Dearest party attendee,

please be overjoyed to receive this most insightful missive from your most friendly local venture capitalists at Not A Cartel, LLC.

Thank you for your attention to this mayhem.

Capitalism Today

There are three ways you can direct a business under capitalism:
  1. According to your ethics
  2. According to the law
  3. According to what you would actually get punished for
It goes without saying that there's a gulf between what is ethical and what is legal. But surely nobody would deliberately build their business in the illegal cracks between law and its enforcement?

But no. Enter late stage capitalism, and witness the modern darlings of capital:

Uber starts an unlicensed taxi service, loudly insists that it isn't what it is, and elbows its way into custom legislation in countries across the globe legitimising its seizure of a rent base.

Every AI juggernaut guzzles the creations of untold millions of humans, fattening their carbon-farting models on our precious creations while forcing a narrative that this is inevitable, it is happening, we can't *not* do it, and are rewarded with the most bloated valuations our world has ever seen - and pressing a path to more laws to cement their theft of all our works so they can sell our knowledge back to us.

So clearly, if we are playing Capitalism, Late-Stage, we must also tread this path. We had to ditch not only our ethics, but our very respect for the implicit and explicit rules that bind our countries and our communities together - while getting everyone to nod and agree that yes, this is totally fine and not a problem at all.

We thus proceeded to rig the game and make you like it.

Capitalism Tonight

We designed our own notes; these are superficially similar to Eugenebucks, but have quite distinct characteristics, particularly elements drawn by a human which were sadly missing in the originals. These are called Ᵽugene, though for compatibility reasons they bear textual script more similar to €ugene. These then had to be reproduced and diced, of course; and then to encourage uptake and easy accessibility we carefully replaced a significant proportion of the Bank of €ugene's currency reserves of €100 and €500 notes with Ᵽugenes in denominations of Ᵽ100 and Ᵽ500, making it as easy as possible for new users to share in this new-found wealth.

Eugenebucks are genAI slop and thus not copyrightable, nobody owns them; consequently, our minting activities in no way constituted counterfeiting.
The procedure of societal acceptance of Ᵽugene into the economy began at the bundling table, where many volunteers sorted notes into envelopes (or bare stacks of ca$hhhh) to get each attendee started. It was noted by a number of people - not involved in this Instance of Capitalism - that there were a few different designs of these notes, and that some of them perhaps had bums on them; a consensus evolved that these were immaterial, perhaps misprints or the influence of Dr. Passey, and that all these notes were equally valuable. Then, throughout the evening, vendors and attendees alike gave and accepted Ᵽugenes and €ugenes for equal value, with not a single quibble heard regarding the status or value of one currency versus the other; they funged seamlessly.
A powerful corroboration is provided by the complete failure of the peeno-gluteal currency our competitors also launched at the event, even despite paying us for publicity. This pathetic coin was ultimately accepted by only two vendors, who then exchanged them for paper at the earliest opportunity.
Having dark launched Ᵽugene successfully, we had planned a public launch announcement to surf on the attention of the prize announcements. This was to involve an extremely surprising number of Ᵽ500 and €500 notes being distributed aerially to the waiting crowd, cementing the new currencies in their hearts and sparking demand for a new round of games and prizes, stimulating the economy unto infinity and perhaps beyond. Unfortunately, due to certain technical troubles with our distribution contractor, the launching device instead seems to have shredded all the evidence that genuine €500 spliff notes ever existed - we cannot find a single one. Perhaps €500 was never real at all?

And so, like any startup, we rebound from this minor setback, and bring to you this electronic announcement to surprise and delight you, your born and chosen families, and the local business owners who adore your repeated efforts to strong-arm them into participating in Eugene-themed whimsies. Thank you for your most enthusiastic participation and we look forward to sharing the inevitable profits with you all! They'll be trickling down soon. We promise. And in the mean time, find your own cut-out Ᵽugenes below so you can play along at home!

With the most corporate-coded love, your friends absolutely: NOT A CARTEL LLC

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