Personal Liberties and Free Markets

American "libertarianism" has, at the heart of it, one single catastrophic flaw.  That flaw is this: the assumption that personal liberty and free markets are not in tension with one another.

Completely free markets...meaning societies in which there are no boundaries imposed on capital or the marketplace...are conducive only to the concentration of capital.  Capital, as a social proxy for power, acts precisely the same way all social power operates.  It is drawn to itself, as those with power are empowered to amass more power.  This is true politically, and it is also true economically. 

The two spheres are and have always been interwoven, as wealth supports the state, and the state protects wealth.  

What neither inherently protects is your personal liberty.  Without the clear boundaries established by disciplined adherence to constitutional law, the state can easily become a monster.  Without a constitutionally ordered state to counterbalance its unfettered venality and avarice, the market is no less dangerous.  Slavery and indenture are both, after all, the state of being owned, and that's economic.

In a market unresponsive to any purpose higher than itself, there is no motivation other than profit maximization, and profit maximization ultimately enslaves us all.  This is particularly true as the marketplace seizes control of information ecosystems, because then capital can create not just products and services, but our desire for those products and services.  

"Marketing," after all, is no different from propaganda.  Both seek to shape the minds of a malleable populace, because it's often easier to make people want your product than to make a product people want.

And Lord, do we now "want" some strange things.

Like, say, thousand dollar phones.  Or sixty thousand dollar SUVs.  Or health care that is cripplingly, overwhelmingly, inhumanly expensive.  We placidly accept the expectation that life must be spent forever in debt, that debt is the norm, that paying interest to a corporation for the privilege of buying groceries is just the way things work.

These assumptions are imposed because they are a profitable imposition.  They are also markers of a disordered market, where enlightened self-interest has been intentionally blinded.  

An unregulated and disordered market is the collective equivalent of an unregulated and disordered mind.  If driven by solipsistic self-interest alone, it is no more free than a soul trapped in megalomania or paranoid delusion.  

And we are trapped in that cage with it.

Of Art and the Machine

When I listen to creatives raising the alarm about artificial intelligence, there's a consistent theme.  

Looking at what the LLMs (ChatGPT/Bard) can write, and the images produced by diffusion systems (Dall E/Midjourney), there's been a terrifying surge in machine capacity in the last five years.  We're now at full Turing compliance for Generative Transformers, meaning that we've blithely skipped over the threshold that twentieth century AI pioneer Alan Turing established for determining the presence of synthetic intelligence.  There is no reason that machines couldn't soon do every form of work requiring awareness, other than that we're restraining them.

As it so happens, the first place that seems to be having an impact is the arts.

It's to the point where writers have begun to feel that their livelihoods are threatened, because they are.  Machine intelligence is great at burping out new content, and can do so at a hundred times the pace of human writers.  Almost all of the writing for the internet content mills, with their lazy listicles and corporately sourced content?  They could be done by AI.  This is equally true of most of the derivative romance novels out there, and the plot of every film in the Fast and Furious franchise.

Commercial artists are doubly threatened, because you can produce an image in seconds, and refine it in minutes, replicating the hours of focused labor necessary to make a single finished piece of visual art.

The image that accompanies this post is flawed, sure, but it took me a single minute to produce.  Just one prompt to Dall E, then another, and then I was like, eh, sure.  That one'll do.  For a graphic designer, that'd take days.

If writers and artists think their livelihoods are threatened, it's only because they are.  In a capitalist economy, AI means artists and writers can no longer expect to make a living through their work.

Which, I think, is the point we creative souls are all missing.  Writers and artists are seeing this through the wrong lens, seeing it as we have been trained to see it. 

AI isn't the problem.  Capitalism is.

There's nothing about AI that prevents me from doing what I love, from creating and sharing what I create.  The joy of writing is a human joy, and while I am slower at it than a machine, I still love to write.  The act itself is part of who I am.  

But we have been taught to view art as a commodity, as part of a system of economic exchange, as something that derives value only insofar as it can be marketized.

That understanding won't survive an AI era.

But then again, neither may capitalism.

House Rules

Back when I was the age of my kids, there weren't endless scads of screens to suck up every last moment of our lives.  You had to make do with appallingly low tech things like, say, decks of cards.   On the bus, on the way to school, we'd play War, or Poker.  It was pleasant, a simple distraction, a social pastime.

There was one card game, though, that I just wouldn't play.  I remember a group of boys getting all into it on the bus, and being pressed to join in.

The game was called "Bloody Knuckles," and the rules were basically this:

1)  Player 1 holds out their fist, knuckles up.
2)  Player 2 holds a pack of playing cards, tight and all together.
3)  Player 2 attempts to strike the knuckles of Player 1, as hard as possible, with the edge of the pack of playing cards.  Player 1 attempts to get his knuckles out of the way.
4)  They trade positions, and it repeats, until one or the other gives up.

I just couldn't see the point.

If I lose, I'm in pain.  If I win, I'm inflicting pain on another.  Neither eventuality is positive or desirable.  The game is...well...just...what's the word....stupid.  And as it's just a game, something that has no real hold over us, you don't need to play it.  So I wouldn't.

I explained my position to the kid asking me to play, at which point I was pronounced a wuss by one and all.  I simply shrugged.  They went on hitting each other.

I feel much the same way about global capitalism.

Economics is just a game, after all.  No no, you may say, but that's what economics means, after all, if you care about the root meaning of things.  Oiko-nomia, it comes from, in the Greek that we Presbyterians learn so you can doze off while we preach.  Oikos meaning "house," and nomos meaning "rules."   Yeah, that's house rules, just like in Vegas, baby.  It's not science.   It's not math.  It's not faith.

It's the game we choose to play to pass the time.  

For all of its dizzying complexity, global capitalism is a remarkably stupid game.  And it is a game, certainly as it manifests itself now, a whirling mass of derivatives and quantitative easings and reshufflings of the deck.  The level of anxiety and psychological pain we're inflicting on ourselves is entirely something we're creating.  It's not something that has any foundation in the real.

What is real is that the harvests in the United States of America have been solid for the last several years.  Thanks to climate change, they're not as great as they could be, but they're still bountiful.  In point of fact, there's enough food produced every year that no one need ever go hungry.

What is real is that there is adequate housing for everyone.  In fact, more than adequate, so much more than adequate that we're tearing down some of the excess.

What is real is that there are is enough clothing so that none need go cold, enough shoes that none need go barefoot unless they choose to do so.

And yet in the game we have created, we are fearful that we will not eat.  We are anxious that we will not have a home.  We watch the numbers on CNBC flutter back and forth wildly, a mad flock of trader pigeons spooked to exhaustion by the slightest movement, and we fret about our futures and our retirement and our children.

I look out at the bloodied knuckles of our collective psyche, and at the fear, and at the hunger in the world, and I think...what's the point of this game, again?