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Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

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It was never really about efficiency anyway; industrialization was about restoring the power of those at the top by minimizing the value and price of human laborers. — location: 445 ^ref-33489

industrialism’s primary intent was to subvert a rising middle class and their peer-to-peer market system. — location: 513 ^ref-31579

The unsustainable endgame is an economy based entirely on marketing and advertising. — location: 773 ^ref-26815

Hickel mentions negative effects of advertising as well

It’s a digitally complexified version of the one-size-fits-all values of industrialism. — location: 882 ^ref-55924

Peer-to-peer is not a means of including more people as value creators but a prelude to getting rid of them—first the skilled, fairly paid ones, and then the unskilled ones who took their places. — location: 974 ^ref-29658

We’re not looking to create jobs because we need more things. We employ people because otherwise we have no way to justify letting them share in a bounty created without their labor. — location: 1129 ^ref-36600

no matter where a corporation is doing its business, it’s always a foreign entity. — location: 1517 ^ref-53533

by registering as a flexible purpose corporation, it can take on limitless investment while still placing exploration and experimentation above any demands for profitability that might arise. — location: 2206 ^ref-5773

“low-profit limited liability company,” — location: 2207 ^ref-34128

We were steeped in an ideological war over a whole lot of things, but it seemed to be mostly about the freedom of corporate capitalism versus the tyranny of state Communism. — location: 2275 ^ref-49389

Currencies, tokens, and precious metals have indeed been used as means of exchange for thousands of years; but debt-based, interest-bearing, bank-issued central currency is a very particular tool with very particular biases—most significantly, a bias for growth. — location: 2301 ^ref-41452

The purpose of the money was not to make the issuer rich but to promote transactions in the marketplace and make everyone prosperous by getting trade moving. — location: 2330 ^ref-31951

In country after country where local moneys were abolished in favor of interest-bearing central currency, people fell into poverty, health declined, and society deteriorated12 — location: 2384 ^ref-12961

Between the 1950s and 2006, the percentage of the economy (as measured by GDP) represented by the financial sector more than doubled, from 3 percent to 7.5 percent. — location: 2398 ^ref-5883

the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate of the economy. — location: 2401 ^ref-28765

An expansionist economic system both necessitated and inspired the colonizing of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. — location: 2450 ^ref-50622

climate change is a direct result of an expansionist economy: the physical environment can’t service the pace of capital while also sustaining human life. — location: 2461 ^ref-13082

most Americans don’t realize that federal spending has been flat or down since 2009, lower than at any time during the Reagan administration, and even lower than Paul Ryan’s infamous budget proposal of 2011.22 — location: 2506 ^ref-6764

Credit-card companies are earning 3 or 4 percent on every purchase. That’s more than the growth rate of the entire economy. — location: 2573 ^ref-27999

by setting a cap on how many bitcoins can ever be created, Bitcoin doesn’t transcend the scarcity bias of central currency; it exacerbates it. — location: 2670 ^ref-61876

We can think of DACs as companies whose stock is issued little by little as the company grows from a mere business plan into a sustainable enterprise. Only individuals who create value for the company are awarded new stock proportionate to their contributions. — location: 2720 ^ref-28226

the new currency initiated a virtuous cycle. In the midst of global depression, the village built bridges, homes, a reservoir, even a ski jump. — location: 2861 ^ref-47139

when people have access to more data through which to predict the future, their confidence in their predictions increases much more than the accuracy of their predictions. — location: 3202 ^ref-59070

Instead, we need to find ways for labor itself to be understood as an investment. Employees must earn more than cash and a few token shares of company stock. They should own the companies they work for. Their noncash contributions to the enterprise must be valued as much as investors’ capital. — location: 3806 ^ref-2864

The ability to create and exchange value must remain distributed and available—a free market. — location: 4083 ^ref-18756

Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life — location: 4431 ^ref-4714

Giants of an Earlier Capitalism’: The Chartered Trading Companies as Modern Multinationals,” — location: 4433 ^ref-48387

Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, — location: 4575 ^ref-25396

“Sell Your Stocks, MIT Sloan Professor Urges Small Investors Saving for Retirement,” — location: 4711 ^ref-2162