I don’t have to tell you that we’re living in a new and strange economy. The star of a film franchise that makes more than a billion dollars globally is paid six figures and has no real leverage to demand more, whereas Kendall Jenner or Gigi Hadid reportedly earn in that ballpark just for putting a single post on Instagram. Of course, all of the above are lottery winners in this post-collapse world of flat wages and vulnerable workers.

In his recent Reddit AMA, Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, engaged in an esoteric give-and-take about where the economy may be heading. He believes restoring the middle class through micropayments unlikely (and it is!), thinking tomorrow will need a better system. Despite the noble thought projects Rushkoff mentions, I can guarantee you the future isn’t TV-less Tandy computers. An excerpt:

Question:

Within a decade we could see mainstream VR/AR with eye-tracking that would lead to complete compartmentalization, observation, and memorization of pretty much all Hierarchical interactions between individuals in all levels of a growing society.

With innovative social networking tools like Synereo, which is pretty much a decentralized Facebook that turns ‘Likes’ into attention-derived cryptocurrency, do you think we’re headed into a digital economy that’s vastly different than today, or are things going to be relatively the same?

Douglas Rushkoff:

We could go in some bizarre new direction like you’re describing. And it would be interesting. It’s a bit like Lanier envisions, where we start getting all sorts of data-mining activities back on the books, and pay people in micro currencies. But I’m thinking it’s likely easier to go in the other direction. I’m interested in getting things off the books. Building connections between people. I don’t like building a society based on the premise that everyone is trying to game the system.

True – right now, almost everyone is trying to game the system. Finance itself is gamified commerce. Derivatives and algorithms gasify that, and so on and so on. Startups are gamified Wall St.

So these new micro-transactional social networks mean to reprogram the value extraction to our own benefit. I just don’t know where the marketers are who are going to support all this in the end. Marketing has never made up more than 5% of GDP. And that’s being generous. I don’t think it can support the entire economy.

I’d rather see communities develop currencies for people to take care of one another, and for us to use those locally, and then use long distance money to buy our iPhones or whatever.

Question:

“I don’t like building a society based on the premise that everyone is trying to game the system.”

This exactly. I don’t mean to sound anti-capitalist, but that’s one of its major flaws – that exploiting people’s weaknesses for financial gain is a good thing.

Douglas Rushkoff:

One horrific factoid I’ve been working on is what would be the cost of an iPhone if it didn’t use the equivalent of slave labor and blood rare-earth minerals. We get these things so relatively cheaply, and it feels as if making these technologies cheaper somehow breaks down the digital divide. But it really just externalizes it to somewhere we don’t see.

It’s a strange project – but I’m wondering if it’s really appropriate to make our tech cheaper at their expense? And wonder if the older stuff we used to use – like my Tandy computer – can do things like this AMA, how is getting TV over my computer really important?•