Tuning into the vibeconomy and the vibeocracy it almost feels as though there are tectonic tensions building and building. To outward appearances not much changes from day to day but the entire group of systems that we live with and depend on, economic and social, political and religio and scientific and constructed exist under tension that is increasing.
If the geological analogy is anywhere near accurate the pressure will find a way to release itself. Either bit by bit, deforming human-made institutions but maintaining most aspects of the structure, the way a fault-line slips or the pressure will be relieved catastrophically with unimaginable force and unpredictable first, second, and third order effects.
And like birds or cats human beings pick up on the vibe or piezo-electic effect or whatever it is that is sensed and have a just barely conscious feeling of unease.
From The Philosophical Salon, March 4:
Trust in Institutions and the War Dividend
Even if almost no one wants to admit it, our “system” is obsolete, and for this reason it is now morphing into a “closed system” – totalitarian in nature. It is equally clear that the few who continue to benefit materially from the capitalist system (the 0.1%) are willing to do whatever it takes to prolong its obsolete existence. At its root, contemporary capitalism works in a simple way: debt is issued from one door and purchased from another through the issuance of new debt in a depressive loop from which most of the destructive phenomena of our time originate.
The facilitators of the “debt-chasing-debt” mechanism are a class of profiteering technocrats whose main psychological trait is psychopathy. They are so devoted to the mechanism that they have become its extensions – like automatons, they work tirelessly for the mechanism, without any remorse for the devastation of human life it dispenses. The psychopathic dimension (uninhibited, manipulative, and criminally antisocial) is not, however, an exclusive prerogative of the transnational financial clique, but extends both to the political-institutional caste (from heads of government to local administrators) and the so-called intelligentsia (experts, journalists, scholars, philosophers, artists, etc.). In other words, the institutional mediation of reality is now entirely mediated by the mechanism itself. Whoever enters the system must accept its rules while also, ipso facto, assuming its psychopathological traits. Thus, blind capitalist objectivity (the drive for profit-making) becomes indistinguishable from the subjects representing it.
Because of their personality disorder, the technocrats in the control room tend to overestimate their ability to enforce a closed system that might conceal the decline of capitalist socialization. First, the tragic pandemic farce, and now the cold wind of permanent warfare, are putting the average citizen’s unconditional trust in their representative institutions to the test. If it was relatively easy to silence doubt and dissent with “humanitarian lockdowns” and emergency rule – which allowed a most opportunistic political class to briefly regain some clout – the complicity in the Gaza genocide coupled with the neo-McCarthyistic construction of the “democratic front against the Russian monster”, with related arms race, are beginning to undermine the old certainties of the silent majority.
In the new totalitarian normal, reality does not quite make it to the newsfeeds or television screens. What we get instead is the hyperreal as theorized by Jean Baudrillard, which is neither real nor fiction, but the narrative container that has replaced both. Thus, the brutal ethnic cleansing of Gaza continues at full throttle along with heart-bleeding humanitarian concerns for civilians, telegenic appeals against all forms of extremism, and cynical warnings of rampant antisemitism. At the same time, we are reminded 24/7 that the Russians (who else?) are preparing for nuclear cyberattack from space and the invasion of Europe. Without even realising it, the conspiracy theory ghostbusters turn into the very thing they love to hate. The resulting maelstrom of infotainment induces a state of collective hypnosis which proves to be more effective than traditional censorship, since it eliminates ex ante the request for a real referent, in all its radical ambiguity.
The hyper-mediation of the world aims to become the only available world. The events narrated by corporate media are no longer thought of as something other than their narration, since, in the hyperreal reversal, it is the narration itself that thinks the subject. Our saturated info-space is in the form of an infinitely malleable self-referential spectacle that a priori sterilizes all critical thought. The official debate on Gaza or Ukraine, for example, is continuously reframed into a debate on the debate itself, strictly demarcated by morally preformatted binary codes (democracy/terrorism, etc.). This tendency to liquidate the referent must be understood in its etymological sense as a tendency to “make it liquid”. It established itself, historically, as a consequence of a process of economic virtualization based on the replacement of the profitability of wage labour (real valorisation) with the simulated profitability of speculative capital.
We live in a world where the stock markets of Japan and the United Kingdom reach record highs as their economies slip into recession, while the United States manages to stay afloat courtesy of a monstrous deficit guaranteed by monetary and military hegemony. Regardless of the crash or drastic correction in the making, the ongoing financial market party (with very few invitees) is inextricably connected with the euphoria of war. Why? First, military production for “long-term security commitments” is now an essential support for increasingly sagging real growth as measured in GDP. For example, 64% of the $60.7 billion allocated to Ukraine in the latest aid package will be absorbed by the US military industry. The source here is not Putin’s TASS but the Wall Street Journal, which also admits that since the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict, US industrial production in the defence sector has increased by 17.5%.
But, above all, techno-military-industrial excitement continues to function as tailwind for a hyperinflated financial sector now in thrall to AI mania. The current S&P 500 bubble is the result of the hysterical overvaluation of a handful of tech corporations, the so-called Magnificent Seven (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla, which today are actually down to the Magnificent Two: Nvidia and Meta). The strong imbalance closely resembles the dot.com tech bubble of the late 1990s, when the internet excitement led to the overvaluation of Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, eBay, Qualcomm etc. While these companies managed to save their own skins, many start-ups were wiped out by the bursting of the bubble. Ergo, a sensational market moved by the lever of Artificial Intelligence would do better to prepare itself for an equally sensational fall.
Let’s keep in mind that financial risk today is immensely higher than twenty-five years ago. Over the last two decades, the system has made itself hostage to the rather elementary ruse called “creation of liquidity out of thin air” (and related scapegoats), whose purpose is to refinance the mass of outstanding debt which supports state deficits as well as speculative bubbles populated by heaps of zombie companies. A stock market collapse of around 80%, like that of the dot.com at the end of 2000, would now be equivalent to a barrage of atomic explosions – metaphorically and literally....
....MUCH MORE
