Fully-automated-Luxury-Space-Communism
"The economy is just stupid people selling stupid shit to other stupid people." - PhilosopherKing Tim Dillon
What is capitalism?
In the strictest sense, it is the accumulation of capital in an effort to accrete more capital.
Of course, there are a lot more complex theories and systems surrounding capitalism but the core function of capitalism is that you can accumulate more capital freely, and that is the game.
What is technology?
In the strictest sense, it is the techniques, methods and processes to accomplish a goal. Generally a technology provides leverage by magnifying input to generate a greater output.
This goal could be providing a good or a service, it is a tool to an end.
A hammer is technology just as a car is just as a computer is, a tool to magnify input to achieve greater output.
What is techno-capital?
Techno-capital is the usage of technology aimed to achieve a capital return.
Techno-capital differs from technology in that it is an idea in a specified praxis.
It is utilizing technology for capital accretion.
Techno-capital and the building companies.
If anyone thinks for 5 minutes, they understand how technology and capital mix.
You take an input, run it through technology (which grants leverage) and you receive an output greater than the input.
This creates energy Delta which hopefully creates Alpha. Alpha is not Delta.
energy Delta is the difference between the sum of the inputs and the output denominated in energy.
Energy is an abstract concept in this equation, but energy can mean time, money, effort, physical labor, it is a placeholder.
Alpha is your ability to achieve greater Delta then the “average” competitor. Anyone can grow an orange and sell it at market for a profit.
But can you make the most profit per orange of anyone else? Alpha is generating the most profit per orange.
Alpha is more important than Delta in Capitalism because anyone can create Delta, but to accrete capital, you must create enough Alpha to separate yourself from a competitor. Once sufficient separation occurs, and you scale that Alpha, you win markets.
Great flagship companies generate more alpha than anyone else; these are your Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.
That is all great but what happens when the technology is used to create better technology. Leverage to create Leverage?
Well you get a feedback loop; better technology means more capital, more capital means better technology which means more capital.
If we compounded this infinitely, we will create infinite capital, and thus, achieve Fully-automated-luxury-gay-space-communism.
But there exists problems in the way of me getting my free space luxury lifestyle.
Here they are in descending problematics to my aims of achieving Bonobo-stan.
Time function(s)
Technological sigmoid functions
Sunk cost fallacy
Complexity compounding
Time Functions
This one is pretty easy, it’s just that things take time.
This is a problem because technology again is a tool, and tools take knowledge to use. The more complexity we add to our toolkit of technology the harder it becomes to first educate individuals up to the level where they can operate at a certain level of competence, and two, the time it takes to educate compounds as we add complexity.
Think how long it took you to understand calculus vs. algebra. The difficulty, complexity, energetic resource expenditure… all these quantums grows nonlinear.
Also I don’t plan on living past 100, neither do my cells, so unless stem cell researchers figure some shit out, we have to make due.
Sigmoids.
This one is a little less obvious. But is simply that technological advancement is not research into a singular vertical with linear results, but a set of S (sigmoid) curves of technological advancement in a very defined and specific subset.
There are hundreds of researchers working on making light bulbs basis points more heat efficient utilizing specifically a substrate for thermal heat management via sapphire substrates. It’s a multi-hundred-million-dollar per year effort that’s been going for decades. That is a tiny fractional subset of a relatively small industry - yet very important. If we never figured out sapphire substrates, we wouldn’t have iPhones or iPads.
Over time these S curves stack on top of each other and you get breakthrough techno-capital when you are able to combine these individual small advancements into one singular tool.
Jim Keller can explain better - skip to timestamp 44:01:
“ALL THIS TIME AND ENERGY ON THE WRONG FUCKING THING!?!”
This one is pretty straightforward, like Hitler’s uranium cubes if you heavily invest in one thing, and that thing turns out to be a dead-end, you just wasted n resources on that objective. It could lose you a world war.
As techno-capital requires larger leaps and bound to make advancements, the Sunken Cost Fallacy gap becomes larger and larger, and it becomes more dangerous to innovate; because if you innovate in the wrong direction - and say re-usable rockets are actually a terrible idea; you have a ton of market pressures, social pressures, and all kinds of ego pressures that mean you might continue down a shitty research pathway that will burn billions of dollars and worse, millions of man-hours in the pursuit of vaporware.
Compounding Complexity
This is just that things as we advance compound in complexity, or in other words:
A * B = C
and obviously;
A + B < C
This just means that as we stack more and more S curves on top of each other to make Moore’s Ladder, it becomes harder and more complex to make more S curves, or new S curve verticals.
This doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but it makes the idea of a polymath more and more abstract. As you niche down and specialize to the level of sapphire substrates, you are getting into compoundingly complex knowledge datasets that make it harder to connect the dots in other S curves.
So where does this leave us?
Well if we have compounding complexity we end up with a job market that over time excludes more and more individuals from the workforce via mental constraints. ie. there are just not enough smart people. (This is the argument for immigration btw)
This means a lower class that increasingly can only subside via service industry jobs to those above.
This also means at the managerial/middle-class level you will drive towards a Japan-style system whereby people work 14 hour days, get shit faced mandatorily after work once a week, and generally have no life outside of work. A grim affair.
And what about the rich? Well, the rich get richer because they own equity in the S curves themselves, and by extension own the Techno-capital, which means anything built on a piece of the Sigmoid they own, they make a return from, compounding forever - as long as they don’t lose their equity.