HADIZA IDRIS SALEH
U15MM2019
Let us borrow a leaf from the principle of continue existence of living organism: that for every living thing to exist must constantly change. This is also true about the evolutionary or dialectical changes in the socio-economic structure of the society. Since man live in an organized society after the state of nature, the social contract that brought them together presupposed that several human activities exist in collaborations that always amass into cultural, religious, scientific, technological and economic change.
Each time these changes occurred, communication, power, logistics of transportation, access to information and knowledge become the most powerful tools that drive the change (Renaissance age was derived by access to knowledge). When this happen, those who were previously not in contact to the edifice of these knowledge became obsessed to the new found knowledge and transform them gradually into a new system that the world came to loved.
To begin with, it is imperative to know how modern capitalism began. After the Guttenberg invention, there was a rise in access to information and knowledge, scientific research were done base on previous knowledge because the knowledge was now available to them and inventions of other machines that aided improved in quality and quantity of production and distribution of goods and services emerged. This led to industrial revolution and the eventual birth of modern capitalism. After this period, capitalism began to bloom into unstoppable economic system, advancing its dominion to all spares of human endeavor including religion and it’s determining everything that has happened to us for some past centuries.
THINGS THAT ARE FALLING CAPITALISM
THE INVENTION OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB: Just as the Guttenberg invention led to new edifice of knowledge and the subsequent springing of modern capitalism, Berners lee’s World Wide Web is corroding capitalism, giving it to the hands of proletariat who are now sharing the fruits of their age long labor. With the web, Intellectual property is in jeopardy, leaving producers of contents who are supposed to make billions of money from their invention in constant panic. This means that everything invented has a free duplicate elsewhere on the web either by hackers, by simple act of copy and paste or by free access.
This was evident in the copy right infringement between Apple and Samsung in 2011, depriving Apple of booming capital returns. All kinds of businesses today are moving online without which there will perish and free access to articles, news, scholarly journals etc are immeasurable. Mainstream media are fast replaced with the buzz of for-non-profit social media like Wikipedia and others, depriving for-profit media conglomerate like encyclopedia Britannia and the likes their billions dollar income. Book publishing companies has being ripped naked with free e-books, portable document format (PDF) and other forms of knowledge at no cost. Information about how to do everything yourself are more than gaping holes on the web, filling knowledge gap that exist between the technical knowhow and the technical unknown- how ,business secret and ideas about everything are porous and seemingly, we can sit at the comfort of our homes and do everything ourselves with our computers connected to the web.
ZERO MARGINAL COST: Zero marginal costs are the additional cost incur in the production of extra unit of goods and services after the fixed cost. Marginal costs are what usually give rise to high prices of products, giving ways to blooming success of capitalism over the years. This marginal cost is shrinking with the collaborative common, expanding its horizon across technology of production process. This means that manufacturers of goods and services always strive for new ways to improve the productivity, reduce marginal cost to survive in the fierce world of competitive business. This result to cheaper products and wining over of competitors in other to make returns of dividends to the investors.
With the zero marginal cost reducing in the era of collaborative common, the ripple effect of this to capitalism is that in the long run, goods and services will be priceless in the market because there are no more marginal costs. We could see this in the rise of free services, more charity organization, the rise of more NGOs, free software application like never before, information on how to do everything yourself etc. This give rise to the question that in the future, who will produce for who?
CONVERGING INTERNET: The third thing that is corroding modern capitalism is the rise of sophisticated converging internet: there is a new wave of converging internet springing in the past years. This new web paradigm could be called INTERNET BRAIN: an artificial intelligence or an affiliation of billions people brain to form a flagging communication, logistics and energy internet with micro unit sensors connecting to centrifugal information data.
Watch video here.
This new internet phenomenon will collaborate to produce physical goods which will affect the entire value chain of global economy. This three in one internet platform will have the capacity to connect 14 billion sensors between human brain, electronic appliances, and resource flow, warehouse distribution centrals, on the road monitoring traffics, in the manufacturing industries, in offices, retail stores and across other system, feeding data back to human.
Similarly, IBN announced that by the year 2020, they will have 30 billion sensors connecting everything with everything and that by the year 2030 they will install 100 trillion sensors, connecting all of us in three fold internet systems of communication, logistics and energy.
To be logical with you, every economy is driven by these three technologies. We saw how it happened during industrial revolution and with this news forms of collaborative internet; everybody is a producer using the big data flow across systems with the uses of application software. So who will the capitalist produce for?
CRUMBLING PRICES OF PRODUCTS: The shrinking prices of goods and services and the fragmentation of advertisement into micro units across social media platforms has wrecked giant advert companies like Omnicon Group, WWP Group, Publis is Groupe. etc. to lose billions of revenue. This arose from the spontaneous rise of collaborative production of goods and services and therefore organizations are no longer response to the dictates of market and managerial hierarchy. Read more here. We could see this in music industries where musicians give away free music to attract fans on social media thereby attract large viewers for micro advertising. YouTube is doing this also and this will jeopardize content productions and will crumble capitalism from that endeavor.
A GLIMPSE INTO THINGS TO COME AFTER CAPITALISM
The emerging new system will mark a new age where the most powerful shall be those who can possess a lot of information and know how they can manipulate them to influence or seduce the thinking of others. It is an Age of skimming and scanning because they will be a lot to read.-start building your app here.
Hacking and espionage will be a new discipline because many cyber warriors will emerge and strive to control information flow will be the other of the day. Internet search engines, browsers and application soft wares are already doing this.-start hacking here.
Codify and programming languages will arise and popular languages will be replaced by nexus of coded language of many people, putting security over internet a serious issue than terrorism to many developing nations- start learning coding language here.
Those who cannot operate or uses internet facilities will be left behind in knowledge no matter how brilliant they are.
Trade by barter will return inform of knowledge swap. A time when the marginalized proletariat shall be the one sharing the fruits of their age long labors.
People will crave for relaxation because robots will be doing everything for us. Conventional practices will fade away and fast replace by new form forms of bizarre behaviors.
It will be a society where some peoples’ ignorance will be the strength of others, war will be peace and the absence of war means no peace. Also freedom will be slavery. 1984.
As we prepare to say goodbye to modern capitalism, the world is turning it leaf to the other side and proletariats are poised to take charge and reap the fruit of their labors, I leave you with a question: which economic system will our children inherit from us?
END.
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