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Bring Back the Marketplace —–——–
The information technology that has been put forth in the last 40 years has been tailored to keep most at the thin end of exchanges and transactions and give an astronomical edge to the hustlers. From the so called smartphones to stock market supercomputers. Gone are the days where you could legitimately invest in the stock market and make gains from your dexterity in understanding and forecasting the flow of industrial enterprising and innovation. Instead it has been changed into a controlled market thanks to information technology with investing rules that are straightly designed to the strict benefit of the marketplace owners and disadvantage of most stock holders. They have put in place an information rules engine that simply allows them to make money off of you, not truly from the business of investing or facilitation thereof legitimately, despite the likes.
As to the cell phones, in the early 1990’s they were strictly communication devices, and nothing else. When Steve Jobs mutated an ordinary cell phone or mobile flip phone into a so-called smartphone with the first iphone, he had knowingly made sure that it was as addictive a device as it could be in hardware and software implements. Perhaps he did not know that it could keep teenagers awake till the wee hours of the night, significantly contributing to the deterioration of public health. To the end, the smartphone is treating everyone and keeping everyone in the role of marketplace clients as consumers. And it does not matter how many YouTube channels and Tik Tok videos one may have, the proceeds, as the genz’s are finally realizing, are rarely going to buy one a $600-700K regular house in a housing market always on the rise by the hustlers or take you off of debts, from credit cards to college tuition.
Consider that a real marketplace is a place where merchants choose to congregate in order to freely offer and sell their goods directly to the public, with no oversight from the marketplace administrators as to sales and proceeds. The so-called online marketplaces early on departed from this natural trend to have rather full control on what stores buyers visit, what products they get to see, and who gets to sell what. The online marketplace owners of the day exercise a myriad of algorithmic controls on exchanges and transactions taking place within the marketplace, even giving themselves the luxury to have their own offerings competing with the hosted merchants from whom they get all kinds of fees to participate! Nobody would lease a shop in a shopping mall if they had to endure the kind of control and oversights that online marketplace owners have unethically and abusively attached to participation in their virtual outfits. For a shopping mall administrator to engage in the same practices, they would have to illegally place surveillance cameras for themselves everywhere in the mall, both inside and outside the shops. Online marketplace owners get to do this due to the very nature of means and ways of their marketplace which is an information technology implementation, not to mention owners of the cloud-based shopping centers who get to hold and peruse the entire business intelligence of their “clients”.
In the bigger picture, these artificial online marketplaces have exacerbated the problem of a World Economy where producers in the West have to compete against massive Chinese subsidies. Subsidized Chinese products have flooded these marketplaces at the behest of their owners or administrators who only care to make as much as they can from sale transactions taking place. By eliminating the second tier of distribution in the economy in giving direct access to the marketplace of the West to Chinese producers, they have severally given an unfair advantage to government subsidies in China. By so doing, they are deeply contributing to the skewing of the World Economy and drying out socio-economic opportunities and initiative everywhere in the West. One also has to remember that massive industrial spying by their government also took place in order to empower Chinese producers. Everyone in the Western hemisphere contributed to this industrial intelligence as our direct social output of all as workers, including small business owners. Elimination of the distribution tier is of course cost cutting which, added to the subsidies, makes these goods artificially cheap. At the end, the cost of buying “cheap” Chinese products in our marketplace in that manner is in fact both astronomically expensive and profoundly disruptive to us.
The redress to all these issues is very much in a re-balance or even re-constitution of the marketplace, which is not going to happen by way of a lawmaker’s regulation. It is only going to happen when the average person or consumer walks back from the role of thin client devolved to them by the hustlers and poses the foundation of an information technology infrastructure in his best possession, his/her residence or household, one poised to extricate him or her from this vicious client dependency. Implantation of a domestic server-based infrastructure in every household to supersede the desktops, laptops and smartphones that consume our lives. This is not a call to rid them but to reclaim them as our own personal tools as well as sanitize them, by turning them instead into a dependency of the server-based domestic infrastructure. To further understand why these computing gadgets as is are no longer working for us, one simply ought to remember that 30 years ago, you only had to stop at the computer store to get the software tool or program needed for any project. You made a one-time payment for it, install it on your desktop or laptop and it was yours to use forever, like anything you buy in the physical world. Now what you are buying for the most part are lifetime subscriptions of applications from insatiable rent-seekers to run on these desktops and laptops. If Suzy Osborne is right that the first thing to do in building wealth is eliminating these unending credit card debts, it must be just as true that the lifetime repurchasing or debt to SaaS providers for everything software works against individual wealth building and stands for first thing to imperatively resist and defeat among others. And when it specifically comes to multi-user exploitation of a program, establishing it as an application service on a server machine makes it readily available in most cases to all members of a household from their own desktops, in their own quarters.
Finally, individual domestic intranets in the terms that we discussed will give a whole new meaning to the social marketplace in scope and breadth. They will:
- give a new dimension to commercial exchanges by re-balancing, solidifying as well as spurring the cyber channels through which these exchanges take place.
- expand thrifting as a means to give the longest exploitation lifetime to created value.
- bring back the focus on real-life value and creation thereof, which is where wealth, as an accumulation of tangibles, is sitting.
- put pressure on the hustlers in order to keep consumer good pricing as well as profit margins in reasonable stead.
- allow us to make efficient use of the resources of the planet and avoid the stretches that are increasingly turning it into inhospitable and in the medium run inhabitable to us.
When we have done this, we will have brought back the real marketplace in its naturalness for the sustainable prosperity of all.