The Police State/Surveillance State and the Fake Money Economy

The corporate/consumer society gradually became dominant in the United States (and the whole "western" world) after WWI, and especially after WWII. It is a byproduct of industrialization and mass organization of people. Prior to WWI, the United States was a completely different country. Until about 1900, most people worked in agriculture, but that percentage gradually declined.

The western world has been agrarian for thousands of years. Agriculture and the seasons are the basis of our holidays and traditions. Once people moved into cities and started working in offices and factories, they retained those traditions for a couple of generations. Finally, the entire culture was replaced by an ersatz corporate product.

Now most people work at make-work, nonsense jobs. The "service economy" and the "information economy" are very far removed from necessity and are mostly the byproduct of the debt based financial system. The current sinks for fake money investment are "AI", i.e. pattern matching computer hardware and software, and "big data". These represent the peak/blowoff top of automation/computing sort of like the era of the railroads where huge, lavish train stations were constructed. There's no value added, in fact they're just ongoing costs.

The current version of the shitty economy needs the police state/surveillance state to grow to absorb its output. There are hundreds of companies looking to attach software and sensors to people, and people's activities in order to monitor, control, and compel them. The latent protections in the ailing Bill of Rights will be circumvented by deploying this shitware through employment and through EULA type agreements for even the most pedestrian commercial activities, like buying gasoline or going into a restaurant.

We're really clearly at a cultural/civilization level crossroads. The oligarchy wants to go full retard on automation. I think they've got a sci-fi perspective on technology and lack basic information or knowledge on its limits. The people who follow them will basically be headed to their own destruction.