20 Comments

Hi Brett, thank you for your piece. Your analysis resonates with recent events in València, Spain, where I live. Our city experienced devastating floods that claimed over 200 lives, with many still missing in the metropolitan area. What emerged from this tragedy was remarkable: an overwhelming wave of solidarity. Thousands of volunteers from across the country came to help clean flood-damaged streets and homes. In the face of limited state resources, people and community organizations became the true front line against this disaster's devastating effects. Some citizens even walked kilometers from València's city center to assist neighboring towns.

This experience connects to your perspective on mastering and tracks because the tragedy notably amplified our capacity for altruism and solidarity, while diminishing the "homo economicus" mindset. To me, this demonstrates that in times of genuine hardship, humans naturally gravitate toward "mastering a track" that aligns with our deeper nature, rather than pursuing the self-interested economic logic that often drives our daily lives.

https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/czj7nnnwedpo

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Hi Brett, this article really spoke to me. Music as a metaphor for capitalism really makes it easy to understand how we are being very "one tract" when we could be the whole 24 and experiment with re-mixing. I've love to chat more with you about what we are doing with micronarratives (think ethnographic), community projects and the finance community. I bet you can't guess which track we are finding the most challenging to remix!!

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Another fertile metaphor — love it!

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I’m looking forward to your forthcoming album

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Heh, actually it's out already!

https://www.darkoptimism.org/2017/02/18/dark-optimism-the-album-2/

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Hi Brett, I do remember a conversation in my Cambridge garden (I hope|). I have always casually followed your posts; but this one is your masterpiece, so I upped my subscription. I too have written a lot about getting beyond homo economicus and capitalism. I launched my Substack page over a year ago with this essay in eight parts from: https://johnkeithhart.substack.com/p/money-and-markets-after-capitalism. Music and light are balm to my soul. Congratulations.

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I'm so glad to hear that! I really appreciate that. Thanks so much for the link - I'd love to showcase more of your work too in due course (I've covered some of Graber's human economy work before, but it would be great to bring in yours). Look forward to digging into your Substack soon

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Hmm, how did the peasants fight back against their feudal lords? I remember countless history classes in school about their struggles to gain autonomy. The number one change that needs to be done is to forbid single individuals to own resources in vast amounts.

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The way out is through.

Make a business of freeing humanity, a giant cooperative business which game theory agrees will take over, especially if at its core, it rewires our collective belief about what’s possible.

Beautiful metaphor and article. Appreciate your work xoxo

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I relate very easily to this metaphor as it reminds me of how difficult I found it during my employed days to conform to managerial expectations that seemed to require something of me that I wasn't sure I had. The bits of me that I wanted to express in my job were much less valued.

For me it works, but I listened to a video this morning by Richard Murphy about the huge number of young people (38% of 18- 24yr olds) who are not in work, largely due to mental health. It brought home to me what a soft ride I had in comparison with todays youth starting out in the world of work who face endless rounds of selection even when (or if) they finally get a positive response to an application. Then assuming they are successful, they are then faced with a job that is usually nothing like they were led to believe, does little or nothing to engage them, paying wages that are not enough to live on with next to no security.

I think this metaphor may be a little too subtle for the new generations who don't even recognise the song that is being mastered and are increasingly looking for their own to record and mix their way.

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And your own response reminds me of an experience of seeking jobs and that weird feeling of being totally fine with doing, say, eight out of the ten things that the job description describes but having one or two things on there that I either cannot do or morally object to doing - and how that greatly limits job possibilities and, as such, the possibilities of a decent life.

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Hey, Brett! Something that I have appreciated about your work for a long time is your pointing out of how we confuse outcomes (of systems, of ways of thinking) for causes, as in the case here with your point about the way that "traits like heightened egotism and selfishness are outcomes of that society, not causes of it. In reality, economists were simply noticing an aspect of human nature that starts to bloom when people find themselves totally immersed in - and dependent on - the insecure and fluid flux of a market vortex."

Your mention of the different "Homo"s here reminds me of my frustration with people who support universal healthcare who think that powerful people's opposition to universal healthcare is about a fear of having to pay more taxes and how they (these universal healthcare advocates in question) are only reflecting Homo Economicus back onto rich people, when they should see Homo Dominandi in them. Of course, if they did so, they could see that, in its own way, Homo Economicus makes powerful people oppose universal healthcare for reasons that have nothing at all to do with the payment of taxes.

As I often say, opposition to increased taxes has nothing to do with why powerful people oppose universal healthcare, but it's a convenient figleaf, and we should stop supplying that figleaf!

Your paragraph about your anecdote about working in the financial sector and the paragraph preceding it makes me think of the folly of liberal and progressive politicians and pundits using "taxpayer" and tax-to-spend thinking when discussing and debating government budgets.

Here in the USA, so many public services are funded via taxation at the state and local level, and a big part of my project is explaining why that it is bad, why we should stop treating that arrangement as if it is somehow a law of physics, or something, as it validates "government should be run like a business" thinking, because it projects Homo Economicus onto the public good, which is poison! Here in Louisiana, there are Democratic Party politicians and pundits who speak about what is good for "taxpayers". No wonder we get the terrible outcomes that we do get!

"What’s important, though, is that those caring, playful, ecological parts of themselves struggle to express themselves in the market setting, and are pushed to the periphery in that context.

This has ideological implications, because Homo Economicus, as a central archetype in the system, also becomes a kind of Ideal that’s deployed by elites to justify and describe why they do the things they do."

That right there helps explain both why "taxpayer" identity and thinking is just Homo Economicus projected onto the government and why resisting that has been so difficult!

But resist it we must! The Public Money Framework, the Credit Theory Of Money, is how we can break out of that trap.

Thanks, again, for all of your great work.

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What a great concept. As a crypto investor/writer/podcaster at “Smoke and Mirrors…and the art of critical thinking” and musician who has worked with Santana, Journey, Huey Lewis, Counting Crows, etc over the years I found this article spot on. I look forward to reading more from you. Good job.

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This was a great read and the images are really wonderful.

The idea of capitalism as a send effect really chimed with me.

I also spend a lot of my spare time producing music and I watch a lot of how-to videos on youtube. Almost all of the channels start out sharing tips and tutorials then end up pivoting to new gear reviews with affiliate links - pushing the send track up to the Marketizer 2000. Homo Expressio enters youtube looking to learn new ways to express musical ideas, and that goal is converted into desire for a new piece of kit with associated market interaction. What could have been an exchange of creative ideas and experiences turns both parties into market actors.

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Hey Brett, I really loved the angle of using music to explain the multitudes of human values. It's very well thought out and captures the essence of what a majority of people are experiencing today perfectly. I was recently thinking about the fluidity of our personalities and how we filter it according to our environment. Your piece captures this in such a beautiful way. Keep it up!

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This explains sooo much with so much to ponder, really thank you very! It feels a long way off, homo idealicus but the growth of homos gifticus economy?

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Inspired analogy - it resonates!

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So the purpose of the mastering process is to prepare a mixed track for reproduction, so the track will sound somewhere between amazing and acceptable on sound systems ranging from expensive hi-fi to cheap radios, headphones and smartphone speakers - the assumption is that the sound needs to work for everyone on whatever device they have available to listen. This is done for commercial reasons rather than to give in itself a better listening experience to people who listen to music on cheap speakers. Significant sonic compromises (loss of subtlety, dynamics, anything that's low in the mix, and any unique charm) are made in the mastering process. The musical equivalent of Starbucks is the result, and we are surrounded by it.

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And instead of actual artists and visionaries we get Max Martins writing the songs and Jack Antonoffs producing the same shit again and again, to infantile lyrics, sold to audiences over-conditioned by marketing and hype to love that shit...

Just swap the songwriting domain for politics and general social change...

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So much to ponder here! Thank you!

I think the focus on how the individual might remaster the economy is already, perhaps, part of capitalism's individualist soundtrack.

I personally don't think it's possible without a metaphysical reconstruction (is there a homo religious in your scheme?). I.e a radical rethinking of the individual and the good.

Otherwise, as you say, the social,cultural and cognitive get re-routed into social,cultural and cognitive capital (or at least there's an attempt to...I think it's a contradiction or at least tension in the system).

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