Oh, good!
It's you!
Here, let me adjust the temporal field.
That sh- should do it.
Listen, we have to make this quick,
we don't want to attract too much attention from the time cops.
What? You don't know about the time cops?
Wait a minute...
What year is this...for you?
2018?
Grunk! I accessed the wrong frunking cyber time portal.
Oh, well, this is actually a good thing.
It means we still have plenty of time before it all goes down.
Calm down, calm down, I'll explain everything.
Here, let me take these off.
My name is Emerican Johnson and if you don't know who I am, it's because we haven't met...
...yet...
But you're a very important person where I come from
or I guess I should say, when I come from.
That's right,
I'm from the future, and believe me when I say things here, now...
are *STATIC* up.
What happened?
Where should I begin?
I guess it really started right about...
now.
I mean...
YOUR now.
You may not realize it, but you're living in a very important time.
Important because a lot of things are starting to happen,
starting to change.
You need to end capitalism quickly before you're all doomed to a future of oppression and misery!
I'll try to break it down for you as simple as I can.
Pretty soon you're gonna be dealing with some major disruptions.
First, there's the environment.
You probably know all about that one if you've been paying any attention at all.
Even in your time, it's pretty clear that capitalism is destroying the planet Earth.
Next, there's automation.
That's gonna put a lot of people out of work all around the world
- not just in rich countries, but in developing countries too -
and once automation goes into full swing,
that's when the capitalists will start to float the idea of UBI (Universal Basic Income)
and all along the way, they'll be developing new technologies that will make it possible for states
to suppress resistance and revolution against the status quo like never before!
You see what a lot of people and your time just don't realize is the capitalism has one function and one function alone:
Capitalism only exists to build profits for capitalists.
Capitalism doesn't have any kind of ethical or moral component at all
and capitalists can't be focused on anything but building profits.
Otherwise, they'll be wiped out by their more ruthless competitors.
That's a major reason why capitalism has been so destructive of the environment.
If any given choice is cheaper and it happens to harm the environment,
well, that's the choice the capitalists will make.
If a given choice increases revenue,
that's the choice capitalists must make.
Who cares if it's destroying the planet?
Of course, capitalism goes hand-in-hand with consumerism.
Why make a product that will last a lifetime, charge a reasonable price for it
when you can make crappy junk, overcharge for it, plan obsolescence into it?
That'll require consumers to make repeat purchases over and over, year after year.
Why spend a little extra on materials that are more environmentally friendly
when you could save a few bucks and increase your profits?
If you don't do it, the other capitalist will and you'll get shoved out of the market, so...
*STATIC* the environment!
That has to be the mindset of a capitalist, unless they want to fail.
Oh sure, some capitalists pretend to care about the environment in their marketing
but we all know how much BS that is.
The simple fact is: if it'll be more profitable to hurt the earth, capitalists will do it every time.
Because they have to!
Or they'll fail...under capitalism.
The same goes for destroying society.
Capitalists don't care about the quality of life for their fellow human beings. They can't afford to care!
It's not that they're evil monsters who want to destroy everything and make everyone miserable.
It's just that under capitalism, they have to concern themselves solely on profits or else they'll fail.
That's just how capitalism works.
But in order for capitalism to function, capitalist have to prop up some pretty deep and powerful lies.
They have to convince humanity that it's necessary for workers to sink long, tedious, dangerous hours into their jobs,
even as they spend billions of dollars to develop incredible machines that can do our work for us.
Check out the Sewbot.
This machine is about to revolutionize your garment industries.
For the first time in human history, the task of sewing and assembling garments can now be completely automated!
This is significant because sewing is one of the last large scale jobs that has, until now,
been resistant to automation.
This is going to put millions of workers in developing countries out of work.
And look at the progress that's being made on self-driving cars!
Uber and other companies that pay out millions of dollars to human drivers,
they have a huge vested interest in eliminating those jobs.
So even in developed countries like the USA, we'll soon see the most common job, driving,
evaporate in a startlingly short period.
Now, that should be a good thing
because sewing in a factory is a horribly tedious and dangerous job
and you don't need me to tell you how many traffic deaths there are in every country, every year.
Automation will no doubt save a lot of lives.
If it weren't for capitalism, we'd be glad to have those jobs become obsolete.
It should be freeing up humans to do more meaningful work, right?
Unfortunately, that's just not how things work under capitalism.
Even as productivity increases, wealth for workers does not increase.
You see, under capitalism, the distribution of resources is handled almost entirely through wages.
That's why when workers lose their jobs, their lives become significantly worse, even if the job they had was crappy and dangerous.
So as things like AI and robots and other smart technologies eliminate more and more jobs,
capitalism will become increasingly unstable,
which is precisely what Karl Marx predicted way back in the 1800s.
Trust me. I met the guy!
(Sure you did, Emerican!)
Capitalism is an inherently unstable force.
Capitalists will always seek to reduce wages for their workers while simultaneously trying to increase consumer demand.
This is paradoxical, since in most cases, consumers are the working class.
So as technology develops, all of these unstable forces are going to continue into a death spiral,
leading to increased social destruction, wild economic swings, incredible economic disparity,
and epidemic unemployment as automation advances exponentially.
What will happen when these huge swaths of the population are simply unemployable under capitalism?
Turmoil!
The capitalists won't have anyone to buy the products they produce and, even worse,
they'll find themselves surrounded by millions of angry starving people every time they walk outside their door.
Oh, I know what you're gonna say: "All this has happened before, we'll be fine!"
Well, of course it's happened before.
Capitalism has always been unstable and has always led to cycles of turmoil--
and that's not a selling point of capitalism, by the way.
Certainly, we've seen cycles of unemployment before and capitalists have always found new jobs for people to do.
But you have to realize:
this artificial intelligence, this automation, this smart technology,
it's all very different than what we've seen before.
Even white-collar jobs and creative jobs are becoming automated now.
I used to work in advertising.
You ever watch Mad Men?
That's a career that used to be all about human creativity.
"Little kid, big bowl, big spoon."
One of the reasons I chose it as a career was because I was really into computers when I was younger.
I paid attention to technology and I could see that a lot of the other jobs were gonna become automated within my lifetime.
But I never thought advertising would suffer such a fate.
Only, it is suffering that fate, even in your time.
Marketing automation is destroying entry-level jobs and it's only gonna get worse as things progress
until marketing is primarily a function of computer algorithms
and humans only have a sideline tertiary role in handling most campaigns.
That's just one example of countless industries that are going to make humans obsolete in the decades to come.
This isn't sci-fi fantasy, my friend.
This is becoming our reality.
Your reality.
And the sad thing is...
it could be a good thing, since...
again, automating labor should be freeing up humans to pursue things like art and science and leisure.
But under capitalism, it's terrifying.
Now, capitalists aren't stupid
and the smartest and most prescient capitalists can already see all of this coming.
Elon Musk.
Richard Branson.
Mark Zuckerberg.
What do all these men have in common?
Yeah, they're all billionaires.
Billionaires who made their names predicting the future course of human society
and they all advocate for something called Universal Basic Income or UBI.
*The three of them saying Universal Basic Income*
UBI is exactly what it sounds like: cash payouts from the government to every citizen.
Smart capitalists are very much in favor of planning for UBI
because they know that it's the only way that they'll be able to secure their wealth and solidify their positions of power.
What? No!
UBI is not the same thing as communism at all.
It's much more similar to feudalism.
Why?
Because it's a system in which a small number of extremely wealthy people
are given the patronistic role of doling out welfare to the masses.
Under a system of UBI, most humans will receive just enough money to survive.
It is called the Universal Basic Income after all.
We'll all be living on whatever meager portions the capitalists deem to throw at us and nothing more.
What little social mobility we have left now will disappear.
There will be no hope of climbing up out of poverty and we'll be little more than serfs and peasants,
living on the scraps of our wealthy overlords.
This is a really good deal for capitalists.
They'll own the robots, they'll own the land the robots occupy,
they'll own the homes most UBI recipients will be living in,
and they'll own the companies that provide the services that most people will pay for with their UBI.
It will be the biggest welfare state in human history, but it won't exist for the welfare of the masses.
It will exist for the welfare of a very small number of elite billionaires
who live out their lives in exorbitant luxury as the rest of society stagnates.
Oh, I know what you're about to say:
"Things won't get that bad and even if they do get that bad, well,
the masses will just rise up and overthrow the new capitalist aristocratic elite, right?"
Sorry to say, but technology is already being developed right now
that will allow those with power to keep the masses under heel!
Just look at face recognition technology.
It's already getting so good that it can recognize individuals, even through masks.
China is already using facial recognition technology to find and arrest people in large crowds.
Combine tech like that with AI-backed drones,
robots and state-funded cyberspying that's already incessantly prolific all across the internet
and you could see how the population will soon be constantly
under the watchful eye and oppressive boot of the state.
Listen,
I know all of this sounds far-fetched,
but it is going to happen unless YOU stop it.
You are living in a very critical time.
You're standing at one of the most important crossroads in human history.
Are you going to keep going down the same road of capitalism and seal our fate?
Or are you going to take a stand for drastic change?
In the past, leftists had the luxury of time.
Marx believed that communist revolution was inevitable,
but he didn't foresee the power we would develop for destruction.
He didn't realize how quickly capitalism would be able to cement its position through technology.
As we continue to eradicate the environment, ruin our natural resources,
delete jobs and enhance terrifyingly oppressive technologies,
how can you possibly have any faith in a capitalist future?
Things are going to go from bad to worse in the blink of an eye.
It'll happen so fast you won't know what hit you!
Trust me,
I've already lived through it.
Oh, don't worry about me.
The best thing you can do for us in this capitalist wasteland of a future is erase us.
Erase this future!
Build a better one for me, for yourself, for everyone!
"THIS IS THE TIME POLICE."
Grunk!
"DISENGAGE FROM TEMPORAL MANIPULATION IMMEDIATELY."
It's the time cops. They've already traced my feed.
Listen,  I have to go now.
Remember what I told you:
It's not too late!
You CAN fix all of this.
Oh, and...
One last thing.
I'm so...
So proud to be your father.
Please...
Tell your mother...
I WILL ALWAYS- *STATIC*
