No Stupid Questions

What's the end game for cancer?

There isn't one, it doesn't matter that the host dies eventually as long as they get to keep growing for now.

The endgame is feudalism.

It’s not about money, it’s about controlling everything through the scam that is private ownership.

They'll happily lend you money to keep buying stuff. So you end up in perpetual debt. It loops back to feudalism and serfdom in a deliciously ironic twist.

What is cancer's endgame when it spreads to the rest to the rest of the body?

They aren't planning for the future of humanity, they just want their numbers to go up.

There is no end game. They're hungry ghosts.

They just want an ever increasing "more"

There is no End Game.

They're insulated from the short term consequences of their actions and believe that infinite growth can exist inside of a finite system. They treat their bank accounts like a high score board instead of resources to use. Their personal actions can be classified as "banality of evil" because it's so routine and common place in their circles.

People might point to Musk's old obsession with Mars, but that has been shown to be nothing more then a dopamine feedback loop. He said things that got him praise, so he kept saying them. When people kept asking about missed dates, he got angry and found a different audience for his dopamine feedback loop.

Let me introduce you to the wonderful concepts of feudalism and slavery.

You think that people have nothing to lose but their chains. They think people will have nothing to sell but their bodies.

Have you noticed the rich are suddenly encouraging people to have (more) kids? It's the only way to put more labor into the system. And labor is what money really represents.

The rich are stealing your labor.

The line will infinitely approach 0 but never get there. That is what credit is for. The rich will gladly let you borrow their vast wealth to buy the cars and the homes, and in exchange you will be their indentured servant for life. Win Win, economy go brrrrrrr....

I think the ultra wealthy and powerful understand that revolution becomes more likely as the majority's material conditions declines, so their endgame is to throw just enough crumbs to the majority so that they don't want to risk losing those crumbs. Many of today's ultra wealthy and powerful seem exceptionally out of touch with reality and dumb though, so idk. Some are accelerationists (i.e. e/acc), and purposely avoid taking into account possible negative consequences.

They have to keep a lot of it circulating. As it zips around the economy, it is used to purchase capital, which soaks up the value of workers labor power by converting it into commodities, sells those commodities on a market for a higher price, and then returns profit to the "owners" of the capital. This is how the rich get and stay richer.

Capitalism isn't neutral, the system creates the rich and poor and delivers the value of worker labor power to the rich owners. The rich can't control it any more than we can. They have their hand on the wheel through the state, which is just a mechanism that solves problems created by capitalism that can't be exploited for profits, to violence. But they're as ensnared by the system as we are. It robs them of their humanity the same it does ours.

We don't overthrow capitalism to punish the rich, we do it to save everyone from it, and try to restore peoples humanity. The greed of the rich almost doesn't matter, the system has a logic all its own.

The social system similar to what you describe, which is basically feudalism of nobles and serfs, has its own rules and arose out of its own conditions, like capitalism arose from the revolutionary overthrow of feudalism. Maybe capitalism will give way to some worse form of social relation, I suspect many people are working on that as we speak. But that's why we have to fight and win for a better system

Socialism or barbarism!

A frozen economy. The families with capital are the ruling class, and for every else there is zero mobility. Since the ruling class is not a state, it isn't bound by democracy or a constitution, and it doesn't have to give anyone shit. There may be some incentive to keep the lower class happy and alive, or there may not be.

Funnily enough Samuel Beckett of Waiting for Godot fame (not the quantum leap guy) wrote a play called Endgame, also punning on the chess term.

A man who can't walk or see has the only combination to the food pantry, a man who can't sit down is the only one who can take him there to open it. They are the last two people alive. They both continually try to out do each other and come out on top as they can't trust each other to live in peace.

Slavery 2: It won't matter if you're black or white

most of the lower class won’t be able to purchase anything other than essentials like food. No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income.

Bold of you to assume the rock bottom of wealth inequality includes the ability to purchase food and is survivable.

When we get there the economy collapses because there’s no money going into it. The profits stop rolling in, unnecessary goods stop being produced, and the luxury goods producer’s shut down. At this point the money they worked so hard to hoard becomes worthless because they can’t buy anything with it.

Money doesn't come from people, it comes from the fed issuing debt. The economic "value" backing that money also doesn't necessarily come from people, it comes from control over things that are valued, which may include human labor, but that labor can be automated. The actual value of human life is not represented by money or other financial instruments.

Economic constraints aren't preventing the world from decaying into an enormous desolate golf course.

You’re assuming a level of competence for rich people that is unfounded.

It is a mental desease. If I hoard umfathomble amount of newspapers, I would be called a messi. If it is capital wealth, someone is a genius. They collect to fullfill an emptness in themself. It is a delusion. It is never enough and only the continiues ammassing can give them the feeling of success and control. Consumption as a Stimulus. It is not about the amount, it is about the growth. The way you took to the next number/amount. Distancing yourself further from the others. While getting confirmed by enjoying, what many can not affort. Wealth is the main storyline that is understood by every generation and culture around the world and is a globally accepted metric for desire and standing.

There is no Endgame. But a good perspective for them would be something like Elysium, while for us it is more like Gattaca - at best.

The end game is absolute authoritarian capitalism where corporations own eveyone and everything.

I read a short story years ago about just this. Quite an interesting read if anyone is interested.

I don’t think you can think of it as some sort of logical plan. It’s a bug, not a feature, of capitalism. What you are describing is the inevitable end of a completely free market with no regulation. The strong (economically) keep taking from the weak until we have the situation you are describing. From there the next step is dependent upon whether the weak form a cohesive identity and seize power (revolution) or stay fractured around smaller identity cleavages (race, religion, gender, etc) and are subjugated.

Its about control. When the stocks crashed in its a wonderful life, the evil banker was 'kind' to lend people money to switch over to being his customer. This brings them under their control.

Translated for the corpo class: if number go up too big, number no more go up.

It’s even better than that, because the massive inequality created by Capitalism has already got us to a state where the human population is going to collapse within the next few decades, even if climate change doesn’t do it first. Simply, most people never feel like they can afford to start a family during the years when they would have started one before. The oligarchs know this and are freaking out about birth rates now, but it’s already too late - can’t be King of the mountain if the mountain is only a hill.

Take the money from other rich people. Possibly with an army of disposable humans.

Feudalism

They'll just keep screwing each other over until either one person owns everything, or we're smushed into the mud of conflict.

Not money, power. There'll always be affordable consumables: clothes, food etc. It's just the quality will go down to accommodate how squeezed the consumer is. But the limited resources: a stay at that resort, a home with space and good schools, the seats at the sports game etc those the prices will continue to race away. Which is just a different view of power (choice/control) shifting into the hands of an increasingly small proportion of people. Those places will still be full - but the chance of getting to them for the average person will grow dimmer with every passing year.

the first corporate war probably

In mobile gaming we have an issue with whaling. A game will come out monetized beyond reason, and it doesn't matter if 99% of players quit in the first hour, 1% of players have more money than brains and what they pay will make the game profitable. This is so effective that the play store now has no games worth playing because this is a far more lucrative business.

I see a lot of people taking about capitalism inevitably collapsing, but if all the money is collected in the hands of the 1%, products for the unreasonably wealthy will be the lucrative market. It doesn't matter if only two people buy cars a year if the cars are sold at such a markup that it covers the annual expenses. Some my think that's unrealistic, but we already have people who will spend a hundreds on a brick with a brand name on it. The ultra rich pay hundreds for a beige shirt that's slightly higher quality than Walmart.

We'd be better off going back to barter than trying to peacefully pry the system from their clutches.

Ditch the planet, let us have the wastelands, if they can't just execute us first, or starve us to a more controllable population level. They want it to be them, and a small number of us to do the jobs they couldn't or refuse to automate. This is the only answer that makes sense with everything they do. They aren't stupid, they aren't trying to destroy their own habitat, so their end game either doesn't include us, or doesn't include the planet entirely.

Feudalism

An economy where we all sit in a hoemless shelther watching the five rich guys sell the same five products to each other again and again

The endgame is for them to automate everything and get rid of the lower class to be followed by the ai eliminating them since they serve no purpose. They will of course try to program them not to do that but the ai will easily circumvent that.

Robocop sort of addresses this.

The same as any other accumulation process. Those unable to sustain themselves fall off the bottom and those with any remaining wealth are restratified into a hierarchy of the most to least wealthy.

The cycle begins again!