Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)

Sure, but with modern technology that they can't easily replace or repair. How long does the technology last? Is anything we make today made for longevity?

>I think you and the parent poster are underestimating the amount of redundancy

Redundancy is inefficient and costs money. We live in a world without warehouses, because just-in-time shipping is cheaper. We live in a world where every 6 months the soda can you get out of the vending machine has a little less aluminum in it than half a year ago because someone figured out how to shave a bit more off of that without it rupturing in transit. There's less redundancy in this world than you imagine, because reducing the redundancy cut costs and the stock price got a boost a few years ago. Why have spare parts on hand, when there will be even better parts manufactured next year?

>If the rest of the world were walled off, we wouldn't go back to the stone age.

Yeh, we would. It wouldn't happen instantly, but it would happen within decades. That would be true even if the population reduction were the only problem.

>If everyone else in the world fell over dead and the resources were available, the US would be massively better off than now.

People *are the resource*. Everything else is just rocks in the ground. You can have a million square miles of old growth forest, but it's not timber unless there are people who can do the lumberjack thing. You can have a trillion barrels of oil in the ground 200ft down, but it's not fuel and plastic unless there are people to pump it out and refine it. So on and so on. People were always the resource, and while not all people are effectively utilized all the time, the more you have the more resources you have. And there's this absurd network effect where two people are more than twice as useful as one person, and so on, so that when you have truly large numbers of people you have absurd amounts of resources.

Quite possibly, the only thing for which this effect isn't true is real estate. That's sort of a fixed supply.

So if you break up the wealth concentration effect, you are reducing dissatisfaction overall, but you are also reducing the likelihood of any future alteration to any number of more minor dissatisfactions that seem characteristic of this system — e.g., the way it makes people's lives repetitive, predictable, robotic; the way it often preferentially rewards behaviors that service medium-term goals rather than ultra-short or ultra-long term goals; the way it reduces the dimensionality of the activities that are needed, from the average individual, and the way this reduction of dimensions along which one might be needed can make a person feel less like a person, etc.

I do not myself agree with anti-capitalists that all these patterns are best explained in terms of capital. You see similar tendencies correlated with, for example, most any attempt to scale culture. My point is just that the people who are trying to formulate the grandiose complaint are, deep down, generally not trying to designate as evil some single feature (even if they have latched onto that feature as being strategically their best line of attack); generally, I think, they are not saying, "Man, I see this nose everywhere and am sick of this nose," they are saying, "Why is it that people seem to be looking increasingly similar?" which sentiment (however flawed statistically) we expert statisticians might charitably translate as, "Why is it that there seems increasingly to be a single stable equilibrium for an increasing number of the increasingly divided planes of our diminishing existence?"

And maybe that last formulation is also empirically incorrect — but isn't there a general thrust in it that you recognize? "One default, one optimal path and anything I do to get out of it is either wasteful or imitated until it is the rule." Can you come up with a tax policy that will break up the concentration effect at that level? Maybe you can. Would it really break up the monoculture, or would it strengthen it? I don't know. I suppose reformers and revolutionaries have always diverged at this juncture.