What can I do?

Thirty spokes
meet in a hub.
Where the wheel isn't
Is where it is useful.

Hollowed out
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot's not
Is where its useful.

Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn't,
there's room for you.

So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn't.

-- from the Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula K. Le Guin

I hope I'm right in thinking that I'm probably not the only person currently terrified and enraged at the state of the world at this moment. This has been brewing for a long time, and now the pot is starting to boil over. When Francis Fukuyama announced the end of history I was still a child. Now as a full grown adult I'm tired of all this history happening around me.

Is anyone else exhausted with living in constantly "unprecedented" times? When do times get to be precedented again? How do we get back to precedented times?

But this creeping sense of apathy, the desire I, and so many of us, are feeling to just look away and not think about it, is a choice. A dangerous one.

I added the Tao Te Ching poem to the start of this because the whole point of the poem is to get you to think about the fact that nothing is something. It has a use, a function, a purpose. A cup has to be empty to hold a drink. A plug needs the empty space of a socket to connect to electricity. There's room for you in a room because of all the empty space inside. There is value in nothingness, in emptiness, in apathy and despair.

It's something I think about a lot. If there is value in our inaction and feelings of powerlessness, who benefits from that? Who values it when we do nothing? Who do we help with our nothing?

We're living in a moment where our politicians are totally unprepared for the challenges around us. They keep drumming out the same old rubbish solutions that haven't worked the for the last 2 decades, and I'm getting pretty sick of hearing the same worn-out schpeel. Why, when the public belt has to tighten, are we all supposed to pay for it? All while bankers and water company CEOs and the like are still getting their bonuses and sucking up obscene amounts of cash from our taxes and bills. Why are we getting told the problem is immigrants, and the disabled, and people on benefits again? Meanwhile, the people at war with Ukraine, driving up our energy and grocery bills, and constantly threatening to invade sovereign nations and overthrow democracy, are all billionaires. It's obviously not a coincidence that while we've all gotten poorer, they're the richest they've ever been. But our governments and politicians are currently content to do nothing.

The people driving the decline in our standards of living have not only outed themselves, they're revelling in their spoils. The Smaug's of tech are greasing up their arms as they prepare for who gets to puppet Trump next. They're in bed with Putin, trying to blackmail Ukraine, and are shamelessly ransacking the world's largest superpower. It's time we stopped making excuses for all the ways these people keep insulting and exploiting us.

Because this is the thing. It doesn't matter which political team you support right now. Your standard of living is under attack. Money has to go somewhere, and yours is being vacuumed up at a faster and faster rate by billionaries who have accumulated so much money and power that they have effectively become black holes in our economies and societies. They've got our governments under their thumb and while we get taxed, they're getting brand new tax breaks and telling us we just haven't worked hard enough.

Billionaires are a spreading cancer; breaking up their monopolies and taxing the living daylights out of them is the cure. But getting politicians to actually get on board with curing our economy is easier said than done.

The S&P 500, one of the major stock market index funds, is hugely reliant on the returns of these very same billionaires. This is also the case for the rest of the major index funds. Our pensions are also invested in the companies of these billionaires. There is a long-running chain of financial dependencies resting on the shoulders of these modern mega-villains that threatens collapse whenever their status and power feel threatened. If we want to untangle this, we need to stop expecting easy solutions made for us, and start doing the work ourselves.

I know it seems like a daunting and impossible goal, but there's a lot of us out here. We might not have much power each, but that doesn't mean we have none. Cumulatively, their wealth entirely depends on our cooperation. We can use whatever is in our power, however small, to divest ourselves from these companies as much as possible, and demand their aggressive accumulation of our wealth and data be stopped.

A full boycott may not really possible at their scale. In the same way the robber barons of the industrial revolution owned U.S electricity, rail, and oil, these modern tech robber barons own the code, data infrastructure, and devices of the tech revolution. But cutting back on using their products and services, however we can, is not nothing. It will weaken them. To topple them, we need political will and effective political action.

Now let me let you in on a little secret about politics: It's just a popularity contest.

All the people scheming and waxing lyrical about politics want us to believe it's all big and complicated and too difficult for the rest of us to understand. But it's not. Some of the dumbest people I have ever met were active in politics. Some of the most callous too. It's a space full of ego and bluster but not usually much empathy or kindness. Effective politics is usually about who can sell us the most compelling story. Then, once they get in, the politicians and their ideas are all pretty similar for the most part.

That's why Labour keep harping on about growth instead of toppling the monopolies strangling our economy. Career politicians barely care about politics. They care about who they can rub shoulders with so they can get themselves a nice cushy consultancy income once they retire from politics. If enough of the public simply demand the same thing, the politicians will do it. All they want is to win the popularity contest. Our wellbeing was never their incentive, they go where the wind blows because it gets them what they want.

The same pillars that make these billionaires so powerful, are the same things that also make them vulnerable. If the UK is the second largest ebook market in the world, and Amazon has captured more than 87% of that market, people in the UK essentially have the power to tank Amazon's position in the global ebook world overnight, just by divesting themselves of Kindle. Bezo's wealth is massively tied to people actively buying stuff either directly from Amazon, or subscribing for access to the Amazon ecosystem. He will still run the internet, but we don't have to let him own online retail and media too.

Tesla sales around the world are already falling off a cliff thanks to newer, cheaper, and sleeker models coming out from other electric and hybrid car manufacturers around the world. Now that owning a Tesla makes you look like a Nazi, I expect that trend to speed up. Tesla rose to prominence by making electric cars look cool. There's nothing cool about doing Hitler salutes and supporting the new German Nazi party, otherwise known as the AfD.

Part of the reason Meta have tried turning both Facebook and Instagram into TikTok is because their platforms have reached their natural user levels. Only so many people in the world want to be on social media, and of those people, only so many want to be on each available platform. Once platforms hit that limit, showing year on year growth gets harder and harder because their model depends on having more and more user attention on ads. It's easier to do that by getting more users than by figuring out ways of tricking users into looking at adverts for longer periods of time. In fact, some of the generational differences in who uses which social media platform suggest some will likely even see a continued decline in users as younger people find particular platforms less relevant to them than previous generations did. Their business model is already on life support, if we drop our usage and engagement with their social media platforms dramatically, Meta is going to be in very hot water relatively quickly. Twitter's downfall is a great example of how this works in practice. The less time you spend looking or posting, or buying things on Facebook, Instagram, or Threads, the harder you make it for Zuckerburg's empire to survive its natural decline. It's probably also worth switching from Meta-owned WhatsApp to non-profit-owned and security conscious Signal too if you don't have significant barriers to switching.

So you can see why it's really valuable to these billionaires when we choose to do nothing. People being content to be passive consumers of services, goods and media, is the only thing holding up their dodgy empires. Doing nothing is a choice that supports their ongoing attack on our freedoms and democracies. Our nothing is extremely valuable to them. They foster it in their algorithms, package it into their products, and make it an easier choice than ever with the conveneince of their services. They want us docile and compliant, confused, and venting all our anger uselessly online. Then just as we start to despair, they want to put an advert in front of us and get us spending away our anxiety, trying to fill the void where human connection and meaningful action should have been.

When we do nothing, they benefit at our direct expense. They drove this cost of living crisis. They put up prices. They lobbied governments so they could avoid the taxes that fund our public services. They broke unions and refuse to recognise workers' rights, making it so much harder to get decent pay and working conditions. And they do it all so they can keep as much of the money they get from us as possible.

They're also Team Putin. They gave him open access to an online system of disinformation and radicalisation. They've fought every attempt at regulations that would have made it harder to abuse their platforms. They have directly and indirectly helped Russia start this war in Ukraine and continue it. The knock-on effects of this war have allowed them to create new excuses to charge us more for the same products, all while they also net themselves lucrative government contracts.

We need to remember this very important fact: When they get richer, we get poorer.

All the wealth we don't have anymore is going somewhere, it's a fixed supply. So if we're getting poorer, and they're getting richer, it's because they've taken our money. If they have multiple homes and we have no homes, it's because they've taken our houses. If politicians ignore us but setup special meetings just to listen to them, it's because they've taken our politicians.

And sure they can throw excuses at us:

"Oh it's the price of gas because of the war in Ukraine"

"If we pay people more we need to increase costs"

"Shipping is just more expensive now"

"Everything was disrupted because of the pandemic"

"There's no magic money tree"

"We're all in this together"

"We can't risk capital flight, we have to go for growth not taxes"

These are unprecedented times

But it's all rubbish. From the billionaires, it's simple greed. From politicians, it's decision paralysis.

Our politicians are desperately waiting for a clear message on what they should do from the public. All the options in front of them are risky. If they take a risk because the public demand it, they won't have to shoulder the blame and they get to ride the rise in the polls if it works out. It's just a popularity contest.

It's important that we never forget that when it comes to the super rich, or even just this particular handful of billionaires, this absolutely is a competition. It is us versus them. They are not our friends. They are not our family. They won't even sit on the same plane as us to travel. We owe them nothing and they owe us everything. The money we need is going somwhere, and it's not into our pockets. So if we suddenly have all these guys worth as much individually as the GDP of a small nation, that seems like a smoking gun to me.

So, minimise usage of their products and services, divest from their brands wherever you can, and start talking to people about this. Maybe even contact your local MP if you feel up to it. Even if we choose to do something small, we're doing something.

Why should we let evil men profit from us choosing to do nothing, when we can do a little bit of good instead?