The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself [sic] as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine…

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men [sic] in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. ― Frédéric Bastiat

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Lay me down, unbound, no shell to hold me still, no walls to fence the earth from what I’ve been.

Does it surprise anyone that when we talk about growth (economy/GDP), we are not talking about an increase in production to meet human needs? Growth does not seem to be about use-value or social provisioning, but specifically about increasing commodity production in order to generate and accumulate surplus value—its sole objective. Is this not a little upside-down?

Pfl tre yrmv rcc kyv zekvcczxvetv ze kyv nficu, slk zw efsfup’j kyviv kf rtk fe zk, nyrk’j zk nfiky?

How do you expect to stop the devil if you don’t believe he’s real?

‘If you tell an AI to make people happy, it may decide to just put everyone to sleep, forever. Which, you know, given the state of the world, might not be such a bad thing. Turns out it’s almost impossible to program something to be good. We don’t have the words for it. I wonder what that says about us.

But maybe we eventually figure out this goodness, and how to program it. I have a feeling, it’s right in front of our eyes. Perhaps, it has nothing to do with programming.

It’s an incredibly disturbing realization that this does nothing to benefit society and it’s just literally created to keep the economy afloat. The mantra of the relentless pursuit of growth, under the guise that it betters the economy, is frankly absurd. The idea that our entire system’s survival hinges on a never-ending increase in outputs and a relentless reduction of inputs—working more, working faster—is irrational and cruel at its core.

As I read on how the economy works, I sometimes pause to reflect: GDP does not differentiate where its growth comes from. Be it the bread made by a local baker that feeds people, or the production of Russian tanks used to kill, for GDP, growth is growth.