Wow - Friction as Financialized Profit: Late Capitalism a Survival Guide

Thanks to our Patreon members for helping to make this episode possible and we're now available on all the major podcasting platforms. You can find more information at the links below. Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to an addendum on late capitalism financialization. Now as we discussed the idea of financialization is that the way to make money is not to produce thing or sell things or buy things or add value.

It is to interfere in financial flows and asset creation and destruction in various ways. And is that interference and mediation between uh systems that allows you to create the kind of value and to extract money or other resources that you're interested in from a process. That's what financialization is interested in. And I think to myself like, wow, are you exaggerating this?

I mean there's plenty of examples like a credit cards as I mentioned and like CLA and all these like pay as you go plans and you know one could argue central banks or that the banks that work with central banks functionally do this because the government creates money gives it to them to distribute pays them a fee. You know it's this whole like interference in systems not providing value and it's like oh is this a is this an exaggeration of the problem that's going on? Is this really uh am I being cynical? Am I being extreme?

And then I run into an example like the one I want to discuss now that so perfectly encapsulates this logic that I'm like, no, no, it's not just me, right? And and this is an example of a company that I won't name the name. You can look this up if you want. There's several companies that do this, but the one I en encountered, this is the argument that they make.

And the argument goes as follows. The biggest payment most people make every month is their rent. But what do you get for paying your rent? Okay, you get a place to live, but you don't get anything else.

If you'll send your rent payment to us, and then we'll send it to your landlord, we'll give you rewards. We'll give you reward points that you can uh cash in for trips or for um goods at stores or discounts. We'll give you a credit card that you ...