This Is What You Get: Parasites

in #capitalism6 years ago

THIS IS WHAT WHAT YOU GET

PARASITES

The transition from bands to tribes, tribes to chiefdoms, and chiefdoms to States, were not the result of considered forethought but rather the cumulative results of people doing what was necessary at the time to ensure both personal and group survival. That's not to say that there is never any planning at all, it's merely pointing out that it was largely evolutionary forces that drove such developments.

A VIRTUAL EXPERIMENT IN EVOLUTION

As such, we should expect to find the same general outcomes that occur in any evolutionary process. With that in mind, consider 'Tierra', an experiment in evolution by Tom Ray. Tierra consisted of a virtual computer in which mutating, self-replicating code competed for limited resources. Those resources consisted of a block of computer memory christened The Soup, no doubt in reference to the primordial soup the most primitive biological replicators are thought to have come from.

Tom Ray inoculated the soup with an 80-instructions-long code dubbed the Ancestor. This self-replicating code filled the soup, and as resources became scarcer due to overpopulation, beneficial mutations began to have an effect. Some of the imperfectly copied code accidentally had ways of replicating using less instructions, which was advantageous because their shorter length allowed them to reproduce while not occupying as much CPU time as their more wasteful rivals.

And then, something interesting happened. Ray knew that there was a limit to how sparse code could be and still self-replicate in Tierra. He calculated that to be a number of instructions somewhere in the low sixties. But, somehow, code that was only 45 instructions long was replicating in the soup. What had happened was that this super-pared down code had dispensed with the need to contain all the instructions necessary for self-replication, and instead sought out larger, more complex 'organisms' to use as host and borrow the host's replication code. In other words, the environment had opened up an opportunity for parasites.

Ray's experiment was run several times and every time the eventual emergence of parasites and a resulting arms race between defence against them and ways past such defences ensued. There is no reason to suppose that this would not be the case with any evolutionary process.

ADVANTAGEOUS ADAPTATIONS

But why should that mean crony capitalism is the consequence of free market capitalism? To understand that, we turn to a practical (as opposed to ideological) definition of free market activity. Such a definition would frame it in terms of people seeking to gain more material wealth by whatever method they can get away with, which obviously includes exploiting people so as to extract wealth from them as well as persuading people to spend their money on genuinely good deals.

We should also expect to find similar evolutionary pressures working on both biological and social parasites, as an arms race between them and defences against their attempts to extract resources ensues. More visible parasites have an obvious disadvantage in that they are noticeable and are therefore more likely to be dealt with. For example, a leech attached to your cheek would very likely be removed. Similarly, obvious wealth takers like thieves and blatant fraudsters are likely to be dealt with, sooner rather than later.

A more effective means of parasitism would be to infiltrate some vital system and become so intertwined with it that extraction of the parasite without causing serious harm to the host is difficult. That might sound like the most effective protection strategy parasites can adopt, but there is actually a further step that can be taken, which is to manipulate the host psychologically so that it acts in the parasite's interests. For example, there is a parasite that infects the brains of ants and makes them climb to the top of grass blades and wait to be consumed by a passing sheep, which is necessary for this parasite's strange life cycle. In social terms, it can involve infiltrating vital support systems like the political and financial system (consistent with the previous point about being intertwined with host-vital networks) and coming across as a necessary part of the system that must be protected at all costs.

A good example of a vital system that is susceptible to parasitism is advertising. The capitalist market system is based on perpetual growth, which is something that is fundamentally opposed to any notion of 'enough' that might dwell in the human soul. In the competitive world of business, companies are compelled to steadily increase market share and profits, for fear of being swallowed by a larger enterprise, but how can perpetual growth be maintained when customers act with frugality and are content with what they have?

Psychologists were therefore brought in to change the human psyche. One such expert was Edward Bernays. He took certain ideas from Freudian analysis about human status and applied them to advertisement campaigns. Products were no longer to be thought of as mere practical solutions to a limited set of problems. They were, instead, symbols representative of one's identity, physical representations of one's status. The car, the appliance, the furniture, were to be less relevant in terms of their utility and seen instead as fashion accessories. Advertising played a major role in developing this new consumer culture, because if the economy was to fulfil its imperative of perpetual growth, the customer had to be persuaded to buy things they did not even know they needed.

image.jpeg

(A run on the bank following the 2008 financial crisis. Image from wikimedia commons).

The fact that we now live surrounded by this kind of advertising and propaganda brings into doubt the notion that people make decisions based on their own free choice. Arguably, they are only as free as the person who is asked to pick any card by the magician, somebody well-practiced in taking advantage of weaknesses in others' psychology, perception etc. Of course, not all advertising is bad but this is just one more part of the market system open to manipulation by parasitic forces. A particularly damning example of parasitic practice would be the sub-prime mortgage scandal. After deregulation of the financial sector, increasingly complex and risky debt was sold; indeed, sometimes what was being sold was known to be extremely dodgy, as this transcript from an Internet chat between two S&P analysts showed:

1: "By the way, that deal is ridiculous".

2: "I know, right, the model definitely does not capture half the risk".

1: "We should not be rating it".

2: "We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows, and we would rate it".

1: "But there's a lot of risk associated with it- I personally don't feel comfy signing off as a committee member".

But they went on to rate and sign off, anyway.

The evolutionary nature of the market has given rise to all kinds of parasitic practices (as well as many beneficial non-zero sum exchanges). There's no need to spell them all out here. For our purposes it's more useful to summarise the overall effect and perhaps the best summary was written by John McMurty, author of 'The Cancer Stage Of Capitalism':

“Non-living corporations are conceived as human individuals...Continent-wide machine extractions of the world’s natural resources, pollutive mass-manufacturing and throwaway packages are imaged as home-spun market offerings for the local community...Faceless corporate bureaucracies structured to avoid the liability of their stock holders are represented as intimate and caring family friends...If we walk through each of the properties of the real free market, in short, we find not one of them belongs in fact to the global market system, but every one of them is appropriated by it as its own”.

This all came about because the market is not the blank monopoly board libertarians make it out to be, where- other than in terms of skill and luck all players are equal- but was instead a system built out of earlier social organisations that were hierarchical and prone to kleptocracy. It also came about because the market functions as an evolutionary system, and all such systems breed parasites evolving to defeat the defences that evolve to keep the parasites at bay.

However, none of this shows that the corruption of free markets is inevitable or even likely. To make that case, we need to look at the driving principles of capitalism...

REFERENCES

'The Cancer Stage of Capitalism' by John Mcurty

'The Men Who Made Us Spend' by Jacques Peretti

'Artificial Life' by Steven Levy

'Financial Fiasco' by Johan Norberg

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very good information..

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