Corporate culture is based on constant growth and ever increasing profit margins. Eventually they’ll amass so much of the wealth that most of the lower class won’t be able to purchase anything other than essentials like food.
No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income.
When we get there the economy collapses because there’s no money going into it.
The profits stop rolling in, unnecessary goods stop being produced, and the luxury goods producer’s shut down.
At this point the money they worked so hard to hoard becomes worthless because they can’t buy anything with it.
What’s the endgame for them if their current path takes them to a point where their assets are more or less worthless?
What’s the end game for cancer?
There isn’t one, it doesn’t matter that the host dies eventually as long as they get to keep growing for now.
This is the answer. These people have no plan other than “make more money today”.
Live, laugh, love.
Live in the moment.
YOLO!
🤮
The billionaire space race reminds me of Devil facial tumour disease (NSFL).
It’s the only cancer (that I know of), that can reliably spread to a new host.Edit: I did some reading, there are more but that is the one that feels most terrifying. I posted the article on creepy Wikipedia.
The endgame is feudalism.
It’s not about money, it’s about controlling everything through the scam that is private ownership.
What is cancer’s endgame when it spreads to the rest to the rest of the body?
They aren’t planning for the future of humanity, they just want their numbers to go up.
It’s exactly this mentality. They DO NOT CARE what happens at the end, because they are assuming they’ll be either dead or in AI bunkers by then. Everyone else will be left to burn.
It’s just like Big Oil (or insert massive scale business with environmental consequences) - they’re making the world inhabitable. As the consequences don’t “immediately” matter to them , all they care about is the immediate future, not long term. But it still makes no sense to me.
Their actions don’t make rational sense to you because you’re not a sociopathic CEO beholden to the whims of shareholders. Otherwise, you nailed it.
They’ll happily lend you money to keep buying stuff. So you end up in perpetual debt. It loops back to feudalism and serfdom in a deliciously ironic twist.
So what’s the way out, you propose?
There is no End Game.
They’re insulated from the short term consequences of their actions and believe that infinite growth can exist inside of a finite system. They treat their bank accounts like a high score board instead of resources to use. Their personal actions can be classified as “banality of evil” because it’s so routine and common place in their circles.
People might point to Musk’s old obsession with Mars, but that has been shown to be nothing more then a dopamine feedback loop. He said things that got him praise, so he kept saying them. When people kept asking about missed dates, he got angry and found a different audience for his dopamine feedback loop.
Don’t forget, those of us who “produce” aren’t even a consideration.
The working class will starve. We’re already working on it with inflation, but managing to keep enough calories coming in.
Soon, the billionaires will have no labor to produce food, and no labor to stock food, and no labor to handle their banal shit.
Then, they will hunt us for sport. Or, more likely, a few class traitors will hunt and butcher us while they go hungry and the billionaires eat of our flesh.
So, eat the rich before they eat us. Got it.
The line will infinitely approach 0 but never get there. That is what credit is for. The rich will gladly let you borrow their vast wealth to buy the cars and the homes, and in exchange you will be their indentured servant for life. Win Win, economy go brrrrrrr…
I think the ultra wealthy and powerful understand that revolution becomes more likely as the majority’s material conditions declines, so their endgame is to throw just enough crumbs to the majority so that they don’t want to risk losing those crumbs. Many of today’s ultra wealthy and powerful seem exceptionally out of touch with reality and dumb though, so idk. Some are accelerationists (i.e. e/acc), and purposely avoid taking into account possible negative consequences.
They want control of governments so they can wield total authority over the working class and exploit them even harder than they already do. Amazon will make showing up to work late a felony punishable with jail time. Oh and the jail is actually an Amazon fulfillment centre.
with sufficient technology and capital, they should be able to stave off any kind of revolution. and then the question becomes whether or not there is any incentive to keep the plebian class happy or alive.
It reminds me of the ultimate game of monopoly I played as a kid (on a handheld). I had complete control over the board. I had bankrupted two of the AI’s, but in order to keep line go up, I’d have to keep the last one around. Every time it’d get low on funds I’d offer to significantly overpay for one of its’ few properties, and then sell it back for a dollar.
I got to around 30k before the game either just quit, or the battery died.
They have to keep a lot of it circulating. As it zips around the economy, it is used to purchase capital, which soaks up the value of workers labor power by converting it into commodities, sells those commodities on a market for a higher price, and then returns profit to the “owners” of the capital. This is how the rich get and stay richer.
Capitalism isn’t neutral, the system creates the rich and poor and delivers the value of worker labor power to the rich owners. The rich can’t control it any more than we can. They have their hand on the wheel through the state, which is just a mechanism that solves problems created by capitalism that can’t be exploited for profits, to violence. But they’re as ensnared by the system as we are. It robs them of their humanity the same it does ours.
We don’t overthrow capitalism to punish the rich, we do it to save everyone from it, and try to restore peoples humanity. The greed of the rich almost doesn’t matter, the system has a logic all its own.
The social system similar to what you describe, which is basically feudalism of nobles and serfs, has its own rules and arose out of its own conditions, like capitalism arose from the revolutionary overthrow of feudalism. Maybe capitalism will give way to some worse form of social relation, I suspect many people are working on that as we speak. But that’s why we have to fight and win for a better system
Socialism or barbarism!
A frozen economy. The families with capital are the ruling class, and for every else there is zero mobility. Since the ruling class is not a state, it isn’t bound by democracy or a constitution, and it doesn’t have to give anyone shit. There may be some incentive to keep the lower class happy and alive, or there may not be.
Back serfdom and nobility.
Funnily enough Samuel Beckett of Waiting for Godot fame (not the quantum leap guy) wrote a play called Endgame, also punning on the chess term.
A man who can’t walk or see has the only combination to the food pantry, a man who can’t sit down is the only one who can take him there to open it. They are the last two people alive. They both continually try to out do each other and come out on top as they can’t trust each other to live in peace.
I don’t see how a blind guy who needs assistance moving can outplay someone who has neither of those disadvantages
Edit: I looked it up and it’s more of comedy/drama so the premise is kinda meant to be absurd, I think
Slavery 2: It won’t matter if you’re black or white
🥚-xactly.
It is a mental desease. If I hoard umfathomble amount of newspapers, I would be called a messi. If it is capital wealth, someone is a genius. They collect to fullfill an emptness in themself. It is a delusion. It is never enough and only the continiues ammassing can give them the feeling of success and control. Consumption as a Stimulus. It is not about the amount, it is about the growth. The way you took to the next number/amount. Distancing yourself further from the others. While getting confirmed by enjoying, what many can not affort. Wealth is the main storyline that is understood by every generation and culture around the world and is a globally accepted metric for desire and standing.
There is no Endgame. But a good perspective for them would be something like Elysium, while for us it is more like Gattaca - at best.
It is a mental disease
Yes. As a completely uneducated non-certified internet therapist I’d say that disease is fear. I really believe that those people that strive for more and more do so to try to fix a fear of not having enough. Or a fear of not being enough. Instead of actually trying to recognize the this fear and controlling it, they just do the one thing that can temporarily make them less fearful and that is make more, control more.
You’re assuming a level of competence for rich people that is unfounded.
The end game is absolute authoritarian capitalism where corporations own eveyone and everything.
It’ll be like that song “I sold my soul to the company store” 16 tons or whatever but in real life.
I’ll go to buy bread and eggs at the Amazon grocery store and the ai operated cash register will turn me away saying “sorry you are 10 bezos bucks short”
Wealth concentration is even worse now than when that song was written.
I don’t think you can think of it as some sort of logical plan. It’s a bug, not a feature, of capitalism. What you are describing is the inevitable end of a completely free market with no regulation. The strong (economically) keep taking from the weak until we have the situation you are describing. From there the next step is dependent upon whether the weak form a cohesive identity and seize power (revolution) or stay fractured around smaller identity cleavages (race, religion, gender, etc) and are subjugated.
It’s tragedy of the commons on a supermassive scale. No one comes out on top in the end, the overprivileged just take a little longer to die. But die they will.
