Its not the main point of the article, but it made me wonder if finance is the new way “war” (predatory struggle for ownership & control) is waged in today’s world
This is precisely what happened, it happened long ago though and has been the driver behind actual physical war more-so than any other factor that I can tell.
I'm admittedly kind of annoying with the frequency for which I post it but I wrote a short paper that attempts to demonstrate how we got to that position over the last 12,000 years. This is the most relevant portion here from the Third Proposition:
----
"“Creating Markets/Value” (Inducing novel scarcity fears via public storytelling) becomes an optimized resource acquisition strategy, as monopolization of production is most efficient when the market “Creator” controls access to the new market from the outset, minimizing appropriation costs. “Investment capital” (Hoarded value) is used to generate these new markets at a sufficient scale, while the relative abundance of capital for the “house” (Investors) will allow the creators to impede competitors from the start, thus ensuring a maximum return on investment. Power law guarantees that existing resource hoards will forever seek returns and accumulate more into increasingly fallow pools of capital. Unrestrained “Free” competition, a reinterpretation of “might makes right,” then must represent the dogma behind forever growth." [1]
----
In a nutshell, people with a hoard of money will fund the creation of "New" markets. Think Meta with the "Metaverse", Apple with the "App store" etc... with the intention of being the monopolist of that market by virtue of creating it. They then propagandize extensively (marketing) to convince people that this new market has value that hasn't been extracted yet and IF YOU JOIN RIGHT NOW you can get a piece of that growing value as a new gold rush. People even use the same language here.
The problem is, only a handful of people can fund large scale new markets and they DEMAND monopolist exploitation capabilities within that new market. Like with Amazon and Reddit, part of the strategy is to delay exploitation significantly so as to bolster the monopolistic market position by pushing platform growth over all other metrics. That way when you flip the cash flow exploitation switch, nobody has anywhere to go and everyone just rolls over cause there isn't enough collective will to change behavior that was reinforced over a decade or more.
But 200 years ago for a rich country to obtain a poor country's natural resources they had to invade an army and add it to their empire; while in the modern age, the rich country can swap the natural resources for pieces of paper they can print at will.
Man-made things are real! Finance is the lazy abstraction we use to represent "resources." Competition also does not exist for competitions sake, it exists as a result of multiple agents within a specific context engaging in activity that has "winners" and "losers" (this is not a great way to put this but I'm trying not to think too hard about the specific theoretical nuances of what competition _is_, but more what it's used _for_).
For sports, this context is highly constrained to whatever game is being played and so its impacts are limited to the scope of that game and those involved with its orchestration/spectacle (definitionally!).
On the other hand, global trade is unconstrained by a specific range of activity (there are states with laws that try and combat this but ultimately money is money). This is much closer in effect to the "real" physical violence of war. By controlling an entity financially, you control that entities ability to exist in a financial context and so when that world of finance becomes the dominant form of interaction you are effectively enacting violence upon and limiting the expression of that thing (i.e. the conquest and subjugation of people/land but with money instead of swords).
In contemporary hyper-reality it is a common mistake to ascribe "unrealness" to things like money or the internet, in such a way that we can box out their effects from our understandings. Then, when those systems are employed to reinforce and/or expand existing hierarchies that layer of smoke and mirrors is able to effectively divert attention away from their _very real_ impacts. At the same time they become both non-things and the backdrop on which everything else exists.
"Just turn off the computer"
"Just don't purchase exploitative things"
"Just do your own research"
[Ad infinitum...]
These bits of rhetoric shift the unfathomable inertia of Things™ onto the shoulders of the individual, be it a person, organization or state without recognition as to why that entity is doing the thing that it is doing in the context of everything else that is doing something around it.
There is probably already a term for it but this seems to itself be a kind of logical fallacy ("ex homine"?) that collapses the scale of a problem down to the decision of an individual. Thus it enters the scope of opinion and so is unreal and unworthy of discussion or understanding. Nuance and complexity are shunted away systemically because complex solutions and understandings do not engage well with efficiency. Because things that are economically efficient are those things which can be spread through economics, even the ideas around what it means to be economic can be distorted by this effect in such a way to detach people further and further from reality while assuring them that they are the only ones that _really_ understand how the world works (in "economic" terms). It is a battlefield that is at war with all other battlefields--and it is winning.
I'm admittedly kind of annoying with the frequency for which I post it but I wrote a short paper that attempts to demonstrate how we got to that position over the last 12,000 years. This is the most relevant portion here from the Third Proposition:
----
"“Creating Markets/Value” (Inducing novel scarcity fears via public storytelling) becomes an optimized resource acquisition strategy, as monopolization of production is most efficient when the market “Creator” controls access to the new market from the outset, minimizing appropriation costs. “Investment capital” (Hoarded value) is used to generate these new markets at a sufficient scale, while the relative abundance of capital for the “house” (Investors) will allow the creators to impede competitors from the start, thus ensuring a maximum return on investment. Power law guarantees that existing resource hoards will forever seek returns and accumulate more into increasingly fallow pools of capital. Unrestrained “Free” competition, a reinterpretation of “might makes right,” then must represent the dogma behind forever growth." [1]
----
In a nutshell, people with a hoard of money will fund the creation of "New" markets. Think Meta with the "Metaverse", Apple with the "App store" etc... with the intention of being the monopolist of that market by virtue of creating it. They then propagandize extensively (marketing) to convince people that this new market has value that hasn't been extracted yet and IF YOU JOIN RIGHT NOW you can get a piece of that growing value as a new gold rush. People even use the same language here.
The problem is, only a handful of people can fund large scale new markets and they DEMAND monopolist exploitation capabilities within that new market. Like with Amazon and Reddit, part of the strategy is to delay exploitation significantly so as to bolster the monopolistic market position by pushing platform growth over all other metrics. That way when you flip the cash flow exploitation switch, nobody has anywhere to go and everyone just rolls over cause there isn't enough collective will to change behavior that was reinforced over a decade or more.
[1]https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf