By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
October 27, 2025
At some point capitalism lost the ability to give us new things that we need and started giving us new things we don't need, and now it's giving us new things we never needed and don't even really want.
Nobody needs all this generative AI crap. We were doing fine with online search functions and the ability to write and make art for ourselves. Only the most shallow and vapid of individuals find any appeal in the idea of talking to a chatbot like a companion, consuming "art" generated by a computer program, or letting the technology of some plutocratic megacorporation do their thinking, researching and expressing for them.
The economy is now balancing on a giant bubble of a fledgeling industry that is already underperforming expectations and hitting points of diminishing returns on multiple fronts, all while being really bad for the environment. And it doesn't improve anyone's life in any meaningful way.
Nobody asked for this.
And it's not like people aren't asking for things; capitalism just doesn't have the ability to give them the things they are asking for. World peace. Affordable housing. Good health. Fast and efficient public transportation systems. Solutions to the various environmental catastrophes that status quo human behavior is driving us toward. The ability to have our needs met without spending all our time at work. Care for the needful. General human thriving. These are not demands that a system driven by the pursuit of profit for its own sake can supply.
When capitalism first showed up it delivered plenty of new things which people had a need and a desire for that weren't available under previous systems like feudalism. The greatly increased material abundance and explosions of scientific and technological innovation ushered in with the dawn of capitalism caused human quality of life to improve by leaps and bounds.
But now we're at a point where that just isn't happening anymore. Things have stagnated, and we're starting to backslide. People are getting dumber, sicker, lonelier, and more and more miserable. And the profit-driven systems we live under have no answers, besides throwing increasingly shitbrained technology at us so we can distract ourselves from how fucked up everything has gotten.
We are being driven into dystopia and annihilation by systems of our own making. We're meant to be the smartest species on earth, but we locked ourselves in our invention - a self-reinforcing labor camp that makes us miserable - and then we get all huffy when people dare to question if it's the only way of doing things. Literally every other species is smarter than us. Amoebas are having a better time of it.
This will change when humanity replaces capitalism with something better, in the same way we replaced feudalism with the superior system of capitalism. I don't know what that system is going to look like, but it's going to have to involve a move from a model that is driven by competition to one that is driven by collaboration. That's the only way humanity will be able to channel all its brilliance toward the immense project of overcoming all the obstacles we now face as a species, along with all terrestrial organisms.
Until then, all we can do is try to help awaken as many of our fellow humans as possible to the reality of our circumstances. Use every means at our disposal to teach people how dire our plight is, how deceived we've been by the propaganda and indoctrination of the empire we live under, how sorely change is needed, and that a better world is possible. Once we get enough eyes open, we'll have the numbers to force things to change.
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