How can our economy shift to better support people and the planet?
Last updated 2024 April 10 | More of my big questions
Sub-questions
- How can we make work better?
- How can workers be empowered within capitalism?
- How do new technologies impact workers?
- What are the problems with how business operates and workers are treated today?
- How does capitalism influence society beyond work?
- How can we reduce the gap in wealth between rich and poor?
- How can we reduce consumption?
Bookshelf
Books I’ve read to think about this question since 2021. Links go to my book review.
Workshops, podcasts + videos
Other media I’ve watched or listened to in considering this question.
Articles
Articles or longer responses I’ve written thinking about this question.
Generative AI + Labor
- The siren call of LLMs ⭐
- We need solidarity across creative industries
- Bottomless graphics
- Email about genAI to King County OESJ Team
- Complexity without clarity
- Who does AI work for?
- Solidarity with the writer’s strike ✊✍️
- Mining intellectual value ⭐
- The dream of AI is the dream of free labor ⭐
- This video pinpoints my worries about AI
- Will “good enough” AI beat human artists?
How capitalism influences our thinking
- Capitalism brain
- Status indicators and the nature of work
- Writing Metrics and Capitalism ⭐
- A dream of leisure ⭐
- Public spending needs context
Flaws in the corporatist system
- To stay or to go?
- The creative industry loses when works become tax write-offs
- They’re so close to right
- Who is high income anyway?
- A Magic Wand
- Selling a lifestyle
Trying to escape capitalism
- Building community friendly spaces
- Finding enough together ⭐
- Why we block ads
- Resistance through rest and relaxation
- Extending my understanding of self-care ⭐
- Swimming outside the lanes
- Dreaming, and Choosing, a Better Future
Notes
Bookmarks and quotes from articles I’ve read related to this question, with my commentary.
What’s wrong with work + business + the economy now
- Failures of markets
- Our lives, commodified
- The futility and flaws of optimization
- Disguising and reinforcing the status quo with tech
- Exploitative arbitrage
- A bad look for Automattic
- Tenuous at best
- Work intensification
- Capitalism vs. children
- They don’t only take our labor.
- I don’t want this to be the future
- LARPing Our Workday
- Monopsony
- Adversarial Interoperability
- Wage stagnation vs corporate profit
- Child Labor is Alive in America
- Tax justice
What workers can do
How technology impacts workers
- Dealing with GenAI’s impacts
- Who’s at risk from new technology?
- Preserving our rights from corporations
- AI as automation
- Article trio: AI is a big risk to our society — and humanity
- Read On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜
- Hiding the harm
- Link pairing: AI trained on stolen art
Perspectives around time, worth, and value
- How we decide what information matters
- The work is not enough
- Transforming ambition
- Mechanical Time vs Body Time
- Three or Four Hours
- Making Outside of Capitalism
- Putting Fun First
- Rethinking Success of Art Outside Profit
- Time is a Tool of Capitalism
- Consumerist Significance
- What makes a country good?
- Defining rest
How society thinks about money
- Article pairing: income inequality
- Article pairing: wealth disparity
- Monopoly was Originally Satire
- “UBI” experiment in Tacoma
The spillover effects of capitalism
- Prioritizing locals
- When life is an externality
- Unpaid Caregiving is the Foundation of Capitalism
- Not built for humans
- Article pairing: houses as homes, not investments
- Investing commercial products with personal meaning, building identity through brands
- Travel as a capitalist, colonial dream of freedom
- Neutralizing reality to sell
- Society and environment sets the baseline for your health
- Article pairing: the monotony of modern culture
Consumption
- Paying for media
- Shared Goods Versus Owning Your Own
- The Conundrum of “Ethical Consumption”
- Want to watch: The Contradictions of Sustainability
- Conservation after collapse
- Quitting Amazon
6 replies on “Transforming Capitalism”
I’m a sci-fi writer and graphic designer in the Seattle suburbs. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area but have lived in Washington since 2008. On this site, I track what I read and watch, write commentary on things that interest me, and collect reference information. My professional background is in ecology and…
What’s Tracy up to lately? Updated 25 June 2024 Designing a couple interpretive signs about salmon Creating educational materials for a city business pollution prevention program Posting thoughts and saving bookmarks here — I love having this site 🤓 Editing a sci-fi novel 📝 I’m planning to self-publish Reading lots — I’m digging novellas lately…
I have too many pages to fit in my nav! Here’s a sitemap of all the pages on this website. Blog Mind Garden Index Links to blog about Big Questions Big Questions Balanced Lifestyle Effective Creative Processes Writing Fiction Thinking Better Information Diet Future of the Internet Resisting Fascism Building Community Transforming Capitalism Collections Cool…
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Doesn’t look like it, but we’re chipping away at the weeds!
Stuff I did:
4.25 hours of consulting
2.5 hours of business development planning
My husband got assaulted standing up to a belligerent guy accosting the gas station clerk on Friday night — he’s ok but pepper spray takes a lot of cleaning up 😔 He couldn’t see to drive home so the police gave him a lift, hopefully our car hasn’t been towed 🤞
Headed up to the mountains for a picnic day on Thursday 🥪🌲
Kickoff meeting with an accountability group for a 12-week year plan and developed the plan
Borrowed a pressure washer from a neighbor on Buy Nothing, but it didn’t work 😔
Weeded twice for 45 minutes total
Walked twice with friends
Went to Homebrew Website Club
Figured out a trip plan for a family wedding and booked a motel
Realized I had our emergency fund cash sitting in a savings account getting 0.6% interest when I have a money market account getting 2.5% 🤦♀️ so I shifted it over
Updated my backlog with tasks floating in my head and scratch paper notes floating on my desk
Dinners:
Braised potatoes from The Korean Vegan cookbook and rice
Two pea pasta
Broccoli red pepper quiche (with premade crust)
Bean bowl (aka a can of chili beans, avocado, sour cream and tortilla chips 😉)
Cheap pizza with mushrooms + can of olives + can of pineapple
Thai 😍 from the really good place 😋 Found a $50 gift card from before the pandemic! 💪
Sweet potato Moroccan stew + couscous from Pretty Simple Cooking
Reading:
Spread from Affinities
Read The Korean Vegan cookbook, The Lost Art of Handwriting, That Alien Feeling, and Affinities
Started reading Her Big City Neighbor by Jackie Lau
DNF’d Magician by K.L. Noone, Married by Scandal by Tessonja Odette, and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs (it would appear I already agree with the premise)
Added 2 books to my TBR (total=744)
Words I looked up:
Affray
Bog-standard
Prosody
Tautology
Website Changes:
Added an old painting tinted pink/red 🌺 as a homepage background
Added and populated a new Big Question: how can we transform capitalism to better support people and the planet?
Added a page to keep track of Music to Try and Podcasts to Listen to (this was previously a post but it was annoying to get to and update)
Added a Site Index
Highlight of the week: I lounged around and read all weekend 😃 Looking forward to: my camas and allium bulbs blooming — another couple weeks…