IMO the least known, yet most powerful, driver to understand the world in the next century. The commodification of everything - including deeply personal and abstract things like attention and love - have been commoditised. Not in the abstract, rhetorical sense that Marx and other such people mean, but in the engineering sense where liquid exchanges with sub millisecond latency are trading such commodities. Everyone is constantly playing a game against a quasi omniscient, unblinking entity, trading everything from fragments of attention to romance. And humans are hopelessly outmatched as the entity has orders of magnitude more information, computational power and vast ability to restructure the market to it's advantage.
I sometimes think "algorithms" understand me more than other people. Through my actions, they can diagnose me better than any doctor. e.g. meme therapy pages on facebook and tiktoks. I believe a constant stream of "best matched tiktoks/reels" to my situation" would be equivalent in value to going to a 3-star michelin restaurant and having their best dishes. It is available to everyone.
> The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
