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Comment by cyanydeez | Hacker News Reader

'Capitalism': the inevitable reduction of all humanity to fungible currency

Is that necessarily true?

E.g., suppose I'm grocery shopping online and get put in behavioral histogram bin #1. You're in bin #2 because of stuff like impulsive browsing habits and low battery. Your bin's price for chips is consequently x% more expensive than mine.

Now, suppose both of us get separate uber rides from the same location. Similar data bins end up with your low battery generating y% higher price for your Uber.

Seems to me enough consolidation and behavioral data-based pricing practically impedes the fungibility of currency. Because while you and I can still borrow and pay back the currency directly to each other with impunity, the literal price of goods and services we can buy with that currency will be different. I.e., if you buy me a sandwich on Monday and I pay you back with a sandwich on Tuesday, you're losing money.

Edit: for the steel man of what I'm saying, imagine most grocery and convenience stores have shifted away from static pricing to something like qr codes. Also, assume pricing based on personal data is rampant across industries for most basic private goods and services.

The truth is, price differentiation is something we've been doing for centuries, just with much worse heuristics.

People are triggered when you frame it in terms of one cohort paying more than the rest. However, if there's a sticker price that basically nobody pays, with most customers getting a discount based on how rich the heuristics say they are, that's suddenly fine.

Transit tickets work this way in most of Europe. There is a sticker price, but most people don't pay the sticker price. In practice, most tickets are purchased by school children, university students, seniors etc, and they all have varying levels of discounts. Whether you think of it as a "student discount" or as a "probably-rich-person surcharge", it doesn't really matter, in the end, the result is the same. Same applies to cinemas, museums, amusement parks. Here, you even have some grocery store chains that give you discounts if you have a "large family card."

You know what else we've been doing? Replacing 2 consumers with 1 consumer when the 1 consumer has more money and is easier to statisfy. Eventually it'll be a couple of billionairs selling a few boner pills for a few million dollars.

Stick to the steel man.

If our cash system deems dollars with certain serial numbers worth only $0.80 because they have history in the illicit drug trade, that cash is no longer fungible.

How is that functionally different than a system where a dollar of essential goods suddenly becomes $1.20 across most sellers for a particular consumer due to reliable inferences from an digital dossier inaccessible to the user?

In both cases, consumer confidence suffers. The biggest difference I see is that there's a rabid contingent who correctly yell, "Don't fucking mess with that!" with regard to currency fungibility, and a bunch of people saying, "It's complicated," with regard to surveillance capitalism.

Edit: again, to be clear-- I'm talking about individually tailored prices insidiously affecting large numbers of consumers in a consolidated industry for essential goods.

Edit 2: I know surveillance capitalism isn't the same thing as making currency be non-fungible. I'm looking for insight on what the difference is in terms of consumer confidence and other economic impacts.

Edit 3: clarification to narrow my question. If you can't tell yet, I'm earnestly looking for knowledge from someone who studies economics.

The price of everything and the value of nothing.

That may be true, but capitalism has nothing to do wit betting or prediction markets.

You can have those with any government or market style.

With an individual tendency towards betting? No. But I think Capitalism absolutely is a huge part of the fanatical drive to financialize everything, and the broader regulatory environment that enables the creation of entities like Polymarket and Kalshi.

Capitalism is just a projection of our natural competition for scarce resources onto an economic system.

Resources would not be scarce if some people were not hoarding.

The supply is greatest at the source.

Are you going to work for free?

Even in non-capitalist systems people aren’t working for free

And those systems also have scarcity.

And it's not just because you are hoarding your labour.

hoarding what?

you could dekulak all 3500 billionaires, magically transmute their make believe money into hard cash, and that $20 trillion would yield less than $2500 per human. hooray?

You say that as if there aren’t an enormous amount of people for whom $2500 isn’t an enormous amount of money. Even in wealthy nations like the US, that equates to approximately 7% of the personal income for the average person. But for the 65% of the world’s population living on $10 or less per day, that is an increase of 77% or more on their yearly income.

But more important than the cash is the power that money buys. Defenestrating the uber-wealthy of their undue influence in society would have far reaching benefits beyond just money in people’s bank accounts.

About 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day. So that’s like 8 years of expenses for 15% of all humans.

Which is a pretty damning indictment of capitalism

The US has over 770,000 homeless people [1]

1 in 5 children in the USA don’t know where their next meal is coming from [2]

[1] https://https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/

[2] https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/child-hunge...

There is nothing natural about distributed ownership and abstract financialization.

Betting with one another predates any notion of capitalism, or economy.

True, but capitalism eventually makes gambling the whole economy.

I don't think it does. Capitalism only allows one to save one's fruit of their labor to use down the line. You exchange it for money, then use that money to buy other stuff.

People using it to gamble has more to do with gambling people than with capitalism people. You can have gambling in communism or socialism, only stakes there are limited because the fruit of the labor of people doesn't belong to them like in capitalism.

Look around you, the economy is aligning itself entirely around gambling. From bitcoin to nfts to the stock market to AI to art to dating apps to social media feeds to video games to venture capital to literal gambling apps infesting our phones ads sports. And finally we have actual members of the government gambling on policy.

The capitalism you grew up with is dead, the arguments for and against it are old and stale. That nature of what it is has changed. It's metastasized, devolved into something else entirely as the middle class is evaporating, the lower class is continually squeezed, billionaires become trillionaires, people are lighting warehouses on fire citing low wages as the proximal cause, and the President is ordering automatic SS registration as he threatens total civilization destruction.

This shit is not working and it's only going to get worse.

Those are diseases of morality, not capitalism. Someone who lights a warehouse on fire because they aren't paid enough is an immoral person. In a communist country they would be called a Wrecker and they'd face a firing squad for their actions.

Gambling, likewise, is a moral problem. It should be illegal or highly restricted and often was. Many other problems we face now could be fixed simply by reinstating laws that used to exist.

there a lot of things that may be immoral but it is the system that promotes it or prevents it. our system promotes it (there are ads for kashi and fanduel on nickelodeon) so it is the capitalism

You and I probably have very different ideas about what is moral and what is not. For me, the highest moral crime is greed. A lot of people seem fine with it today. So for you to claim that the fire happened because of the poor moral character of the person who lit the fire, I can just as easily say this happened because of the poor moral character of the people who didn't pay him a fair wage, which leaves us nowhere.

That's why I focus on purely systemic arguments. The humans in the system are abstract. It doesn't matter if they are moral or not, they respond to systemic incentives. So if they're acting immorally according to you, why is the system incentivizing degenerate behavior instead of moral behavior?

I think you're mixing up capitalism with commerce. Commerce is where people buy and sell stuff. This is good. Capitalism is where capital is hoarded by an increasing smaller group of people. This is bad.

(Many) people love gambling. Capitalism is great at giving people what they want.

How?

Once the capitalists get enough control of the government they rig everything for themselves. In a capitalist system money is paramount and they have the most of it, so their opinion is regarded higher than everyone else's. Once capitalists rig the system for themselves, the only way to get ahead is just pure luck or connections. Sine not everyone can be connected, luck is all that's left for most people, so it becomes a huge part of economic activity along with whoring and warring. See Also: OnlyFans, and the Department of War.

When Bill Gates was the richest guy in the world, he still had to battle the authorities for ten years to import his sports car from Europe.

I'd hardly call that controlling the government.

Again, like I said, the capitalism you knew and loved is dead. When Bill Gates became the richest man in the world he had like $10 billion dollars. Today we are talking about trillionares now. As today's elites aspire to be able to own 1995 Bill Gates 100 times over, so yeah apparently he didn't have enough power back then.

Can you entertain the idea that someone several orders of magnitude more powerful than 1995 Bill Gates might have more effective control over the government?

Aren't you begging the question? You are saying that today's richest have more money (though you should probably adjust for gdp growth), and I agree. However, you are automatically concluding that they have more power?

It’s interesting take for sure. However it appears that in real life nowadays most millionaires are self made. I was surprised when I found out about it too. Seems to contradict your thesis.

Musk and Trump got into goverment and are getting rid of everything not for them. While paying huge amounts of money to themselves.

Yeah, that’s definitely corrupt. Doesn’t contradict the fact that people are generally richer than ever nowadays and that capitalism enables that, I don’t mind ultra rich getting richer as long as everyone else is also getting richer.

What do millionaires have to do with anything I said?

> Once capitalists rig the system for themselves, the only way to get ahead is just pure luck or connections.

Don't you consider millionaires as ones getting ahead? If not then I've got to say - it's absolutely spectacular how rich did capitalism make everyone if millionaires are not even considered rich nowadays!

I think the main cause (that's actually quite anti-capitalist) is that banks and people at power have the ability to create money out of nothing, to lend the money into existence, while devaluing everyone else.

It was very interesting to me where I finally understood how banks (and the overall system) create money. As a bank you start with 0 money, you lend 100 to some person that you "deposit" into their account at your bank. So now on your books you have 100 in liabilities (the money that the person has in your account) and 100 in assets (the money the person owes you). So accounting is balanced. You did not need money to start with, as a bank you just "lend it into existence".

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