The Giant Dog-Pile Economy Turd

#DogPileEconomy

I am not a fan of the “Dog-Pile Economy.” I think it is as stupid as it wasteful, the ultimate form of waste it creates being a giant digital turd through which customers have to wade in order to find anything of value. This turd gobbles up AI processing, data centers, petabytes of storage and terawatts of energy just to be the firm that is on top of said turd pile when you, the lucky customer, shops for your next pair of socks or can of green beans.

The Price of Freedom

I live in the United States of America, a country that prides itself on freedom, especially freedom of speech. Now, as technology rolls forward, these freedoms have been challenged and a strong socialist agenda has taken root. On one hand, I am not a fan of socialism. On the other hand, I am not a fan of people parking cars in their front yard next to my house and ruining my property value, I am not a fan of people spewing hate speech, violence and mass-misinformation into a world that has plenty of other sources of stress, and as previously mentioned, I am not a fan of dog-pile marking clogging my inbox, diluting my internet to a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) swamp and hitting me up on LinkedIn for 15-minute conversations which I will not be having.

The price of freedom then, is responsibility – people need to be socially responsible stewards of their speech which in today’s terms is synonymous to being socially responsible stewards of the information they put into the world-wide web. But that’s not how capitalism works. Those who have read my previous posts know I am not a fan of “isms” in general, but capitalism, with its quirks, has been my go to for decades. I am aware it has issues.

Problems Facing Capitalism

I have enumerated these before as well, but lets do it again dog-pile style.

• Regulation: Unchecked capitalism leads to unbridled exploitation, ergo, regulation is necessary to make sure consumers are not lied to, are not gamed, are not experimented upon with damaging or fatal consequences. My sister-in-law works as an executive in the building code industry. Without building codes, ask her about how construction would be done. . . What corners would be cut and at what cost. Sadly, building codes are just one of thousands of examples where regulation keeps an “ism” such as capitalism at bay. But not all regulations are wonderful either. On the other side of this debate, at what point does regulation cross into the “Command Economy” or “Corporatism” – those are not socialism, but they aren’t free market capitalism either!
  
• Blocking Innovation: Capitalism is a source of innovation. Until it isn’t. An example of this is “shelved patents.” An organization might buy and shelve innovation so as not to disturb their market. That hain’t good. Another example is delayed release – the practice whereby a company will design several generations of its product line, but it doesn’t release the latest version because Research & Development (R&D) is expensive. So, they release their product at an interval that allows them to recoup R&D costs and make money on their innovation. That’s totally reasonable; however, it is a retardant to innovation all the same. Finally, I just spoke to colleague about how businesses will lobby against innovation to protect their markets… That is a classic!
  
• Consumer Dependence: A free market economy only thrives when there is a market, and so capitalist corporations have gone to great lengths creating markets – this generates waste in the name of sales. Capitalism wants:
  
  • More babies – have more babies so they have more customers to buy their stuff!
    
  • Product Slavery – make products proprietary so consumers cannot switch easily, and convert more tangible products to digital version so they are licensed to consumers instead of owned; meaning customers have to perpetually pay for access to their content because they cannot buy a copy, they can only “pay per listen,” “pay per read,” etc.
    
• Perception Manipulation: Macy’s created the Christmas we know an love today, insisting Santa delivers plastic gadgets to good little boys and girls. Corporations continue this trend: even though the lawn mower sits in your garage MOST of the time, the clothes washer and dryer spend 80% or more time just sitting there taking up space, our kitchens are less used than ever in favor of prepared meal plans and dining out, our vehicles spend huge amounts of time parked and not going anywhere, and yet everyone feels like they need to have their own of all of these and much more. We wouldn’t dare share these things at, say, a tribal or village level where there utilization would certainly be more effective and the level of waste would be greatly reduced. That’s the power of perception manipulation and market creation. Markets, like currency itself, are anchored to nothing, really. . .
  
• Artificial Intelligence: I drop this link every chance I get, because to me it is obvious. Capitalism cannot survive artificial intelligence. At least, not in the way people are pretending it can. I hear, “oh, AI isn’t going to replace people, it will just help them do their jobs better.” That’s a lie. Period. A freaking lie. AI is coming for the jobs, for entire markets, it just is, and we need to be smart about how we usher that into the world economy if we want to avoid a whole new level of class-based society and slavery. The counter to this is “universal income” which I think is a crappy solution. Equally bad is the idea that we “pause” AI – because that won’t ever really happen. Whoever presses the “pause” button will simply be at the mercy of those who do not press the pause button. People like the Amish and the American Indians pressed the pause button. People like Tibetans pressed the pause button. These are beautiful cultures that got wrecked by “progress” and the same thing will happen if people try to hide from AI – those groups of people will get wrecked.
  

The Forces of Global Market Inertia

Again, I speak from an office chair within the United States of America, but I contend, even with its problems and looming demise, capitalism will continue forward based on its own market inertia, until it breaks. This is the case with all human systems, they continue forward under their inertia until they stop working, or are replaced by something else. And it is on this backdrop that the dog-pile economy has unfolded. Right now, it is cheaper to spam the universe than it is to abide by a fairly ancient observation:

Ergo, what if I am not willing to jump on the “spam the universe” band wagon? Then, we need to devise a smarter approach. One that speaks to our level of technological advancement, and brings our psycho-social tendencies up to that standard instead of the near-constant self-exploitation of our animal nature.

People may have noticed, my content doesn’t come out more frequently. I typically end it with “this text is 100% human generated” so that researches and data scientists can use my content to train AI without fear that they are creating a warped feedback loop by feeding AI content into AI.

Mindfuel Shall Not Yield

I’m simply not going to play. I hope others will join me, but I doubt most will because people gravitate towards patterns that work and the dog-pile approach is working! So, I suspect most ventures will simply continue to lean on the dog-pile economy to establish and maintain relevancy until . . . Until we are smart enough to come up with something better.

We are smart enough to do that. My goal is to do that. And as I move forward with the things that matter to me personally (authenticity, privacy, post-AI economy, circularity, and yes, I am still a fan of the broader version of DEI), I will carry my progress into the brands I support (Crave Locally and Alton Veridian for starters).

In closing, the #DogPileEconomy is beneath us as a species. We deserve better, our planet deserves better and I believe we can replace this #TurdFad with something that is smarter, more meaningful and a hell of a lot less noisy.

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