The Quiet Devastation of Extinction Capitalism
Image Credit: Gary Hooker
How Our Current System is Cannibalizing Our Future
by umair haque
Hi! How’s everyone? Today we’re going to discuss an especially cheery topic — extinction.
How do you feel looking around the world? Depressed, anxious, bewildered, bereft? We have the pathetic spectacle of the first criminal trial of an American President — and the current front runner for the next Presidency. If you needed a sign about how things are going in this age, that’s one that’ll go down in history.
How did we get here?
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There’s a phrase that came into vogue a few years back. “Late stage capitalism.” I won’t go into its provenance, per se, suffice it to say that it’s sort of an academic term, that’s supposed to summarize this phase of history, this age. But now I think we’re in a whole new phase: extinction capitalism.
By that, you might imagine that I’m referring to the planet, and what’s happening to it. Scientists are bewildered that we now find ourselves in “uncharted territory,” warming’s happening so fast. That’s one aspect of what I mean, and it’s a crucial one, to be sure, but funnily, sadly, I mean the term “extinction capitalism” in an even broader sense than that.
What else is going…extinct? Or is on the road to it? Here’s a little smattering.
Democracy’s at just 20% of the world right now, declining at 10% a decade. That puts the extinction of democracy within today’s lifetimes. And that’s an historic, crushing loss.
Generations are in downward mobility, and the sort of central idea of modernity, an upwards trajectory of living standards, is going extinct, or already is. Most people don’t think their kids and grandkids will have better lives than they did, and given current trends, they’re right.
How about…just prosperity itself? The majority of the world, in a stunning reversal, is now getting poorer. I say stunning because this upturns decades, if not centuries, of progress — and in a very real sense, we may be watching prosperity itself going extinct, in civilizational terms.
Then there’s capital-P progress — which has flatlined and or gone into reverse, for the first time in centuries, too. It’s sort of sputtering, or “flickering,” as I discussed recently, a technical term for what systems do before they wink out. We’re witnessing what appears to be the extinction of big-picture human progress itself (and no, chatbots aren’t…are you kidding…a substitute.)
How do we feel about this age? People are more pessimistic than any time since the 1930s. In some respects, they’re more pessimistic than the 1930s. Feelings of anger, despair, sadness, and rage have skyrocketed off the charts — and young people say they “can’t function anymore.” We’re witnessing sort of the extinction of fulfillment and well-being, too, as people buckle under the strain and distress of a world going haywire.
Then there’s sociality itself. Social bonds have ruptured, imploded, and been torn apart — and hence, societies are riven into social groups perpetually at each other’s throats. Meanwhile, crises of loneliness and isolation and friendlessness are becoming endemic. Are we seeing the extinction of healthy sociality itself?
I could go on. That’s just a short list. All of that’s kind of an intro to what I mean by “extinction capitalism.” It’s eminently true that this variant of capitalism’s killing the planet, but it’s also devastating a lot more than that — from politics to society to economies themselves.
Now. When I say that kind of thing, people imagine me as some sort of beret-wearing revolutionary. I’m not. I like capitalism. But this version of it is…out of control. What’s gone wrong with it?
All the classical problems that generations of thinkers predicted, sort of multiplied a thousandfold. How is it that all those things are going wrong at once? What’s happening is that capitalism’s eating through all these things, these possibilities, in the eternal quest to capitalize, to profit, to make more and more money. But this crusade is completely haywire at this point, because, for example, this decade, we’re going to see the world’s first trillionaires, and meanwhile, we can’t raise a few billion to fight climate change. There’s something deeply wrong with that picture.