American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

dotcoma

https://archive.is/q1GxG

datadrivenangel

Is there any graceful way to let the pressure out of the system and begin rebuilding trust and stability or is the only way out to immanentize the eschaton?

sghiassy

We came back from the gilded age. So there’s hope right?

dionian

"much of wall street is in a fatalistic mood" yeah the SPY is going vertical, sure sure.

Stitch4223

> Perhaps the danger is not 2008, 1999, 1973 or even 1873, but 1789. 1789 was the year of the French Revolution [1]. The rest are years with financial crises. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

randycupertino

I would say with inflation, wealth inequality and skyrocketing housing, gas and grocery prices as well as super high amounts of consumer debt and families stretching to keep up it feels a lot like pre-bust 2005/2006 economy out there right now. We might not be on the cusp of a subprime mortgage bank crisis but it does feel ominous lately.

matrix87

I'm kind of confused. It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up. People are spending less because of economic insecurity, everything is more expensive because of tariffs and war, interest rates have been high for four years. The general cultural mood feels unsustainable. Like the peak-woke period around 2022 before the pendulum swung really hard in the opposite direction. I don't know if there's a word for it, but I feel like the US has this tendency of trying to shove cultural change down people's throats in a really top-down manner that tends to backfire. At least one really positive outcome from this whole """AI""" movement thing is that class consciousness has been increased quite a bit from it. If you're a capitalist, it's better to be one quietly and fuck people over in secret instead of painting a huge political target on your back. They've done the opposite of this. And one key difference here is that the early 2020s DEI movement had way more people behind it. This is just a small group of rich people. Either the market is going to crash and they'll end up getting humiliated, or there will be a wave of populist backlash. In either case, we (people working in tech, SWEs, HWEs, etc) will probably get fucked over even worse than how it's been over the last couple years.

aeternum

I thought the Economist used to have much higher quality articles. Where is the historical analysis? Is it more apocalyptic now than during the cold war when kids hid under their desks? Did America really win the space race because of a presidential speech or was it the apocalyptic threat that if we lose, we will all live under communist rule? Would American manufacturing have ever caught up to Germany if it weren't for the existential threat of the world wars? Perhaps American capitalism has always thrived on fear of the apocalypse.

tjwebbnorfolk

Author appears to take resilience and preparedness to the logical extreme and mistake it for some kind of doomsday worship. Indeed, the rise of armchair-eschatologists is at an all-time high. This article is a much better example of such thinking than the likes of Anduril and Anthropic.

saltyoldman

No reason to black pill. Tons of opportunities - be creative.

seydor

Is it true that Thiel moved to Argentina

aussieguy1234

With investments AI and robotics automation, I've long been convinced that capitalism is going to eat off its own head, even before the current AI boom. The general public won't accept a system where only a small few have the means to get by and without much work being available to humans anymore, we'll need an alternative economic system, or face serious civil unrest. With capitalism, for work to be done, you need the possibility of homelessness and/or other types of poverty to motivate humans to work. But that isn't required for robots.

anon291

America is a communist nation since the majority of the populace holds the majority of the productive capacity in joint ownership

anon291

No ones labor is worthless. Guys this is so retarded but I understand why tech people find this difficult. Humanity runs off of romance. This is not sexual romantic love but rather the thrill of other human people. An AI cannot provide this. This interaction has value. Technology frees us from having to deal with the mundane so we can deal with the exemplary. Just go to a poorer country and see that it is not possible there. America is friggin awesome.

Frieren

Fascism needs existential threats. Nobody in their sane mind will accept their hateful ideology if they were not desperate, and in panic. > A millenarian economy is necessarily a paranoid one. The economy does not need to be paranoid, it becomes paranoid with inequality increases the stakes on everything, when you can be obscenely rich or depressingly poor and there is no in between. That makes reasonable people paranoid. High equality with opportunities for everyone makes people reasonable and wanting to work for the common good. > “Merely regulating it is insufficient,” wrote Pope Leo XIV in a 40,000-word essay on AI last month. “It must be disarmed.” Of all the messages, the Pope was far from "apocalyptic". He was trying to defend the working class and avoid discrimination and xenophobia embedded in the models. No, end of times bullshit. > If things are so dire, why are American stocks so expensive? Because it is disconnected from the average working class experience. "Everything is good because stocks are up" is a non sequitur (except for the people that only care about their portfolio).

ai_fry_ur_brain

These rich folks should probably study Mao and the revolutions of 1848 before the worst possible things happen.