- Michael Karnjanaprakorn
- March 15, 2010
"To this day, the bias of centralized currency is toward scarcity and hoarding. This slows down the rate at which money circulates, while concentrating wealth at the top. Instead of encouraging cooperation and community, it promotes competition and individuality. Worst of all, instead of supporting a sustainable economy, it depends on an economy that grows forever, accelerating all the way."
"That's why the bias of local currency was not toward saving but toward spending. Hoarding money meant losing money... The fact that the currency cost money encouraged people to think of other ways to create value over time."
"Those on the periphery owe while those in the center grow. This, in turn, leads to the redistribution of wealth away from those who actually do work and toward the lending classes. The rules of the currency create a slope of value and authority toward the center."
"The currency system we still use today was invented with very specific biases in mind -- ones that promoted the power of central authorities and the assets of the already wealthy, while reducing the ability of smaller groups and local regions to create value for themselves."
"Atkin conducted dozens of focus groups with the members of real and "consumer" cults--from Scientology members to Harley Davidson riders--and found them yearning for the same things: to belong and to make meaning."
"Corporations made themselves over as the best friends people could ever have: they were empowering people, through their consumption, to become more themselves. At its core, the new tactic would be to promote the idea that corporatism restored people's individuality, while collective action and community forced only stultifying conformity. Corporatism would help you be more you.
"As long as we could be isolated from one another, extracted from the real world, and immersed instead in a sea of emotionally compelling imagery, we could be placed under PR's control... realized that the application of Freudianism to public relations would mean disconnecting people from the real fabric of their lives."
"Rewards were likewise shifted from personal satisfaction, the joy of teamwork, or a sense of accomplishment to the much more symbolic compensation of cash. Instead of using skill to make things they could be proud of, people performed repetitive, meaningless tasks for cash."
"The industrialization of the economy required a corresponding desocialization of the people within it... While mass production desocialized the worker, mass marketing desocialized consumption. Brands had to alienate people from one another in order to replace that human bonds that once characterized commerce with artificial corporate ones. National brand relationships replaced local social relationships.
Just as mass production dehumanized workers, mass marketing alienated consumer from one another, replacing the urge to connect with an urge to compare or contrast through consumption."
"In the kinds of towns de Tocqueville visited, human relationships dominated the local economy... The brand was developed to substitute for the relationship you used to have with the miller."
"... strategies concocted to disconnect people from one another and to require them to interact with each other through things instead... Dreams of achieving status through social participation were replaced by dreams of purchasing status through private acquisition."
"This makes people entirely more predictable, better targets for advertising, increasingly more isolated from one another, as well as more dependent on central authorities to create both value and meaning."
"We're trained in our society to give, but to feel uncomfortable taking or receiving. But if you don't take, you are denying another person from giving."
"Investment banks knew better than to invest in land. The last thing they wanted to be involved in was the buying and selling of real property -- especially since its value had already been inflated by decades of mythmaking. No, the land would be at the very bottom of the pyramid. Instead, they invested in mortgages other people took out to buy land.
Going into debt, distancing ourselves from our neighbors, and striving for conformity became equated with freedom.
So the suburban home was as much a symbol of luxury as it was a real luxury. It was less important for this new life to provide actual satisfaction as for it to produce a class of people who behaved as if they were satisfied... Our social programmers were learning how to keep us on the edge of a true climax of customer satisfaction. For us to remain goal-oriented, the suburban ideal had to remain unattainable--always one step away.