“Your future dream is a shopping scheme. Cause I… I wanna be … anarchy.”
The modern economy – junk food, drugs, gambling, porn, phones, social media – have all taken a nefarious turn. When venture capitalists align with coding geniuses and celebrity front men to hustle everyone else into addiction, that’s not capitalism. It’s something else.
Capitalism works by providing goods and services that people need. And freely choose to buy. Addiction is something else entirely. That’s why it’s reasonable to make drugs like crack cocaine and heroin illegal. Profits that come through addiction warp the soul of society. Creating apps that trick teenagers into running up debts they can never repay, driving some to suicide, is morally equivalent to manslaughter.
If you can leverage technology to 1000x the Pareto Principle, then supercharge that with open bribery of politicians, and supercharge that by letting billionaires control the media, and then add in robotics and AI to make the vast majority of human beings “superfluous” you set the stage for trouble.
Punk rock can’t fix it. But at least it can give it the middle finger it so richly deserves.