Sure feels to me like a lot of what we’re seeing is the rich increasingly running out of profit faucets, reaching for ever dumber and more harmful shit. Broadly it’s more and more coercive relationships with the consumer in all things, while the products (services, whatevers) themselves just get shittier and/or less safe and/or more exploitative, pick your combo depending by thing sold (may as well say rented or licensed I guess too, lmao).

It feels like thrashing, for sure, I would say panicked thrashing but less sure there, think I’m conflating the suffering that’s here and coming, for the not-rich, with what I’m expecting the rich are feeling.

The many ways to borrow money for trivial and unnecessary small things has always looked like a bad sign to me as well, I haven’t looked at any of them in detail but just on the surface, mathematically, it feels like combining all the delights of payday loans with the short-term attractive but obviously long-term unserviceable debt of the subprime lending crisis.

And huh, looks like we are also doing that mathematically ~guaranteed long-term unserviceable debt move, as a nation, with gigantic internal combustion engine vehicles being sold but not quite bought, all the time.

It’s like in addition to all the rest, the tightening of capitalist “opportunity”, we also figured out how to kind of atomize the disastrous lending that characterized pre-2008.

I’m no eCoNoMiSt (🤡), but, that seems pretty bad.