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TTMYGH 2025 02 Fin De Siecle
late stage capitalism
Sarah Drinkwater and • 18 cards
While the most insignificant animal species take thousands, sometimes millions of years to disappear, manufactured products are wiped off the surface of the globe in a few days; they’re never given a second chance, they can only suffer, powerless, the irresponsible and fascistic diktat of product-line managers who of course know better than anyone
... See moreMichel Houellebecq • The Map and the Territory (Vintage International)

In the early decades of the twentieth century,
Matthew Desmond • Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Modern inequality is at record highs and, in some cases, even eclipses the extreme inequality of the ancient past. The Roman Empire, notorious for its unabashed plutocracy, doesn’t hold a candle to modern imbalances. In 2012, the economist Branko Milanovic estimated that the businessman Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire, had an annual income that
... See morePaul Behrens • The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science
Living in a world that is valued only as gain, an ever-expanding world-as-frontier that has no worth of its own, no fullness of its own, you live in danger of losing your own worth to yourself.
Ursula K. Le Guin • The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
re-create some value ourselves. Instead of fixing the problem, and reclaiming our ability to generate wealth directly with one another, we seek to prop up institutions whose very purpose remains to usurp this ability from us. We try to repair our economy by bolstering the same institutions that sapped it. In the very best years, corporatism worked
... See moreDouglas Rushkoff • Life Inc.
But this era is over. Now consumers have coalesced into the powerful multitude. Their empowerment can more and more be seen as a threat for society. Just like Walmart, tech companies such as Amazon and many others prove that in the Entrepreneurial Age, a multitude hungry for quality at scale beats workers and society most of the time, inflicting a
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