september 19, 2021
it's my staunch belief the final end-stage perversion of capital isn't to force resources into producing things that exist solely to speculate on - loot crates, ape jpegs, collateralized debt packages consisting of subprime loans - it is to make useful objects assets, and therefore destroy their utility.
that is what appears to be a 1990-ish Mercedes Benz 190E 2.3-16, a sports variant of the company's W201 small-sedan platform outfitted with slight aero upgrades and a 2.3-liter inline-four Cosworth powerplant. It is not rare, with around 20,000 produced; it is valuable, because the market said so.
It is valuable because we have a glut of men who have more money to spend than they have time left to live, once all the workweeks they still have left are accounted for. Those men collectively decided that in an absence of time, the next best thing to usage is ownership, and they will collect every childhood dream like they are funko pops, complete uselessness and all.
As a car, this Mercedes is stirring, I'm told. Handles excellently, revs to the moon, incredibly well-balanced torque curve. These characteristics are likely why it was purchased and sought-after by wealthy men.
Unfortunately, an asset cannot be used for its purpose, if it originally had one, and so those attributes might as well be video-game statistics now. A broken Hasselblad, a worn-out record, a blown-up Cosworth - those cannot be valuable anymore, so they must not be used, and they sit on a shelf to safely collect monetary value, and they collect dust as they do it, and they lose all their utility, and the entire world is a shittier fucking place for it.
i hypothesize that one of the reasons tech industry salaries are so high is because capital wants engineering talent all to itself, knowing full well that what we'd get up to when left to our own devices might threaten their strangleholds on society, however slightly — for examples, small companies like cohost, and disjoint community projects like the fediverse.
so much of being such a collector is just what this post talks about: denying the utility of an otherwise-useful thing to anyone else, and letting it waste away on a shelf.
so they drive up the price of particular types of human resource, thereby elevating the cost of living anywhere attractive to live, to the point that it makes so much more fiscal sense for a computer toucher to waste their life playing an asset in a billionaire's collection, ostensibly helping deliver value to shareholders speculating on the collection's value in aggregate, that those with the privilege to even be able to actively choose otherwise are so few and far between as to not actually pose a substantial threat.
As someone at a Big Tech Company that pays a bunch: I can definitely attest to staying at my current job and doing really boring useless things instead of working on more interesting and useful things but at a place that pays less, or instead of pursuing academics full time
Especially this is the case with ”””the economy””” being very uncertain right now, it feels dangerous and risky to do something at a smaller place or reducing my pay
I imagine at some point I’ll save up enough that I can justify leaving to do something more useful that provides intrinsic benefits to actual people, but with the Thunderdome of Capitalism, I’m also super afraid of being stuck (in the coziest most privileged sense of the word) in the corporate bureaucratic machine forever
