My understanding of finance is profound to say the least.
I have two personal loans (the maturity terms of which I can’t remember), five bank accounts (none for savings), a few hire purchases (with irrelevant interest rates) yet only four plastic cards and just three internet banking usernames (all of them with my dog’s name as password to keep things simple).
Add to this that all my life I’ve been paid above average and now, close to retirement, my only asset is a 14 foot boat Vaila I hardly ever use.
Yet my understanding of finance is profound to say the least. Or maybe I should call this business? The two terms confuse me a bit. What about you? Need a clear picture?*
I have this magnificent theory which may or not be original, but it is a very sound theory indeed (if you ask me):
- Thinks tend to evolve unless they get destroyed.
- The more people are interested in things to evolve, the more things will.
- The previous affirmation is only valid if the people involved are rich.
- When things evolve too much quantity-wise, they change one gear up and start evolving in quality.
- The concepts of “quality” and “quantity” should not be understood outside their context.
- The respective context is too narrow to fit this theory but our understanding of it diminishes exponentially the more we get entangled in it and this could help.
- When we rich the top limit of our comprehension, things become brittle and that’s when they may just be destroyed.
- Brocken things usually lead to other things.
- The previous statement should not be analyzed for how true or false it is, but for how long it takes to ignore it until your mistake becomes obvious.
- Every time when something is destroyed in the process of evolution and you don’t know what will replace it, I tell you: money.
This theory is rather general. In particular, things work pretty smoothly: take something and try to turn it into something a bit better, brake it and you may have to pay to buy another one, even older or not so good, a bit used and dented or just pure rubbish. Somebody’s making the buck and it’s not you, mate!
If you want to be on the money-gathering side of the society, you need to be on the Dark Side of the Earth (not the book, not the movie!). There’s always been a bunch of guys who prevented history from running fluently. Do you want to be one of them? Of course they won’t accept you in their inner ranks. What do you do then? You outsmart them and you keep always one step ahead of them. This way they’ll think you are one of them from the future and they’ll accept you without further ado.
If they want to invent the vinyl record, you boldly move and invent the CD!
If they want to fly to the Moon, you just go there and leave the Union Jack behind or whatever flag might be handy.
If they want to invent the recession, you just go a few years ahead and start selling residential real estate.
OK, OK, hold on! What do we have to do now in order to make a quick buck?
I’m sorry, there’s nothing like a quick buck unless you already have a few $$$ lying around doing nothing. But there’s a perfectly good solution if you want to break stuff and replace it with something that will make you rich!
Think of how society and economy went through the material stage: if my flint tool is not as cool as yours, I’ll wait for the right moment to crack your skull and grab the technological advance from you, as you had created it by mistake anyway and I was smarter and therefore deserved it.
In the energetic stage: I don’t really care you’re working on the peaceful use of that stuff, I need it to make a bigger bomb first and we’ll see how we go! Please send any comments in writing to the UN, thank you very much!
In the informational stage (the end of which we’re seeing about now in parts of the our planet where you can read this mockopost, therefore having gained enough to make sure that in other parts they are still dealing with the previous two stages) things are a bit more subtle and the bucks accumulate much quicker: you think you’re smart for charging me for using your sound track? You know what? I charge you back for using my network for asking me to pay you for using your stuff, which, by the way, I’m also sharing with my subscribers.
Now, if you picture this exponential evolution towards destruction, the nest step should be easy. Some can already see signs of its coming**. You just need to jump on board!
What will happen next?
There’s nothing like a free lunch.
After about fifteen years of using the Internet on a large and narrow, public and secret scale, the grip of the big blue chip guys on information is tightening. The same webpage looks different if you are in your country or if you are browsing while visiting mine. I cannot see some things that are public in the USA and Canada. In China my website may look better when the PC is unplugged. If I browse the Pentagon library online, I’m a hacker. If CIA browses my fishing photos, it’s war against terror. Free stuff is less and less available but if you really need it free, you can sign up for some services that will gather your private data as a bonus. Phone companies don’t talk to you anymore and don’t even give you so many options to press numbers and the # key in the end. They give you less choice outside their recognized pattern. You may have to utter a world and the voice recognition system may place you in the right line. You may have to have an eye scan to enter your own office. Your dog carries a microchip. Your mobile phone gives your position away to the network operator, brand manufacturer, police, social services, Google and God knows to how many other close friends of yours that are yet to be introduced to you. If you use your loyalty card at the mall, they’ll know you bought beer and socks, which may lead to the conclusion that you are a bushman for the first time in town, getting dressed for a party. It is cool to buy this combination again. It will prove yourself a good citizen of the modern society and they’ll send you the right offers in your mail, email, text message, chat window, web browser, you name it! But if you later go to the shop and change the sock colour choice, you may be in the draw to win a Mediterranean Cruise by subscribing to a gay magazine they have just sent to you when they browesed YOU and found you reading this!
Great stuff! Sugar Big Brother!
Yet this is just what’s now! Today millions can still cook like Jamie Oliver and still feel originally happy. Today you can still see a glimpse of Posh Beckham’s breasts (if any) on the first page of ten hundred thousand paparazzi magazines in 40 languages. Today when you go to work you still get paid and in your sleep you still believe you’re free to do whatever you want, although in the morning you may not be bothered starting it all. Thank the corporate guys who look after you for this degree of freedom. Thank them for letting you express your unique identity by accepting your money in exchange for one of the only few millions of Manchester United T-shirts they print just for you. Thank them for inventing the bug for which the antidote will be soon available from their factories. They are fighting to still make their buck and in the process you get some choice, maybe not the real choice, but at least the smell of it, the sound or even the touch of what the choice could have been.
Picture a not so distant future when corporate decisions as to how to improve your bodily life and reduce your intellectual one are not any more made by humans. Imagine that the robot does not only control the amount of fat your margarine must have but also how many people like or unlike you must live and breed in your Google Maps quadrant. Imagine you having to pay to see your mother’s photo kindly saved in an Internet Cloud as local storage would become so expensive and unreliable. Imagine going to bed *** with your friend and having the light in your room changing from red to green and the music (you cannot control) from army brass band to Debussy depending on one of you being closer or not to the best ovulation moment.
Wanna make money? Heaps of money? Wanna become so rich you’d never be able to spend your fortune? There’s still room: join the machine army! Money will become irrelevant then ‘cause first you’ve had the last generation of rich guys killed in the process.
Bloody hell! The next step is to farm human brains for hard labour and give those lovely robots some time to recharge.
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* The only think finance and business have in common is that both work mainly with humans (and in some special cases maybe with aliens that are alienated enough to understand these concepts) and are completely inexistent for the representatives of flora and fauna of this and other planets.
**Evolutionary stages have always coexisted: bronze, fire, knowledge.
*** Isaac Asimov long ago postulated that this simple act may become futile.