Even my dog is complaining about late stage capitalism now
After many, many years of using the same cleaning service, this week my dog, Tucker, insisted that the cleaner come with us on our walk. Of course Tucker is right and capitalism is wrong but I could only tell him, “He’s not coming.”
There has been for a long time a litany of claims that merely complaining about our economic system doesn’t solve anything. From a multitude of books to the Daily Show to now BreadTube and movies like Barbie the criticism of late stage capitalism is an industry. And you often hear capitalism incorporates its critics.
I’m not certain of that anymore. At a loud volume the complaining might become a force of its own out of sheer deafening. The Good Place has a character say of moral conversion, “There was a voice in my head telling me I was doing the wrong thing and I don’t miss that voice.”
The fall of capitalism as we know it needn’t be some dramatic before and after story. If the voice telling us we are doing the wrong thing can grow shrill without a dramatic change in ideology then it can be quieted without dramatic change also.
Student debt servitude didn’t used to seem normal and it can be reversed and gone again without complex plans or a new economic paradigm. Throughout history people have been paid for public works or to work in the arts and America could increase those sorts of jobs without “imagining a world beyond capitalism”.
This blog defines sentience as “going beyond original programming” and recognizes culture as an extra layer of programming beyond the genetically driven. Complaints about late stage capitalism are the equivalent of activating pain receptors. It’s true that pain doesn’t tell you exactly what needs changing but enough pain still eventually promotes new behavior.
We might not be able to immediately stop the income inequality social isolationism that Tucker noticed, but we could at least hold the line before there is a PetsApp that brings you a gig economy dog for a few hours a week (or does that app already exist?).
First though we have to resist the urge to silence sentience. The complaints against late stage capitalism have to grow louder and even more ubiquitous. They’re not “just talk” because there is no such thing.