The following post was prompted by the Daily Beast Article linked below.
This certainly sounds like a very good book. The real problem with such works, however, is the lack of effort in understanding why the "New Gilded Age" cannot last. Of why the increasing instability, and ultimate inability to control this mutated system is growing at an accelerating rate.
The two main issues as to why this is so relate to the nature of what skill and information used to be, as opposed to what it has become. This view is one that you can come to fairly easily if you study the work of Marshal McLuhan.
Capitalism you see was a product of Typographic thinking. Linear, abstracted, and rationalist to the extreme. The electrification of experience retrieval, however, has moved us back into the oral mind set; the all at once sensory space that fosters holistic thinking, and matrixcies of interaction. Capitalism has been warped across these two mind sets and it has mutated as a result.
Information now is money. Human skill as a commodity is completely obsolete. Electrified networks moving information ever faster, and software we don't understand anymore to take advantage of that movement, at an ever growing number of accumulation nodes, reacting with and against each other, put the formulation of new information into a completely new dimension; a dimension that has very little to do with human notions of value, or need.
The other problem, of course, is that ever increasing productive capability means more can be done with fewer people. Nice from a purely cost benefit analysis, but from the perspective of who is going to be left to still be able to purchase this unimaginable spew, is something else entirely. At some point, even with ever more insanely effective hyper marketing, getting remaining few to consume at faster rates, it will drown in its own capabilities. Not to worry, though, the planet will surely punch our tickets out well before then.
What we need now is the intellectual elites, especially in economics, to come clean on this fact. We need them to start shouting from every pulpit then can muster that Capitalism is as obsolete now as the original Windows operating system would be if it were the only system available for today's computers and networks. Shouting out that an alternative is not only possible, it is absolutely imperative if we are to survive as a species.
I have been working on this analysis, as well as a possible alternative, for more than twenty years now. I would urge you to check out both Oldsofty.com, as well as Jeff Vale on Google+ to see a lot more detail concerning it.
#CapitalismIsObsolete
