Oh. This is a good one. Today's #dailysignal is on clean air as luxury a subscription service - and how *breathing* has become a class issue. This is a classic tragedy of the commons - a market failure of both socialised costs and privatised capital profits (both in terms of the cause of the problem and the "solution" here) and opens up all sorts of cans of worms around climate justice, the future hyper-capitalism and how the web2 and web3 ethos's of, respectively "everything-as-a-subscription-service" and "the commoditisation of *everything in* the commons" are converging in and offline - and how they have very, very different effects for consumers, citizens and companies.
How do you feel about the "everything as a subscription pay as you go but never own the right to anything" future?
Should some things remain outside of markets? (Is pricing some things - like love, care, and air! - a heresy or a necessity for efficiency of allocation?)
How can we resolve the tragedy of the commons? (and can heterodox economists like Henry George and Elinor Ostrom help us out of this mess?)
Let me know your thoughts!
Much more on this coming up in our Flux Trends Open Salon in April, which is going to be all about rewriting our many social contracts.
Read more:
The "pay to breathe" industry: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/breathing-is-a-luxury-in-indias-air-crisis
Me on "web3" ideology (important!) : https://brainstorm.itweb.co.za/content/kYbe9MXb9BZvAWpG
Digital landords & more Neo-serfdom (you'll don't own anything but rather rent access, convenience vs resilience trade off on steroids) : https://brainstorm.itweb.co.za/content/rW1xL759D9K7Rk6m
Can Georgism fix this?
The future of US : https://www.fluxtrends.com/the-future-of-us/
Air-as-a-Service