It was of course completely cynical towards the U.S.A and presented Capitalism globally as a "sin", "evil", "contrary to Compassion" and even destructive for Society and Progress.
But independently of the expressed political tonality, it made an impression on me.
In fact, it was a bit of a revelation. I realized somehow that economic problems that we are facing like Poverty, Wealth Distribution or even the last Financial Crisis could be solved by finding just the right conceptual paradigm to think about them. In other terms, just by the power of ideas.
And here we are, it triggered the writing of this post.
By the way, George Soros has been attempting to find new paradigms for years with his Theory of Reflexivity, which is charming but I think too complicated to be efficient.
My take on Capitalism after the screening of the movie is the following.
On the one hand, we got the proponents of Capitalism who see it as the only system that allows anyone to do what one has freely chosen to do for a living (and hence maximize one's utility).
And on the other hand, we got the critics who see it as a system allowing the ones who own already something to own even more on the basis on what they already own (and hence find potentially themselves exponentially richer and richer, to the contrary of the poor who find themselves exponentially poorer and poorer...)
I'd say both are right but lack a lot of precision and exactness in their view.
The proponents of Capitalism are clearly unconvinced that improving the condition of other Society members and caring for them, directly impacts and improves (and I believe, actually improves in an exponential fashion) their own wealth and conditions for the very reason that they fail to see that our Society is in fact a Computational Society ruled by the Law of Accelerating Returns. Their egoistic greed is arguably naive.
The critics of Capitalism are clearly unconvinced that it's fair that there should be a direct correlation between work/merit/social utility and wealth for the very reason that they fail to see that each man and woman represents no less, no more a proper and a certain amount of computation within the Computational Society. Their ideal that everybody is "equal" is fallacious and naive too.
You see the idea coming...
My wish for 2010 is to construct a new paradigm to approach Economics, which I have let myself coin Computanomics, so that we might solve the issues raised by the movie.
The paradigm is based on the main axiom that the human brain is a computational device running software. Other propositions (that are assumptions at this stage, but hopefully will be proven later) state that Money is an approximation of Instruction and that our Society is a computational one, that is as per my definition "a hierarchized and organized network (i.e. Society) of computational devices (i.e. human beings, electronic devices, machines, cyborgs, animals, robots etc...) exchanging literally Information and Instructions."
Please help me in my endeavor! :) by reading, spreading the word or contributing to www.computanomics.org , BunkerSofa's wiki and of course www.bunkersofism.com
C0MPUTAN0MIC$ is a fun way to write it.
ReplyDeletewhat do you mean?
ReplyDeleteC0MPUTAN0MIC$ since it is about $ and bits (0 and 1) , instead of COMPUTANOMICS.
ReplyDeletemaybe even C0MPUTAN0M1C$