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10:34

(In »The free and open Internet versus the ecological apocalypse«)

When the banknote establishes itself as the dominant form of communication between people and societies in the 17th century, it generates an accelerating technological development and increased prosperity to an extent that the world has never seen before. It is easy to be blinded by this efficiency and progress; liberalism is a particularly popular ideology, entirely based on this blindness, spurred on by capital’s formidable historical successes. But capital liberates all this human creativity and makes possible all this specialisation at a very high cost. Within the capitalist system the good, the service and the banknote are namely all disconnected from their interacting agents, which results in these agents being cynically isolated from and insensitive to each other. Both capital’s own isolation of its interacting entities – you have no idea who owned your banknote before you, and you have no idea of where it will end up after it has left you – and its accelerating production of new human pathologies – a constant stream of new shortcomings in relation to a projected normality and an ever-increasing number of frustrations to be compensated for by a constant stream of new goods and services – makes capital the strongest alienation generator in all of human history.