#lifeinc — Public Fediverse posts

.> Maintaining one’s brand means keeping up appearances. Confessing to a neighbor over a beer about the loss of a job or a missed mortgage payment may have once meant enlisting his help. Among branded neighbors, it means admitting vulnerability. How can he recommend you for another job without endangering his own brand? Why would he even want to if he didn’t already believe that your brand offered a mystique he couldn’t get on his own? What labor unions once earned through solidarity, a society of secreted, branded careerists takes away. Now we can all get paid less for what we produce because admitting to one another how little we’re making is bad for our brands.

@lightweight thanks, I'll check it out. But I have to say that having the hyperwealthy reforming our system is how we got in this mess in the first place (eg rampant monetarism and austerity since the 1980s but as #DouglasRushkoff points out in #LifeInc it goes back much further). I'm sceptical about the notion that more of the same is what we need. That said, respect to the born wealthy who are at least trying to be part of the solution instead of fiddling while the world burns.

@lj_writes as for poverty, that pretty much began with industrialization, when people were forced off the land and into cities that didn't have the capacity to accommodate them. People look at the early industrial era and assume things were even worse before then. Actually, it was pretty much the low point for human quality of life in all of history. Pre-industrial serfs ate better and had more holidays than most modern people. See #DougRushkoff's book #LifeInc. for references on that. (2/2)

@msh in that case it's pretty easy to know; it was killed on purpose by the central government. The monopoly on issuing currency is almost as important to the essence of the state as the monopoly on the use of force, and as important as the power to tax. In every country, states have sabotaged or outright banned local currencies, to enforce this power. #DougRushkoff goes into that history in his book #LifeInc.
@clacke