The force in market forces

Water is pulled down a hill by gravity, and it’s not like water chooses or desires this. When we move toward things, however, economists tend to assume that it must stem from an internal and independent desire within us, that pushes us towards the thing. This becomes a foundational vibe in their analysis. For example, when our desires hit against constraints, they’re supposed to be resolved by ‘market forces’ that will generate signals that guide society down some optimal path to get the most from the least. This feeds into dominant progress narratives, in which desire-driven economic agents accumulate more and more stuff and carry society to a new ‘high score’.

But if Economics is synonymous with ‘market forces’, many conventional economists seem reluctant to fully embrace the implications of that word ‘force’. We’re certainly tied up in large-scale markets, but what if those markets subjected us to forceful forms of ‘gravity’ that could override - or condition - our internal desires, and pull us towards paths of least resistance? Rather than being independent units, we’re all caught in interdependent webs, and nowadays those webs have been massively scaled up to the point where their default settings easily overcome, and mould, our individual desires.

The primary default setting is to expand and accelerate, and going against this path can feel like being a water molecule trying to move uphill. This is why people who find cash normal have a growing feeling that the option to use it will be taken away from them. They can sense the systemic tendency pulling everyone towards ever more automation and acceleration and struggle to imagine how they’d move against it. It’s this uphill path that requires active choice, whereas going with the systemic tendency is a passive act of releasing resistance, allowing yourself to be pulled towards the systemic default.

In a city like London, millions of people remember living with debit cards and apps without feeling any strong necessity to use them all the time. Like social smokers, however, they would experiment with them. After a while, they started to feel the pull getting stronger and noticed the alternative options slowly disappearing, after which it felt inexorable. They’re left with a feeling that society must have ‘chosen’ that, but nobody can remember an exact moment when this shift happened, and they’re currently in the process of slowly forgetting what it was like before it happened. Many people are vaguely aware of how their neural pathways have been rearranged into new circuits of addiction and now find themselves agitated by situations they previously were not agitated by - like the thought of taking out a banknote in a bouji London bar rather than simply tapping their card. At some level, they understand that they’re stuck in a vast web that will literally break if they refuse to choose the path of acceleration. If they try to go ‘uphill’ through acts of actual choice, they’ll be increasingly blocked. This imminent blocking is why we find so many stories expressing concern about those who’ll be ‘left behind’ by a cashless society…This is now easily visible on plane flights. A few years ago it was common for people to take out cash in an act of choice, but EasyJet executives and all the other airline execs decided in boardrooms to take that choice away. Those were political acts imposed from above, and those acts of blocking create shame that transmits like a cultural virus. People have now rearranged their behavior to avoid it. They learn to have their cards at the ready, after which they come to expect it, and once addicted - want it.

Just visit a place where cash is considered normal. The people don’t perceive any inconvenience, because they’ve not yet learned to feel shame about cash.

This is not unique to cash. This same phenomenon occurs with all automation processes in our economy. A few years ago we barely noticed the absence of AI, but right now all of us are in the process of learning to want, or at least expect it. We’re at the beginning phase of a new slumping process, and at some point, you’ll be forced to sink into dependence on it.

Conventional economists frequently just ignore the econo-political-cultural forces that can create this ‘gravity’, and this approach gets spun by the fintech industry. They drip-feed us a powerful ideology that says automation is pushed by our desire but is also unstoppable, and thereby completely indifferent to our desire (don’t get left behind!).

continues in part 2