If in 2008 instead of bailing out the Banks & allowing them to...
R.Сам 🦋🐏@Logo_Daedalus
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Jul 10, 2025
~3 min read
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If in 2008 instead of bailing out the Banks & allowing them to foreclose on properties, we had fucked written off the debts, said fuck you to the Banks-- we'd be living in paradise by now. I firmly believe this. The "End of History" that was the 2000s was the cultural watershed, mass hyper abundance & freedom in the digital plane-- & everything since has been shrinkflation & feudal increases in rent extraction. The period of Napster, Kazaa, & the archipelago net of forums & blogs was freer than this platform oligarchy of "social media" & streaming. We destroyed our taste of paradise in order for intellectual property regimes to extract more rent.
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We lived through an unparalleled explosion of technological proliferation, but this was all "credited" on the assumption that once it reached saturation, the credit would be returned with interest via platform rent extraction. That's precisely what's happened.
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One little metaphor here is this.
Let's say you had a bunch of Playstation 1 games-- & you got a Playstation 2-- good news, you can play all the PS1 games on it. They also rereleased a bunch of PS1 games on PS2 disks, so you could have a massive library shrunk down into a more compact format.
Great. PS3 comes out, & at launch it's backwards compatible with PS2 & PS1. But they got rid of this to cut costs mid generation. This was precisely when rent-extraction came to predominate in terms of "growth" -- instead of getting "more for less" you get "less for more" -- you buy a PS3 made after the first run that were backwards compatible, & you're locked out-- you can download a PS1 game through the Playstation store, to play on PS3, but this costs more than the price of a used PS1 disk.
This is the new model-- repurchasing "access" to what had become superfluously cheap. Now, some people have bought Skyrim 10 multiple times because each new console generation refuses backwards compatibility & favors "remasters" etc. The physical media created a different type of superfluity than digital "access" -- if you made 100 disks, the price of those disks is out of your hands. If you make all those disks obsolete, then the download cost for "access" is akin to prices for food inside a theme park. You can raise rents because there's no resale possible & there's no competition.
Let's say you had a bunch of Playstation 1 games-- & you got a Playstation 2-- good news, you can play all the PS1 games on it. They also rereleased a bunch of PS1 games on PS2 disks, so you could have a massive library shrunk down into a more compact format.
Great. PS3 comes out, & at launch it's backwards compatible with PS2 & PS1. But they got rid of this to cut costs mid generation. This was precisely when rent-extraction came to predominate in terms of "growth" -- instead of getting "more for less" you get "less for more" -- you buy a PS3 made after the first run that were backwards compatible, & you're locked out-- you can download a PS1 game through the Playstation store, to play on PS3, but this costs more than the price of a used PS1 disk.
This is the new model-- repurchasing "access" to what had become superfluously cheap. Now, some people have bought Skyrim 10 multiple times because each new console generation refuses backwards compatibility & favors "remasters" etc. The physical media created a different type of superfluity than digital "access" -- if you made 100 disks, the price of those disks is out of your hands. If you make all those disks obsolete, then the download cost for "access" is akin to prices for food inside a theme park. You can raise rents because there's no resale possible & there's no competition.
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This is what "Streaming" hides as well-- it used to be that you'd have your 80 gb iPod, & you could fill it up however you wished. You could take your whole library of CDs (you could go to your local library & just upload all the CDs to your hard drive for free)-- & then you had them on demand. Now-- you are on a subscription plan for "access" -- you do not own the music, you have a license to access-- that's not the same thing. It's the difference between buying a "lifetime pass"-- one purchase, permanent-- to monthly "access passes" in terms of subscription fees. What was better about the "lifetime pass" model was that they were transferable. The whole secondhand market of "used CDs" enabled you to build up your own canon & library, which you had "infinite license" to. Now-- you stop paying for Spotify, & your "library" is gone instantaneously.
