From the Guardian:
Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian
Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.
Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.
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Why do I post this?
Because, I think, that technology and information sharing will continue to destroy the traditional convention in industry. And that includes the landscape industry.
We have seen such a huge market shift in the last 8 years. Landscape and garden practitioners have been able to freely share information - whether that's on how prices are structured or on the methods used to carry out a task - which was, historically and commercially, only shared via the membership of expensive clubs.
This paragraph resonates:
"Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue."
This is strong:
"New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”. Buzzwords such as the “commons” and “peer-production” are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself."
Scary, isn't it?
"We’re surrounded not just by intelligent machines but by a new layer of reality centred on information. Consider an airliner: a computer flies it; it has been designed, stress-tested and “virtually manufactured” millions of times; it is firing back real-time information to its manufacturers. On board are people squinting at screens connected, in some lucky countries, to the internet."
Soon these clubs will not have information gateways and intellectual property to sell:
"Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied/pasted infinitely. A music track or the giant database you use to build an airliner has a production cost; but its cost of reproduction falls towards zero. Therefore, if the normal price mechanism of capitalism prevails over time, its price will fall towards zero, too.
For the past 25 years economics has been wrestling with this problem: all mainstream economics proceeds from a condition of scarcity, yet the most dynamic force in our modern world is abundant and, as hippy genius Stewart Brand once put it, “wants to be free”."
You can read the whole article but just one last thought:
"In an economy where machines do most of the work, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be “social”. In a final late-night thought experiment Marx imagined the end point of this trajectory: the creation of an “ideal machine”, which lasts forever and costs nothing. A machine that could be built for nothing would, he said, add no value at all to the production process and rapidly, over several accounting periods, reduce the price, profit and labour costs of everything else it touched."
Interesting post Phil.
I originally was heading for a career in software, buying into the whole digital age thing, and in the end I just ended up with anxiety and depression, from what I can only assume was too much time on my own in front of a screen, which is what the modern jobs market seems to be heading towards. Lots of people sitting in offices, in front of screens, sharing information, etc, etc.
Gardening saved me really. I was given an allotment in 2012, which gave me a whole new perspective on things. I think there is a trend towards information overload these days, and I personally think that the human mind is not made for constant stimulation. I pulled myself right back from it all, stopped using social media except for business purposes, and now I just dabble in programming for myself, and maybe one day as a separate revenue stream.
My reasons for turning my new found allotment gardening into a business were this. I see people getting stressed and fat and generally unhealthy from working in offices etc, and I also see an ageing population with plenty of money to spend. I also realise how quickly a garden turns into a jungle. Nature never sleeps and more and more people will need a garden service as time goes by due to old age and general laziness. I see this industry and others like it going into growth in the next few decades. People are folding their worlds into a little bubble, and eventually the look outside and realise nature has reclaimed their green spaces.
I am really a generally practical person, and even though this industry pays less than I could be earning in software engineering, I am happy and I foresee that incomes will start to rise as we become required by more people, but with less people wanting to do the work. Basic supply and demand.
Sorry for rambling, I have had a few brewskies :P
I wouldnt say its the end of capitalism - capitalism is pure human nature - the desire to engage and trade - that said it is morphing into some thing very different and new, and I do think that the large business model that the internationals use is time limited - it will still exisit but in a more fluid form, perhaps more like co-operative working between loosly linked organisations rather than top down corporations.
At our end of the world I rthink it will lead to more work like i've had recently - small businesses coming together for projects, then parting, then again etc, a much more fluid trading environment. In manyways a more pure form of capitalism.