Capitalism requires expansion, imperialism, and invasions of frontiers to create new markets and vent internal tensions.
There’s a reason a new Cold War is brewing and why tech giants are either trying to create space colonies or shove us into commodifiable digital universes.
There’s a reason a new Cold War is brewing and why tech giants are either trying to create space colonies or shove us into commodifiable digital universes.
As frontiers have closed and nearly every possible society has either been rigged for markets or shoved into the machine of global capital, the only thing left is to create new land, new markets, new opportunities for expansion.
It’s either war, space, or metaverse.
It’s either war, space, or metaverse.
Just as markets pushed people over oceans and to conquer civilizations and peoples, this new expansion is going to be predicated on brutality and suffering.
Tossing climate change and disappearing resources, land, and displaced peoples, this could be a historic tragedy.
Tossing climate change and disappearing resources, land, and displaced peoples, this could be a historic tragedy.
The answer is that we have to figure out some alternative before hypercapitalism cooks the planet, starts another war, or plunges us into a dystopian neofeudal or neofascistic state. We can do that, but it’s going to take a whole lot of clear eyed work.
The argument currently is limited, pathetic, and dangerous. It’s between strongmen who will enforce order with violence and determine the winners and losers, reselling every inch of the Earth via alternate digital reality, or entering some bizarre indentured servitude in space.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, and the limiting to those options is by design. We can hop off this algorithm-based merry go round of death and greed and chart a different course that prioritizes human dignity, sustainability, and something decent and real.
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