Chris Hedges on Technocapitalism: Bitcoin, Mars, and Dystopia

We are living through an incipient technological revolution. AI, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, commercial space travel, and other innovations are rapidly transforming everything from the workplace to the financial architecture of the global economy. While many of these technologies hold vast potential to benefit the social good, the multinational corporations and financial oligarchy that drive innovation and own its products are solely motivated by private profit. The consequences are unfolding all around us. As technology and the power of the oligarchy advances, the misery and disenfranchisement of the majority grows. We are now in an age of “Space Barons and Techtitans,” and the future they are leading us to is one of even greater exploitation, inequality, and ecological crisis.

Loretta Napoleoni, author of Technocapitalism: The Rise of the New Robber Barrons and the Fight for the Common Good, joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the technocapitalist present and future described in her book.

Transcript:

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Chris Hedges:

A small group of high-tech savvy entrepreneurs who understand the velocity of technological innovation have harnessed this new power to establish predatory high-tech monopolies, such as Uber or Amazon. They subvert labor laws, strip the state of its power, gut regulation, ignore legal norms and amass personal fortunes in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Their apps, services, and private equity firms dominate our lives. They are technological predators seen in every aspect of social existence commodification. The living wages of working people decline. The gig economy abolishes job protections, sustainable incomes and benefits. AI replaces human beings. The most vulnerable are pillaged for profit. The sick feed the profits for big pharma. The bodies of poor men and women on the streets of our bleak de-industrialized cities feed the profits of the prison industrial complex. They’re worth nothing until they are locked in a cage in the world’s largest prison system generating between 50 or $60,000 a year fed, of course, to the privatized phone services, the money transfer services, the commissary, and the medical services that have privatized American prisons….

https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/21/chris-hedges-technocapitalism-bitcoin-mars-and-dystopia

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Clara Mattei: How Economists Invented Austerity / Anwar Shaikh: What Happens When Economics Doesn’t Reflect the Real World?

Eric Toussaint: Concerning the founding of the Bretton Woods’ Institutions

On Justice and Sovereignty: The Limits of International Justice Architecture in a World Marred by Conflict and Conquest

The Original Sin of Economics

Lee Camp: The Dark Secret History of Capitalism

George Monbiot: Trashing the planet and hiding the money isn’t a perversion of capitalism. It is capitalism

Pandora Papers: Suspect foreign money flows into booming American tax havens on promise of eternal secrecy

Money as Empire?

Kojin Karatani’s theorising on modes of exchange and the ring of Capital-Nation-State

The New Associationist Movement