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10:49

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

Capitalism and its nation-state and corporativist bureaucracies optimise themselves, not by solving problems, but by creating more problems for themselves to solve, at the same time as more and more goods and services are demanded in order to satisfy a continuous stream of newly-produced needs. Therefore new laws are constantly being produced, new crime classifications, new pathologies, new defects, new failures to rectify, new problems to investigate, which one can later expand on even further, rather than rectify them. Postmodern society offers no catharsis and lacks a narrative of how the capitalist tragedy is to be brought to an end. Capitalism quite simply lacks an exit strategy. Liberal democracy’s dilemma is not primarily that it is based on obsolete individualism – liberalism is individualism’s political ideology par excellence – but rather that it is based on the myth of the invisible hand’s mystical self-regulation. But such a hand does not exist, an unregulated market always moves towards sundry variants of corrupt monopolies or oligopolies as their terminuses. The invisible hand cannot do anything itself to stop this; that can only be done by visible hands. Pragmatism defeats liberalism every day of the week in actual politics. Contingent disruptive technologies, when such emerge, and an innovative regulation of the market are, in the long term, much more important and healthier than any invisible hand.