Counterculture and a Parallel Economy

A theme that's emerged in this blog is that the credit finance economy is wasteful and unproductive in any way that matters. In a lot of ways it's a victim of its own success, which is a pretty common problem with large organizations like empires and nation states. The governing clique and bureaucracy detaches from the state and floats away inside a bubble. The concerns of the clique don't match the concerns of the people.

The counterculture that's popped up on the Internet over the past ten years or so is like a new frontier where people experiment with different ways to live to improve quality of life. The credit finance economy creates a corporate "frontier" of financed projects, which in recent years, has devolved into building the apparatus to spy  on people and send them ads.

Common virtues of decades past, like thriftiness, or yankee farmer ingenuity at keeping old rusty machinery running find a new home on the Internet, while mainstream corporate culture pushes decadence and a hyper nanny state where a "citizen" is a completely incompetent child-person whose only outlets of expression are work at a corporate job, sex, and consumption.

Arbitrage between finance shitworld and virtue world is probably a pretty good strategy. It's something the Amish have done for a long time, and various counterculture groups promote variations on the theme. (E.g. Living in the Waste Stream)