An inconvenient community

With our daughter being ill, it is now my turn to stay home and care for her with my shift starting today and going through to at least tomorrow. We luckily both have the possibility to take time off work to care for a sick child, something provided in the Finnish law. It is definitely a luxury to have, especially since the 16 years I have been in Finland has been as a freelancer and entrepreneur, if I didn't work, I didn't earn. It puts a lot of pressure on.

I see that across the globe this is going to be the new norm; short-term contracts, self-employment, clawing and scraping for revenue streams while so many of the available jobs are automated away. Sure, new jobs may be created, but that doesn't mean that the people who are currently doing the ones that will be lost are capable of filling the position. Self-driving trucks will mean 8 million driving jobs will be lost immediately in the US alone, how many globally and then, how many adjacent jobs will be affected?

There is no simple solution for this but what I do consider relatively certain is that individuals either have to find ways to take care of themselves, or have to continually give up civil liberties in order to make ends meet, in some kind of Black Mirror -esque world. With the governments themselves unable to manage the economic systems, it will be corporations with the single rule of profit maximization at their helm.

As I see it, the only real way to have some semblance of personal control is through ownership, and with the physical world already divvied up between a handful of people and organizations, ownership has to take on new meanings. This is the coming world of digital real estate, non-fungible tokenization and cyber interactions that provide values to us as users who value them enough to add value to them. It is important to recognize that in order for something to have value for trade, more than one person has to value it.

I reckon that there are many events and technologies coming to a head that will speed the processes of change in this world and disrupt the legacy systems in all kinds of ways. As always, we the people are the ones who are likely to be far behind the eight ball as normal, because most people in the world will rely on others to take the responsibility of care for them. Just remember that civil liberties are granted by a government, they aren't natural law.

While it is unlikely that the outcome is going to be anything else than most of us suffering more, the attempt to have a better world still needs to take precedence. Much like whether or not we can do much for the environment, we still have to try since there are going to be people who are going to have to face it regardless, even if that is past the end of our own lives.

I see the trying for a better outcome for all things about investing into the right things now and that has to be an opt-in to change and move away from the current status quo systems, as they are designed to fail by driving value tot he very few. In some ways, the successful economy is one that is organic in nature and can flex and evolve with change, to take on the same process of living evolution - distribution and resource optimization.

This is going to be interesting to manage in a digital world where resources are able to be created out of zeroes and ones and ownership can be secured through algorithms. Whether it will be the age of abundance or a pipe dream that we as a world of individuals will never be able to pull off because of our continual reliance on the provisions of others, is yet to be seen, but it is still something worth trying for.

The greatest economic force in the world is the collective consumer, we just have to buy differently and rely on each other more than on a government or corporation to provide for us, as inconvenient as that will be.

Taraz [ a Steem original ]