Technology

All currency is a scam. All the way back to the beginning of currency it's been about stealing things from nature, claiming it as your own entitled right to have, and then selling it to someone else as if you have the right to sell it and they don't have the right to it themselves anymore due to your claim.

As long ago as we are aware of, people traded with animals and animal products like bones and shells, because they were sometimes rare and the animals were good eating and they were the first things that prehistoric humans figured out how to take from nature unsustainably and the first things that we needed to compete with other people for and actively prevent other people from taking. Then we found metals, and eventually metals that stayed shiny forever like gold and used these instead because it was even more rare and it pleases people's "ooh shiny" magpie brains. It worked great for awhile. Wars were fought over it, empires were built with it, continents were colonized over it. But it wasn't convenient enough and became too valuable to carry in any meaningful quantity, so we abstracted the gold away and used coins and paper monies that simply represent portions of gold. Then we decided it only needs to represent some of the gold not all of it because we still needed more money and that's crazy because nobody has that much gold. Then fiat currency said nobody's actually using the gold anymore anyway and got rid of the gold standard entirely, the money itself is now what's valuable, because the government says so. Crypto is just taking it to yet another new level saying we don't even need a government to back it anymore we'll just do math and have the math say it has value. The scam is the same in all cases. The currency is the scam. It's a pyramid scheme all the way down. It's a way for someone to convince you they've got something you want, convince you it has value, so you give up some of your basic personal autonomy, rights, and freedoms to do work for them or give them stuff, in exchange for this store of alleged value that you expect you will either be able to hoard for personal pleasure or theoretically later be able to use to convince someone else to give up their autonomy, rights, and freedoms to do work for you or give you stuff, and they convince you that it may even be worth more in the future, but in reality it's less, because inflation happens and the things you want are a moving target and the target keeps moving to more expensive goals. And the lie is believable because it almost works. And you can attribute the little ways it doesn't work to bad luck, or personal failings, maybe you didn't work quite hard enough.

They've created a whole impenetrable mythology around it, western civilization is built on a whole secular religion of easy prosperity, of job satisfaction, of car ownership, of homeownership, of shopping, of consumerism, of retirement, of entrepreneurship, of being independently wealthy, of building generational wealth, but it's all a fucking lie, it's an infomercial, acted up to look so easy absolutely anyone can do it, and so obviously wonderful that everyone needs to, while showing any alternative as so hard and awful it's virtually impossible. It's all marketing fluff, it has no grounding in reality. The currency itself is the scam, the society expectations are the ad copy you've been sold about your future and what you should expect it to look like as a result of your continued acquisition of that currency. Just keep buying into the system, it will give you the returns you've been promised eventually. Don't look behind the curtain, you'll only find wars and thefts and toxic waste and cruelty and foreigners who are not technically slaves because that has a very specific meaning and the more narrowly we define it the more room we have to use even better, more modern working arrangements. We paint a romantic picture of infinite growth and utopian progress while the only thing that is actually progressing is our accelerating destruction of the planet. Even the most stubborn capitalists won't be able to deny reality forever, because reality happens whether it's been denied or not.

Late stage capitalism has been a long, wild and exciting journey, hasn't it? Stay tuned for the dramatic and heavily foreshadowed ending, now quite possibly coming within our lifetimes!