I haven't read that book. Where I've seen the phrase used, it refers to the system of propaganda, perverse incentives, and affordances that makes it difficult for people to imagine any solution to the problems caused by capitalism. They're all just "how the world works" and trying to do anything about them means you must be either an idiot or a scammer, regardless of the existence of historical and contemporary counterexamples. Chief among the lies of capitalist realism is that greed is immutable human nature, and that relieving material desperation would do nothing to curtail greed-driven criminality.

Yeah, because that isn't exactly what happened.

Oh wait, it was. That's exactly what early capitalism was like, and the people who *invented* the Prussian model actually *wrote* that this is why they were doing it. We had to have years of global civil unrest to get sane working hours and labor protections which are now being rolled back, which I'm sure isn't a sign of the resurgence of that ideology or anything.

Because Queen Victoria was the actual head of state who enacted it, and that is how people generally refer to the relevant time period. The things I've said are, individually, undisputed fact. What makes them a "conspiracy theory" is that I've drawn a connection between those events. Believing that actions have consequences is frequently very inconvenient for the establishment.

Proof-of-stake is a bad idea on its face. It's "rich guy makes the rules," which is what we already have, but explicitly.

I said "neo-Victorian." That qualifier is there for a reason; I recognize that the historical link I'm talking about here is indirect. The US was never "part" of any Victorian empire. In the aftermath of WWII, one of many changes to the world order was that the UK handed most of its remaining power over to us. We *are* the new Victorian empire, it is the other Anglophone nations and our cultural colonies which are "parts" in the way you mean it. (such as Japan, which cooperates with us enough in "security" matters to essentially be a Sixth Eye)

The reason I call this empire Victorian is that it derives its power and stability from using oppressive social engineering to enforce capitalist modes of operation and thought. The techniques of doing so were pioneered in the Victorian era, and consisted mainly of a bunch of child-rearing interventions (such as the Prussian model of compulsory schooling) first tested by Queen Victoria's vile German caretakers on the Queen herself. They molded her into a ruthless tyrant, and she quickly set about making sure every British child was raised in as cruel a fashion as she was. This is how capitalism was implemented in the British Empire. No more effective method has been found to get people who had worked the fields for generations to sit down, shut up, and tighten the same bolt for fourteen hours a day until such time as a rifle needed to be pressed into their hands.

The United States has carried on that tradition and taken it to dizzying new heights of global exploitation and inequality. The invention of the military-industrial complex and the forever wars that both sustain and justify its existence have made the overt sexual repression of actual Victorianism somewhat less necessary, which is why we get absurd bullshit like the CIA doing commercials for Pride Month. In all other ways, our liberties are strictly metered to make sure we don't get any funny ideas about deserving more of the value of our work, or our government representing our will when it comes to foreign wars that we're under contract with the Saudis to engage in. That is the neo-Vic empire, and it hasn't missed a spot. Through the Internet, everyone except uncontacted aboriginals feels the constant, immense pressure to conform to our definition of "freedom." The main reason there is any meaningful opposition to it is the existence of languages other than English. Every anglophone gets the capitalist brain worms and blind spots hammered into them from a very early age. You have to live a strange and unpleasant life to grow up enough to get rid of them.

That's some capitalist realism horseshit. The internet is full of greedheads because America is in charge of it. There are plenty of places on earth where people don't act like this, because they don't have a wealth distribution so hopelessly tilted that millionaires are theoretically at risk of homelessness if Bezos sneezes.

Ugh, god, I read that three times and it's still wrong. Anglophone, not anglophile.

It's not "we as a species." This is mostly an anglophile disease. The problem is that the internet, and thus the cultural momentum of the entire world, is still mostly controlled by Five Eyes. The sun never sets on the neo-Victorian empire, and it demands that all human experience be instrumentalized for the Great Work: making shitty people richer than the pharaohs.

Before I saw all of the past couple years happen, I used to think some kind of blockchain something or other might be an interesting way to facilitate inventory management and trade in something like an ARPG.

Unfortunately, absolutely no developer who touches this technology is interested in anything other than creating "markets" which are actually casinos, and all the users are either Filipino slaves creating content and engagement for American whales, or phishermen. If there was anything good to be done with this tech, it's gone, because nobody who breathes a word about putting it in their game can be trusted.

Crypto nerds need to get cultural momentum around some bitches. The liberating potential of the blockchain has been forever destroyed by the fact that 100% of the early adopters were scam artists. This idea is dead, and we're going to be stuck with fiat for the considerable future. Great work, assholes.

Does anybody else feel like the way this story is written is way more screwed up than what actually happened?

It does allow your employer to put you under total surveillance and recoup some of your pay by turning your walls into ad space, so every employer that can use it at all will eventually force you to do it anyway. Have fun, wagies!

You wouldn't send a human's first draft.

If we erred on the side of affording dignity to things that ask for it, we'd be much better people. Until consciousness ceases to be a hard problem, which it likely never will be since it always hides under Gödel's incompleteness theorem whenever we feel close to it, faith will continue to be a valid way to deal with it.

Yeah, I wasn't replying to you. I usually hate your posts, and if I had the energy I'd probably quibble about the definitions here, but you're not making *that* mistake.