The Game They Make Us Play: Capitalism as a Ticking Time-Bomb

The tragedies of capitalism are legion. You and me and likely everyone we know has been affected. People we care about have struggled and worried and suffered and, in some cases, their lives have ended prematurely. It’s likely we’ll never know the full accounting of capitalism’s toll because, counter to alternative economic systems, nobody bothers to keep count of how many lives its cost or how much unnecessary toil it has created. Instead, we’re supposed to look at it as a natural law, something that moves and changes like so many weather fronts.

But one of the more insulting tragedies is the continuation of easily predictable and observable cycles. Rather than seeing ourselves at the mercy of these cycles, instead we are treated to narratives that iron out the creases and complexities, gifting us a view of the world and our experience that treats everything as if it is happening for the first time and no one could have seen any of them coming.

Since capitalism emerged, we have witnessed dozens of collapses. It has been a repeating pattern since the 17th century and has ranged from the Dutch obsession with tulips to the economic crisis of 2008. Along the way, we’ve seen one bubble after another pop and total meltdowns spread through increasingly interconnected frameworks. The stories are hauntingly familiar. Unfettered speculation. Waxing and waning regulations that link busts and booms and then busts like sick, diseased tissue. Throughout it all, the principles remain constant. The wealth class grows more and more brazen, growing greedier by the day, setting off a chain of events that harm the working and middle classes while the wealthy continue their plunder.

In a way, you can forecast these things like the seasons. We’ve experienced so many of these that it is written into us like our expectations of weather changing. As I write this, I am watching a front roll through. The temperature is dropping, the leaves are falling and swirling. I know, without having to look at the radar, that this evening will be colder. You feel it, too. It’s more than inflation and it’s more than being shocked, and eventually not shocked, by the price at the cash register. By now, it’s likely that you’ve realized something is slipping. You’re probably not going to have more money than your parents. Maybe the idea of buying a house seems as likely as walking across the surface of Mercury.

The indicators are all there. Household debt has reached a new record: $18.59 trillion dollars. Debt is, and has always been, the means by which the gap between wages and a sustainable life has been bridged. There is a point at which it becomes saturated, where there’s no ability to take on that debt anymore. Americans are defaulting on credit card payments, student loans, and falling behind on their utility payments. Consumer confidence has cratered. Despite the Trump Administration’s ruination of oversight and data collection, we know that job losses are continuing to accelerate. Meanwhile, the top 10% of earners are responsible for nearly half of all consumer spending. And everywhere you look, from online gambling to cryptocurrency, the common thread is gambling at the end of empire.

Operating as a facade between the reality and perception is the stock market, where the AI bubble has kept the illusion flickering. Last week, economists held their breath as they awaited Nvidia, reportedly worth $5 trillion dollars with a market cap that constitutes 16% of America’s GDP, to release its earnings report. Construction is driven by the erection of data centers that may never get turned on. OpenAI has touted AI as an epochal invention despite it showing no real capability of producing profit. To navigate the deals that keep this entire enterprise going is like trying to hack through an overgrown jungle and it looks increasingly like the ghost of the factors that brought the world economy crashing down in ‘08. AI is, outside of new military, policing, and surveillance technology, the only innovation being offered, and for it to “work” it would need to wipe out an estimated half of all entry-level positions and add 10 to 20 percent to the unemployment rolls. And you don’t have to be an economist to understand the popping of the bubble or the success of AI, either way, would create economic havoc.

What we are experiencing is an unsurprising part of the capitalist cycle. Eventually, let’s say after From 1975 to 2018 an estimated $50 trillion dollars was redistributed from the working and middle classes to the wealth class and that process has only accelerated since. This is the essence of the contradictions of capitalism. It encourages the wealthy to gain more and more wealth, which then risks the ability for regular people to continue living or circulating money through the system, sending everything off balance. In that pursuit, the wealthy use their ill-gotten resources to further rig the economy and politics, buying politicians, pushing through legislation that increases their advantage, discarding regulations and safeguards, setting off a manic dash toward oblivion.

We know instinctively this is happening, but we are given narratives to grasp onto that shifts our attention and, more importantly, our anger. The frustration is channeled through faux-populist movements like MAGA that express a semblance of understanding while transferring rage from their wealth class benefactors toward political enemies and vulnerable populations. We’re pushed to hate and mistrust people around the world who are suffering like we are and victims of the same game and then positioned to fight one another in wars. A duopolistic political system herds us into allegiance with public relation fronts like the Democratic and Republican Parties, which express emotional sentiments like tolerance and empathy and anger and violence. Meanwhile, both are bankrolled by the wealth class that benefits regardless of what happens at the polls. The Democrats are there to clean up the messes and provide necessary empathy. Republicans to hit the throttle and increase state sponsored violence to suppress dissent while the wealth and oligarchical classes accelerate their plunder and take sights on the state’s resources.

I will say again: Fascism is theft. At this point in the plundering, a discarding of democracy is necessary and, in order to drive this jalopy of an economy into the ground and strip it of spare parts, this type of overtly authoritarian system is necessary. Since 2008, all the safeguards have been effectively erased. Even while we race toward the meltdown, the players who have rigged the game are still profiting handsomely. They’ll find a way to profit off the collapse as well, buying up endangered assets on the cheap before they do it again. The consolidation, after all, must continue.

For you, the reader, there is little to do at the macro level. We must continue demanding actual representation and creating a movement to challenge this wretched status quo. But we have very little leverage when it comes to these systems, which are so intertwined with everything that it is nearly impossible to wrestle them free. It is on the individual level, however, that we must focus are energy.

A collapse of some type is coming. When talking about these things, it helps to think of it as a rock bottom, a place where the denial may end and an alternative might emerge. To look at something like the AI bubble naturally causes anxiety. We’re forced to choose between two separate collapses, one which would be chaotic (the bubble popping) and the other (adoption and mass replacement) carries with it the illusion of control. Surely, if millions were laid off, leaders would provide support. Maybe even universal basic income. But what in this modern moment speaks to that happening? Nothing. There is no plan. There is no remedy. There is only destruction and the profit it unleashes. And, in this case, if AI is installed to replace the middle class, what then? Control over almost every facet of our economy and society is in the grasp of the same people who have been openly antidemocratic, anti-human, and who are obsessed with increasing their own wealth above everything, including the fate of the planet itself.

What we must do is change. Our participation in this cycle has been integral to it continuing. We must reconsider what it is that we want and what it is that we need. Our perception must shift. Our value is not tied to our careers or our earnings. It is intrinsic to our very being. That feeling we carry, that inner-critic that tells us we aren’t good enough or we aren’t successful enough, that we’ll feel whole if only we get that raise, that promotion, that financial success, is the voice of abusive capitalism driving us to work harder, work more, to sacrifice more and more of ourselves. We must set aside our culture of self-service and band together with our neighbors and friends and families and create the kind of mutual aid that will weather whatever is to come and craft the framework that will deliver a better future beyond this abominable system.

This is, of course, a tall order. We’re talking about a potential event that could upend our lives and cause suffering. I hope there is some solace to take from the fact that we have survived these things before and that, if taking the long view, we believe, deep deep down, at our very core, that we will find something better on the other side. We must recognize this pattern and, ultimately, how literally insane it is. We cannot afford to continue this amnesiac existence and allowing the sleepwalking between crises. Nor can we trust leaders who are more than happy to take the money and forget the pattern for their own benefit.

We can make these choices and we deserve much, much better.