Digital Distributism
Part III: How to get from digital industrialism to digital distributism
In the 1990s, with the advent of digital technology, many of us believed the monopoly industrial system would finally be supplanted. Just as we could compute at home and make our own media, many of us believed we would be empowered to create our own value, or even our own money. The network was to decentralize everything, erode central authority, and make monopoly control of human value exchange impossible.
But really what happened was that we doubled down on industrialism. Instead of getting a highly distributed digital economy characterized by renewed localism or a hands-on ethos, we got what I have been calling “digital industrialism.”
In essence, we went ‘meta’ on the industrial economy. We moved from the linear growth required of industrial stocks, to the exponential growth expected of derivatives and meta-derivatives. Rather than being a merchant or retail monopoly, you become a platform monopoly like Amazon or Uber.
The same anything digital, under digital industrialism, everything becomes represented by a symbol. Just as a song, in a…
