Amerika

Modern society possesses a fragile duality: people depend on its power and wealth, but simultaneously are existentially miserable.

Their existential misery comes from the fact that civilization is in decline, social order is failing, and so all meaning and purpose is removed from their lives because whatever they do is futile and will be destroyed once the raging herd gets ahold of it. At the same time, we all must survive, and so they are dependent on this abusive system for paychecks and enough stability for grocery stores.

What happens if the money runs out? All Western governments are heavily in debt, consumers are heavily leveraged, and our industries are massively interdependent.

On top of that, we have the makings of a brutal tech bubble:

Yesterday afternoon, the S&P 500 closed at a record high, and is up over $1.5 trillion since the start of 2017. “And the companies doing the most to drive that rally are all tech firms,” reports The Verge. “Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft make up a whopping 37 percent of the total gains.” From the report:

All of these companies saw their share prices touch record highs in recent months. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the U.S. economy, which grew at a rate of less than 1 percent during the first three months of this year. That divide is the culmination of a long-term trend, according to a recent report featured in The Wall Street Journal: “In digital industries — technology, communications, media, software, finance and professional services — productivity grew 2.7% annually over the past 15 years…The slowdown is concentrated in physical industries — health care, transportation, education, manufacturing, retail — where productivity grew a mere 0.7% annually over the same period.” There is no industry where these players aren’t competing. Music, movies, shipping, delivery, transportation, energy — the list goes on and on. As these companies continue to scale, the network effects bolstering their business are strengthening. Facebook and Google accounted for over three-quarters of the growth in the digital advertising industry in 2016, leaving the rest to be divided among small fry like Twitter, Snapchat, and the entire American media industry. Meanwhile Apple and Alphabet have achieved a virtual duopoly on mobile operating systems, with only a tiny sliver of consumers choosing an alternative for their smartphones and tablets.

As mentioned here before, the tech sector is primed for a crash because it is overvalued and yet is selling a product that is increasingly less relevant to middle America, the group that forms the base of the conventional consumer economy.

To counter this, the tech companies are trying to cultivate the conventional media audience, who lean Left and consume more media than others but may not actually be as relevant as consumers except for luxury goods.

In order to bolster that process, Western governments have created a capitalism-socialism hybrid which consists of heavily taxing citizens and corporations, and then dumping that money on the working classes so that they can purchase more consumer goods, creating a circular Ponzi scheme which will eventually run out of money.

On top of that, Western governments have accumulated enough debt that when their taxes fall short, they will be in a tough position where they will be unable to acquire new debt cheaply enough to justify it, and these governments will head toward default at the same time their economies cave in and the social consequences of Leftist policies culminate in crashes.

Tags: circular ponzi scheme, consumerism, depression, dot-com 3.0, Nerdcore, recession