J G (👟, 🍔)

Here’s a hard truth about modern society. We don’t practice Capitalism anymore. Rather, for the last 40 years we’ve been conducting a horrific experiment called “neoliberalism”. And we’re near the terminal point in that experiment, a stage I’ve been calling metastatic market fundamentalism. Capitalism is agents organizing to seek profit by serving the needs and wants of customers. Metastatic market fundamentalism treats citizens as feedstock for corporate profits. Social media is a canonical example. It’s established fact that Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram etc. algorithms, which are tuned to maximize advertising revenues via limbic activation, and produce political division and derangement, depression, and a host of other problems. But regulating against these algorithms might impair corporate profits, so America doesn’t regulate them. Because the system isn’t designed to protect the rights of Americans to not be exploited by corporations for profit. The system is to designed to protect corporations’ rights to extract maximum profit from citizens. This is pathological sociopathy at societal scale. I adore Capitalism. It’s a truly miraculous tool, but shouldn't be used to solve all problems. Take science: it is unequivocally the optimal way to seek empirical truth and model reality. But science can't address which questions are worth asking, or what priorities are most important to citizens under resource constraints. Similarly with Capitalism. It is an unparalleled engine for allocating resources and commercializing innovation, but it is a terrible arbiter of human values. When we ask the market to decide what constitutes a good life or a just society, it defaults to the only answer it knows: whatever is most profitable. That is the metastatic cancer. A functional society knows when to invoke science, or capitalism, or democracy, or the judicial process, or the deliberative bodies that define its public good. The central challenge of governance is to protect the sovereignty of each institutional sphere, ensuring that the logic of the marketplace does not set the curriculum for our schools, write the laws for our courts, or determine the mission of our hospitals. So here’s where we are: We built the most powerful resource allocation machine in history, then let it allocate us. We became the resource. The product. The feedstock. If you think I’m being dramatic, ask yourself - when did we last make a major policy decision that hurt corporate profits but helped actual humans? That silence you hear? That’s the cancer winning.