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A Paradigm Shift: The End of Lords

Writer's picture: SID - PresidentSID - President

Updated: Jan 14, 2024

With the influx of apocalyptic predictions, we should consider another possible result where the masses succeed over those who use leverage and decades-old schemes to entrap them. Furthermore, there is the possibility that nothing needs to change course for this massive shift to happen and that corporate greed in itself will be the factor that rips the reins away from the current-world lords.


The Landscape.

To understand this possibility, we first need to observe some top-level concepts about how and why wealth is being so heavily concentrated away from the reach of the everyday person.

Stocks can be used to amplify wealth, but this has dependent factors, namely the performance and cost-cutting measures of the corporations of C-Level executives to increase profits or cut losses. I will use the term credits to define non-asset backed wealth I.E. Cash, Credit, Debit, Stocks, and Crypto. As long as someone's wealth is in credits, it is not an absolute property and therefore is subject to the influence of the choices of the credit issuer and other environmental influences.

How are these credits being kept away from the regular? Via 'flow' strategy; capital owners keep their money in the stock market, therefore no matter how they spend their money, some of it will come back to them (unless they are very bad at investing, but most don't even manage their own investments). Simplified: a billionaire spends 20 million on a home; that money pays for the products and labor. Those laborers are paid out of the profit of the contract and then spend that money on say new electronics, as they make these purchases it boosts the stocks this billionaire invests in so they cut their losses further. But this is just wise wealth management, right? It absolutely can be, but there is more to the story.

The United States has rampant corporate write-offs and other tax deduction types. So a corporation may be lazy and make bad business moves and then deduct those losses so that they pay nothing in taxes when otherwise they would pay ~25% combined. This compounds year by year as their holding companies then reinvest this money in other corporations that do the same thing, creating a wealth pyramid where basically no one is paying taxes while controlling the vast majority of the wealth. This artificially keeps corporations who do bad business from failing, but that isn't it. Since these organizations often retain extra money they shouldn't have, their stakeholders also receive this multiplier, meaning every single year, corporations and the wealthy (who leverage the stock market) experience ~1.5x multiplier in gains, which compounds year after year. This reduces the economic flow for others to start competing businesses at the same rate, negatively compounding year by year. So with this, it may seem to be an impossible situation to escape. This is where most breakdowns stop, ending with a message like 'Get rich or die'.


The Disconnect. There is a crack in our situation leaking some light, however, and that's a solution disguised as cause. Corporate Greed. You see, nearly no brands have the reputation they once did before quarantine. Many over-budgeted due to the influx of transactions from people spending savings despite it not being an indefinite flow of income. When people's savings were depleted, so did this influx of income. This original increase caused C-Level executives to give themselves unimaginable raises, and when that new income left, their rates stayed the same and our situation evolved to where it is today. Large corporations have to cannibalize their own to falsify profit with many repercussions. Brands are seen as much less ethical, value per dollar has decreased, some brands have begun sabotaging previously sold devices to push new purchases, and existing services have become of lower quality and quality control. There are mass layoffs, often cutting those who created the product value and brand notoriety that drove sales for so many years.


Corporate Collapse. We may see extreme changes in the coming decade. Corporations have become accustomed to mass layoffs as a primary method of falsifying profit, however, this is not sustainable and will cause the downfall of these brands without extreme change in the near future. Eventually, there will be nothing left to cannibalize. Retained employees will experience burnout and things will fall through the cracks, causing an ever-rising frequency of fines. Compensation will be too low to justify innovation and their products will fail to justify their value. Purchases will abruptly divide and the company will attempt to reform itself in a shell of its former offerings. This process has already started and will continue for up to 15 years.


The Flood of Foss. A great over-saturation of software developers began during the pandemic. This has resulted in a vast multiplier to the evolution of free and open-source software and the ability of businesses to run their services locally without extreme monthly subscription fees. Many quality projects are being rapidly developed, often faster than premium SaaS solutions. Proxmox, Truenas, ZimaOS, NextCloud, and HomeAssistant are some of them, and there are over 100 million developers on GitHub. Not all that software is free, but much of it is. This enables IT professionals to start a business with a vast array of tools fairly easily.


The Death of Monoliths. Many larger web applications will diminish their product quality and algorithms to prioritize profit rather than experience. This is visible with YouTube and their now many back-to-back unskippable ads, on short-form content services that prioritize argumentative behavior to increase active-use time, and the long-standing lack of control over your data. YouTubers will slowly begin serving their content through their personal servers or via the Cloud to get better control of their content and freedom of speech, showing the world how serious this decline truly is.


The Rise of The Abandoned. As more and more corporations fail, startups will start to take their place, creating a vendor diversity that's never been imagined. Many highly skilled experts who previously were product value-builders have sworn off the actions of their previous corporate employers and will begin startups with a people-first focus. These companies will be driven by smaller teams with a passion for the products they provide.


The Rise of Foss. Tech and software endlessly evolve, and so do their intuitiveness. As large tech companies continuously toss their old servers to recycling companies who then resell them for a fractional cost to home users, people will start buying these old devices and learning how to deploy their own services, thus empowering more and more people to start businesses. This has already begun, (see the Proxmox community) and the educational bar for entry will continually lower as extremely active projects like NextCloud (which even delivers free local-only AI) and ZimaOS evolve. This will make it easier and easier for non-technical users to manage their own services.


The Last Behemoth. Monolithic Cloud services are the last to go, as they are replaced by many, many smaller boutique Cloud providers who guarantee service to a small set of clients. Small business owners will start renting rack space to each other (and possibly wall space) to enable highly available and redundant services.


The Panic of the Wealthy and the Great Deflation. There are two great money printing machines for the wealthy- stocks, which are a credit, and property, which is an asset. But this asset still has its value driven by the market. As people begin living together in masses (despite any laws or otherwise forcing them to pay for rentals), business owners will begin buying land to build community on. Rental homes will go unoccupied until the loan payments become too much for the wealthy to maintain, and this will cause a domino effect of properties being sold at less than market value, thereby causing property value to spiral downwards.


The Lock Part 1. After the previous events have run their individual courses, this still leaves room for history to repeat itself. But as before, this step will carry itself. (Unless there is a great coordinated effort to knock out the internet and blame it on say a solar flare...which by the way is impossible. If it is powerful enough to blow copper lines and therefore the internet, it's much more than powerful enough to kill nearly everyone, if not literally everyone.) Due to the rise of FOSS and great improvement in user intuitiveness of home servers, it will have become standard to have a server in your home, and people will be able to click and download many self-hostable and aggregatable social network instances. This will give them total control of their data, what information they are fed, and how they communicate with each other. This will disable the re-emergence of lords because they will no longer have control over what information you are fed, or the power to aggregate information on their users.


The Lock Part 2. This is the only part that requires intentional action by civilians. We already have access to all we need to create our own boutique interconnected ISPs and power grids. This would strip the power of the government, large ISPs, and utility companies and stop them from controlling our ability to communicate. This is a step led entirely out of the anxiety of possibility. It isn't guaranteed that any of those entities would have that intent, but delivering a diverse vendor ecosystem in these capacities would completely strip this possibility from them and give that power to the people.


This is not a serious prediction of the future, but simply a hopeful daydream amongst the constant negative noise that surrounds us. Please feel free to leave a thought.


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