New Research Paper at C4SS: The Alternative Economy as a Singularity

"The Alternative Economy as a Singularity"

Localized, small-scale economies are the rats in the dinosaurs' nests. The informal and household economy operates more efficiently than the capitalist economy, and can function on the waste byproducts of capitalism. It is resilient and replicates virally. In an environment in which resources for technological development have been almost entirely diverted toward corporate capitalism, it takes technologies that were developed to serve corporate capitalism, adapts them to small-scale production, and uses them to destroy corporate capitalism. In fact, it's almost as though the dinosaurs themselves had funded a genetic research lab to breed mammals: “Let's reconfigure the teeth so they're better for sucking eggs, and ramp up the metabolism to survive a major catastrophe—like, say, an asteroid collision. Nah, I don't really know what it would be good for—but what the fuck, the Pangean Ministry of Defense is paying for it!”

To repeat, there are two economies competing: their old economy of bureaucracy, high overhead, enormous capital outlays, and cost-plus markup, and our new economy of agility and low overhead. And in the end... we will bury them.