First World Decay

             What must be noted with regards to the psychic economy overtaking the physical economy is that there are many second order and tertiary effects that flow from this. One such effect is that physical institutions like colleges are dying and becoming laughingstocks, which can be observed through academia increasingly focusing on social causes and diversity rather than ideas or scholarship as a proxy for the quality of people involved in them declining – due to information and thus social networking being severed from an umbilical cord which tied them to physical economy nodes and geography -- but this is just one of the many consequences of the psychic becoming dominant over the physical. What is really happening is not the decay of academia or cities, but rather the rotting of the entire first world and its infrastructure (both biological and synthetic or structural) as the physical resource flows which made the first world have become secondary to psychic resource flows. The failure of physical institutions is just a phenomenological precursor to the long term effects in dominance of the shift from the physical to psychic.

            Part of the shift in dominant mode of economy (from physical to psychic) is the abstraction of resources. What this means is that wealth can be abstracted from physical goods and resources into digital goods and resources. For a more concrete example, this means that wealth which used to only be able to be stored in gold or fine art or some sort of human marker for a representation of energy expended across time (what money tries to be) can now be stored on computers in the form of cryptocurrency. While gold and fine art required physical storage that required stable communities and/or physical protection, cryptocurrency is decentralized and not contingent on stable communities or physical protection. I can be in America with ten million dollars in cryptocurrency and if America fails, I can memorize my private keys or send an email to myself with the private keys and move to a different country without any risk of my wealth being stolen or confiscated by any authorities. Furthermore, I don’t really need personal protection or even to live in a stable community if I am clever in keeping my cryptocurrency wealth secret, as the abstracted nature of it doesn’t require me to live in a compound to protect it. The abstracted nature of the psychic economy with regards to wealth means that those with wealth in the new economy have no real incentive to promote stability or extend themselves into physically local communities to ensure their own safety.

            With abstracted wealth that is now decentralized and physical geography agnostic representations of energy expended over time (which is what money fundamentally attempts to be), the local economy no longer matters because local currencies no longer matter. In the past, a billionaire who had his billions in USD was incentivized to make sure USD was in good health, that the USD economy (which is geographically localized) kept running in a healthy manner, at least in the short term. Now, a billionaire in crypto doesn’t really care if USD is in good health, if the USD based economies are in good health, so he does not have to invest time and energy that support and enrich the communities that are the backbone of USD based economies. This is not limited to USD, this extends to literally all physical geography based economies, as their currencies are fundamentally linked to the physical economy, which is now in the beginning stages of being eaten by the psychic economy, of which cryptocurrency as an organism of sorts is part of.

            Now that financial outcomes are being divorced from physical geography outcomes, the countries and communities that were successful in the past because of the physical economy are beginning to suffer. This is, as mentioned earlier, related to how colleges are rotting and decaying, but it also extends to physical infrastructure and governance as well as communities as a whole. When resource flows were physically dominant, control over oil and food and materials routing was the most important thing for anybody with large amounts of wealth. This is still valuable as physical resources are still valuable (for getting psychic resources through selling of excess physical resources), but it isn’t the best game in town. Resource flows are now psychically dominant, so information and information flow (distribution and monetization of it) is what is most influentially and linked to collecting wealth. I write collecting wealth rather than collecting and protecting wealth, as the protection of wealth has been decentralized and distributed across the globe through cryptocurrency.

Physical resource flows are beginning to be drained into psychic or abstracted wealth rather than physical wealth which was part of the physical resource flows and resulted in phenomenological expressions of this formerly functional resource loop: towns, cities, and countries. The value that is being extracted from physical resource flows isn’t being reinvested into the physical; it’s being squirreled away by exploitative parasites and predators on the top of the physical hierarchy. They were already doing this through offshore bank accounts and investments in companies, but now these people don’t even need the bank accounts and investments and can just dump the value into psychic abstractions of wealth. What this means is there is even less accountability and health to governance than ever before, what was already bad is now getting even worse, because once a nation or community sucked dry, the suckers dry can migrate somewhere else or just retire somewhere else with the abstracted wealth. You can see this process is not new -- it has been going on to an increasing degree that tracks in a time-lagged manner with the degree to which wealth has been gradually abstracted. It was gold and financial instruments and property, and now it is purely digital and psychic in nature. The people on top of wealth hierarchies are just starting this process as the internet is quite recent and cryptocurrency is even more recent, but this process is not something that can be stopped as the people who can engage in it are the only people capable of stopping it from happening, and they have no incentive (other than empathy or remorse) to stop it from happening, and those who don’t do it will simply lose out to those who do engage in it as power is simply a resource acquisition and application game at its core.

What all of this means, in practical terms, is that the feedback loops which led to first world countries being so functional and successful in infrastructure and law and order are now close to being destroyed, and their destruction is inevitable. The incentive structures which dictated the health of communities and countries in order to let the wealthy to preserve and protect their wealth have been removed, so the health of communities and countries are necessarily about to take a big nose dive. You can already see this with the disdain that the elite treat proles in each first world country. The working and middle and upper middle class are functionally little more than toys at this point, and what’s worse they are the toys that the elite don’t really care to play with or treat well, because these toys aren’t needed in any real sense. Sure, they are needed for minimal upkeep and moving physical goods and planting food, but even that is a ticking time bomb, as the elite are working hard to advance robotics and automation to the point where the human toys are even less needed for infrastructure. What is essentially going on is the elite now have synthetic decentralized structures for wealth which means the less efficient biological centralized structures for wealth are outdated and being neglected or even explicitly targeted in a harmful way. The targeting is for the purposes of weakening the proles to the degree to which any revolution or rebellion against the ruling class is completely impotent. With entertainment, poisoned food and water, and information control, we are already functionally at the point where the game is over and the proles are lost. At most, proles can do temporary damage to individual elites, not change what is going on structurally, and these actions will not result in any meaningful revolution or upheaval, they will essentially just be the last gasps of a dying organism: the once happy underclass.

If you’re a first world prole (middle class and upper middle class are functionally included and will explicitly be the same as proles in the near future) reliant on the physical economy and physical institutions that used to be quality and reliable, here is what you can expect in the future: Your roads will be less functional, your food will be worse and increasingly synthetic and poisoned, your healthcare will be increasingly haphazard, your communities will be filled with more and more crime, your mayors and governors will be more corrupt and care less about you, your government workers will be welfare whores who don’t provide any quality service, and your national leaders will be increasingly ridiculous and out of touch. The game is over, the physical institutions and countries which were established to serve the purposes of elites are no longer needed and so they will decay. The only people who will do well who are not elite are those who can establish themselves in the psychic economy and find some small pocket of geography with local agriculture and husbandry economy and self-reliant people with a strong spirit. The city dwellers and pseudo-intellectual class and white collar workers who have made bank sorting excel columns and forwarding emails and attending meetings are a type of animal that is about to be murdered. Don’t try to hijack or rebuild the institutions that are corrupt, impotent, and dying. They are corrupt, impotent, and dying for a good reason: the psychic is beginning to eat the physical.