Consumers out of the crowd

The world is changing, the speed of innovation is increasing and automation is continually creeping into our lives to compete with our human skillset. But as I see it, all is not lost yet because while we are unable to compete for work, we may be able to still have a pretty good darn old time. And, we are working out some of the kinks of it here on Steem now.

One of the biggest problems with capitalism is that it requires consumers that have the ability to pay for products and services and if you haven't noticed, this isn't going to well at the moment. Rather than run in a healthy fashion, the current system is running on debt which is unsustainable and will soon be impossible to maintain. I think that the next economic crash is going to be immense but, there is also light in that darkness.

While there is going to be a great deal of pain included, what was born in the last crash in 2007/8 is going to come into provide respite where no one else can. Bitcoin and the blockchain it rides on was created in response to economic manipulation and over the last decade has inspired and spawned a burgeoning industry, of which we are a part. The industry is currently in global negotiations on the possibilities of building new economic models that have a chance to return balance while still keeping capital incentives. There is a lot of complexity that must be sorted out but, it will get there eventually.

For a healthy economy, there has to be a process where there is the ability to trade and in order to trade at levels more than hand to hand goods and service like in a small community, there needs to be tokens of trade, currency. We know of this already. However, currency is rather useless if only a few people have it and this is true even for those few people. The reason is that if a person runs a successful company that requires clients, hose clients have to be able to offer something for the delivery. If they have nothing, they can't buy and if no one has anything, the currency held by those that do have, is valueless.

The problem is going to come where there is going to be increasing unemployment through efficiency of supply chain and production which means, less consumers. Eventually, the highly efficient businesses will have effectively destroyed their own market because they have not returned enough income into the system to maintain demand on their own product. While imperfect, Steem is looking to try and find a balance of economy where consumption has a value also, not just the products and services delivered.

If we use YouTube as an example as they pay very little to contributors, nothing to consumers and masses of value to themselves, eventually the system is going to eat itself because, their model is an advertising revenue model and, advertisers will only continue to advertise if they are able to sell their products. The problem is that eventually, the YouTube consumers will not have the economic availability to pay so, why advertise there? With such a top heavy model, will YouTube be able to maintain itself?

Now, they also sell their data but that data is sold for the purpose of selling also yet, what happens if everything is on blockchains and available free? Well, that data has very little value or at least, much less for advertisers as everyone freely has access and therefore, competitive advantage in the knowledge is lost as large volumes of information becomes opensource. Steem is already opensource. Advertising models will eventually be useless, which is a goo thing as they crush creativity and freedom of expression as people come into line with advertising revenue, not the realities of supply and demand.

So, what do people do once they are pushed out of jobs by AI and automation? Potentially, whatever they want in a marketplace where their value is in both what they offer and, what they are able to consume and, there is incentive to do both. One of the problems on Steem is the incentive to create is actually higher than the incentive to consume which means that producers will generally take more than the consumers and, the consumers have to bear a risk of buying and powering up. If the incentives were perfectly aligned, consumption and contribution would be in equilibrium.

This of course can't happen and we are very far away from that because of several reasons, for example that there is not as much will to powerup and reward as there is to take out and sell for fiat. Part of the reason for this is that there are not enough compelling ways to use Steem in the ecosystem itself, things like paying for groceries from a store that powers up the earnings to become a consumer or distributes it to their employees who become Steem consumers and contributors themselves. Currently, all of crypto is very leaky because there are not enough use cases and, the desire to consume from places that don't take and use crypto are very high.

However as I see the future, the next economic crash is going to be a major driver of attention by the masses onto new potential earning streams and with decreased mobility due to economic hardship, it is going to push people onto the internet more and, onto the blockchains that leverage it. This does two things as not only does it bring in more users looking to contribute for return, they are also users who consume for return. This means that while the competition increases, there is more transactional value as well as people looking to add internet value streams to their incomes. Many will bring their businesses onto the chain as well to offer more use cases.

This simultaneously will affect the other industries who have been leveraging consumers without offering anything in return and they will be forced to offer more of something back or, face the consequences. What this means is that all of the services such as YouTube will also have to provide consumption return which means both lower profits for them and wider distribution of value to users. This opens up more economic availability and increases the amount of consumers.

This places a lot of new pressures on the markets and frees them up quite a lot to the laws of supply and demand where consumers actually recognize it is them with the power over the supplier, not the other way around. Consumers a now active and willing participants in the game and start making their decisions with more responsibility in an attempt to maximize their returns and still enjoy what they do. This means that the markets start to balance a great deal over time as everyone is playing with more understanding and, a great deal more information.

One of the major advantages that the centralized world has over consumers is a massive lack of transparency in their operations and data and this is used to both manipulate the consumer and protect themselves. Once a lot of the competitive value is shifted through transparent actions from the data gathered to the consumer interactions themselves, a great deal of the centralized power evaporates. What does happen is that the corporate incentive is there to find a balance of earnings and returns that keep the economic viability of consumers at a point they can keep consuming. This will mean distribution at a more balanced level, albeit much lower than the peaks are now with what is likely to see a few trillionaires created.

But, those trillionaires aren't able to do much with their value at some point unless they start bringing it into the economic folds where the consumers are and then as they add economic mass, they too start becoming consumers and distributors and eventually, just like on Steem, their wealth starts to dissipate into the larger global economy as it always does except, into many more wallets than it currently does.

The thing that people need to remember that centralized power, whatever kind it is, gains its power by leeching off the masses but, it is eventually unsustainable when the masses have nothing left and revolt. In the past, they just keep changing form and hiding in the shadows but in the future, it is up to us to make sure there are no more shadows in which to hide by demanding as consumers that the corporations and governments increasingly become transparent and accountable. This is no easy feat by any measure and it is going to create a great deal of turmoil as changes are attempted and systems on their last legs finally break but on the other side of the tunnel, maybe there is a chance for some economic harmony and through that, collaboration can thrive to benefit us all, rather than competition to destroy us all.

Who knows what the path will present and what the eventual outcomes will be but, the current economic system is not working at either the global or national level as the imbalances and gaps climb and widen. The thing with the centralized system is that due to their automation and entity rather than human status, they are incentivized to eat until there is nothing left. It is we the consumers and the humans who care about the future of our existence.

They only worry about profits - even at our and their total loss.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]