Everything is fine!

A couple of weeks ago I was on a bus and we drove past a large billboard on a main road that was advertising Wicked: For Good, a movie that came out almost a year ago.

Billboards are a big deal to advertising departments. I know this because I used to work in digital marketing and the traditional marketing people were always very excited about securing a billboard. When you have a billboard you get to count every car that drives past it as eyes on your billboard and, because there's no tangible way to measure whether any given bit of marketing worked, this is a very important bit of data for a marketing team.

A few days after this I was walking home at 10pm on what was predictably the last nice summer Friday evening of the year and I walked along my neighbourhood's high street and it was decidedly un-bumping. My local high street has a very nice, cobbled lane full of cool little bars and restaurants with great outdoor seating ant it was, again, the last pleasant summer evening of the year and most of these cool little places were empty.

When I ask my friends how their various jobs are doing many of them talk about how their workplaces are understaffed by design, about the stress and chaos needlessly created by that system, particularly now that colds and flus are in session. Others are spending part of their time trying to find uses for AI systems they're being forced to use because some manager bought an expensive package without checking first if there was a use for it.

Earlier in the year, like many months ago, I filled out an enquiry for an insurance policy that I did not ultimately take out, and since then every three weeks or so I get a call from them to see if I want it. I have blocked every number they use but they keep coming back. Their most recent call came last week when, already frustrated with the customer services department of a separate company, I answered and was honestly awful to the poor man who was calling.

After all, I know exactly what's happening at that company – they are being constantly made to fill quotas of new business and they dig through old enquiries to find people to call. I cannot imagine this has a high hit rate – people who want insurance tend to have already bought insurance, if they let their enquiry die it's because they went with someone else – but what else are you supposed to do?

It's well documented that I've been flailing for a while and there's an increasing sense that many people are flailing, but it seems to be getting clearer and clearer that business are flailing too and at some point we are going to have to ask if there is anyone left who isn't flailing.

I'm so sick of feeling insane.

I had this half-baked idea for a series on this newsletter a while back called If capitalism isn't working for me, a middle class white lady, who is it working for? It would have been about the tiny things that suck now, the minutia that shouldn't be as hard to deal with as it is but that slowly grinds away at you, sapping you slowly of your ability to enjoy your really quite nice life.

For example, the combination of my brittle, broken doorbell with its intensely abrasive ring and the fact that courier companies exploit their drivers means that I can barely accept a package without developing an instant headache. The words you have no compassion for my nerves have attained new meaning for me in recent years.

Or the fact that doing something simple and normal like giving a recruitment site my information leads immediately to a dramatic uptick in the amount of spam calls and emails I get. The difficulty getting through phone menus to an actual operator, the endless pop up ads – you know all this, we all know all this.

We all also know the reason for all this as well. The individual's comfort takes second place to the corporation's needs, whatever, but you can't do that forever without it becoming a society-wide plague. An economy-wide plague. Society is, the economy is made of individual people, after all.

A couple of months ago a video game publisher called Devolver Digital announced that it was looking to revert to a private company after going public in 2001. In their announcement the company said:

Being private will allow the Devolver Digital team, especially the finance, legal, and executive team, to singularly focus on the long-term health of the company and less on satisfying the requirements of the public market, which have nothing to do with being a successful game publisher.

The public market needs shares to always be worth more than they were yesterday and less than they'll be worth tomorrow. And while investing in the stock market has always been a form of gambling it's also the thing we have, for some reason, decided to make the sensible thing to do with your money. You're supposed to put money away for retirement, that money is supposed to be in an investment account of some kind, so it can earn more money for you over time.

Because sensible financial practice is so tied to a system that's basically gambling for dweebs the remit of any publicly traded company becomes protecting those investments before any other consideration. Instead of questioning whether we could maybe find an actually safe place for people to put their money, we tried to stop the gambling from being risky.

You're supposed to just have a modest mutual fund, which spreads your money across many companies so you can benefit from the steady rise of the market as a whole. If one company falls you'll be ok because others will rise. But that doesn't take the pressure off each individual business to prioritise share prices over the needs of their customers, employees, and even the needs of the products they sell.

Business is risk. The world shifts and changes and companies need to shift and change with it, or people will move on to other companies. But people don't like change, so adapting is risky too.

It makes total sense to me that a video game publisher – particularly one that specialised in indie games – feels that attempting to serve the interests of its shareholders prevents it from serving the interests of the company itself. What I'm starting to wonder is whether the same isn't true for all companies.

Capitalism is supposed to be a system that works for businesses. Without proper regulation it exploits workers, so it's not working for them. It manipulates and preys on consumers, so it's not working for them either. It destroys the environment, reconfigures education to revolve around earning potential, makes life needlessly stressful for almost everyone involved in it, even those at the top. And we're supposed to accept this because it's good for businesses and businesses keep us all afloat.

We all have a lot of fun joking about living through the collapse of civilisation, mainly because joking about it makes you feel a little less insane. We joke to pretend for a moment that everything's fine. But there is a spreading sense of desperation in the air, and it's not just coming from individuals. The corporations are increasingly desperate too.

Capitalism is not working for me, a middle class white lady. It's not working for workers, it's not working for consumers, it's not working for the planet and I don't think it's working for businesses either. And I'm not talking about small business; obviously it hasn't been working for small business in a long time. I don't think this system works well even for corporations any more.

There are obvious signs. The amount of money tied up in AI models that still show no signs of ever becoming profitable. Giant corporations acquiring other giant corporations because if you're not growing you're dying and there's only so big a company can get on its own. The frequent death by leveraged buyout of legacy brands.

I don't know. I'm just some bitch. I just don't see who any of this is working for anymore.