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Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason

134 points by cribbles 4y ago

rgrieselhuber 4y ago
Only about a quarter of the way through this so far but am enjoying it. From the article: "Some sixty years ago, Habermas did pioneering work in this field in The Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). On his—not undisputed—account, the early-bourgeois public sphere could be seen in London’s coffee houses, important locales for the development of emancipatory discourse. Tamed by capitalists, its imperatives were then tied to those of the culture industry and its advertising complex. As a result, pre-modern, private power structures and hierarchies reemerged in what he termed the ‘re-feudalization of the public sphere’, indicating the zigzag dynamics of modernity. While Habermas eventually distanced himself from the concept of ‘refeudalization’, preferring ‘colonization of the lifeworld’ instead, some in Germany have recently recovered it." The acceptance of individual consciousness represented by the emergence of the bourgeois class as it manifested in the 19th and 20th centuries was quickly coopted, in particular, after WWII by the Cold War dialectic. In order to prove you weren't a Communist, you had to be the most Capitalistic, which made it very easy to hide the difference between the Main Street capitalism of small and medium businesses and multinational, monopolistic, crony-Capitalism. The results of that one confusion are readily apparent in the political dialogue of our times.
- gumby 4y ago
  > In order to prove you weren't a Communist, you had to be the most Capitalistic, which made it very easy to hide the difference between the Main Street capitalism of small and medium businesses and multinational, monopolistic, crony-Capitalism. This point is dreadfully under appreciated, and heavily exploited for political and business purposes. The US Chamber of Commerce does not have the interest of small businesses at heart and, despite the name is nothing at all like your local town’s chamber of commerce. Yet when someone says “business” the local restaurant and Exxon are considered the same.
  - rgrieselhuber 4y ago
    Not sure why you’re being downvoted, this is exactly right.
    - bsedlm 4y ago
      because it's exposing a scheme (for the lack of a better word) actively being used to keep (and increase) power/wealth concentration
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topynate 4y ago
"Curtis Yarvin, who hypothesized a neo-feudal search engine, which he cutely named Feudl, as early as 2010" Did he? It's absolutely nowhere on google or DDG except in Morozov's article. Yarvin's blog archives are all indexed. "3 The ideas behind Feudl are described on Yarvin’s blog, Unqualified Reservations. Essentially, Google was not too feudal but too ‘woke’—too democratic." Yeah, I call BS. Back in 2010 the word 'woke' (as an adjective) was practically unknown outside of AAVE and had no negative connotation.
- Jupe 4y ago
  Maybe it was a typo? https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/03/future-of-search/ https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/03/future-of-s...
- hellerve 4y ago
  I presume the author is referring to this blogpost[1]. The proposed name of the system is actually "Feudle", which might have made it harder to find for you. The word "woke" did indeed not make an appearence, but this choice quote: "Eventually, all desirable content will move out of the anarchic slums and into this new, happy gated community. And junkies will be shooting up in the old Google building." His idea seems to have been that hierarchic—or "feudal"—arrangements would be preferrable to the "anarchic" ways of information indexing Google uses. 1. https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/03/future-of-search/ https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/03/future-of-s...
  - topynate 4y ago
    That must be it. Thank you for finding the link. Shame that the author couldn't be bothered to leave one…
  - pfisherman 4y ago
    To be fair I do not think of the proposed search as particularly “feudal”. He is basically just describing what people do by appending “Reddit” to their Google searches. I think Yarvin diagnoses partt if the problem correctly, but misses (1) the massive amount of money that can be generated from paid manipulation of rankings (by Google or others), and (2) the adversarial environment this creates.
mberning 4y ago
Capitalism is somehow responsible for police brutality and a pandemic. That was my cue to stop reading.
- _alxk 4y ago
  That's not what I understood from this passage: > Late capitalism is certainly bad enough, with its explosive cocktail of climate change, inequality, police brutality and the deadly pandemic. To me this says "we're at the late capitalism stage, and we're dealing with a cocktail of ..." Regarding police brutality specifically, it's not hard for me to believe that's a symptom of what they're labelling neo-feudalism. Police aren't going around beating up the ruling class. There's probably a direct correlation between where you are on the social ladder and your chances of being a victim of police brutality. That's what you'd expect of a feudal society.
  - NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
    Your reading seems to omit the possessive intent of "its".
    - civilized 4y ago
      I think the sentence is just sloppy and the author himself doesn't quite know if he's talking about characteristics of late capitalism or just current events which happen to be occurring in the context of late capitalism.
      - drewcoo 4y ago
        It's not sloppy. It's quite easy to understand. Let's substitute some metasyntactic variables . . . > Foo is bar, with its baz. Clearly baz is an example of how foo is bar. https://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/subordinate_clause.htm https://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/subordinate_clause....
- nonstickcoating 4y ago
  Police brutality is the direct effect of a state trying to uphold it's monopoly for violence. This monopoly in turn is (in the current situation) neccessary to uphold the expolitation of labour and the functioning of the state itself. Of course this is not exlusive to the capitalist system. The expropriation of serfs in feudalist societies through the armed forces of nobility serves a similiar purpose under a different economic and political system. Just the same as capitalism has a tangible effect on how the pandemic is dealt with. Where I live for example there were multiple cases of industrial workers (often migrants working for a few month and then returning to their home country) contracting the virus en masse, which in turn had a lot to do with overcrowded houses and flats where they were forced to live.
SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
What is the point of this article? I don't have anything to do before the grocery store opens, so I gave it a full chance, and after the end I'm still really struggling to identify what the author is trying to do here. Is this an extended argument that people should avoid calling things "feudal" as a rhetorical strategy?
- starkd 4y ago
  It's almost like the writer exists in a very restricted echo chamber. I have trouble relating to it.
  - barbecue_sauce 4y ago
    I mean, the New Left Review is an academic journal. The author is probably an academic rooted in the Marxist/Marxian strain of western philosophy and thus communicating through the appropriate vernacular of the discipline.
  - mkr-hn 4y ago
    I'm pretty far to the left and have never heard of this publication. I get the feeling it's suffering the same phenomenon as movie reviews where professional critics are increasingly distant from people who watch movies for fun. People can now get their movie recs and political advocacy from people they mesh with across the world without consulting the cathedral.
- paganel 4y ago
  There are some of us who are interested in this type of subject, for example I do happen to have read books written by several of the authors mentioned in this article during the past year or so (in my case that's true for Mazzucato, Perry Anderson, Immanuel Wallerstein and I did try to put my hands on Brenner's Merchants and Revolution [1] but I was too lazy). The transition from feudalism to capitalism is a very interesting subject, even the discussion itself of said transition makes for an exciting piece of late 20th century (in fact the 1970s-1980s, to be fair) intellectual history. Back to the article itself (which, I admit, I hadn't finished reading until checking the comments in here), I would have personally also added a quick mention about the Asiatic mode of production [2], but seeing as I'm not a specialist on this maybe I'm talking bs. More generally speaking I fully admit that this type of discussions can be quite boring for those with no prior interest in them. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Revolution-Commercial-Political-1550-1653/dp/1859843336 https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Revolution-Commercial-Polit... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_mode_of_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_mode_of_production
robertlagrant 4y ago
Article thinks 300k views after three weeks makes a YouTube video popular.
- nonstickcoating 4y ago
  I think for this kind of niche, academic topic (even though the discutants are quite well known) 100k views per week after publication is nothing scoff at.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Context is that it was a popular meme on Twitter/Reddit, not just popular for an academic topic: > Plus, it makes a good meme. The hungry crowds on Reddit and Twitter love it: a YouTube video of a discussion on techno-feudalism by Varoufakis and Slavoj Žižek garnered over 300,000 views in just three weeks.
    - nonstickcoating 4y ago
      You are propably right, even though my experience with explicitly socialist (using the European meaning of the word here) topics nd discussions like this one is, that it does not get much traction outside of already quite leftist circles. I for example didn't know of the discussion they had until I read the article.
dopylitty 4y ago
This was an interesting read. I have to admit it mostly washed over me like a rainstorm given my lack of background on the subject. That being said I think I understood enough to like to see more analysis of how the companies that depend on data extraction (Google,Facebook) themselves depend on actually productive companies. They are obligate parasites. Google (for example) collects user data so it can sell targeted ads to companies that want to sell products to the users whose data was collected by Google. In the absence of these productive companies Google’s data is worthless. And similarly Google’s profit is directly tied to those upstream companies exploitation of their labor. It seems like most analyses stop at the step where Google is making money from data and don’t really get into how that data is only valuable in the context of consumer goods, which are often produced by classically extractive or exploitative companies. The article’s “userism“ can’t exist in a vacuum. That is also separate from companies that produce digital products for consumption and then profit off the “rent” of the intellectual property rights to those products.
- cgio 4y ago
  But products themselves are being dematerialised also. I.e. looking at my kids who constantly watch “gamers” and dream of getting the next battlepass. And games themselves are about data and IP etc.
photochemsyn 4y ago
It's rather amusing that a long-winded article stating that people shouldn't describe the current American economic system as 'feudalism' doesn't bother to include the concepts of 'the aristocratic class' or 'inherited wealth and power.' For example, one characteristic of a society divided into aristocrats and serfs (and lacking anything like the 'American middle class' of the 1960s) is a segregated educational system, with fundamentally different approaches for the posh vs. the proles. The various attacks on public schooling (like the effort to remove higher mathematics from public schools in California) and the elimination of state subsidies for higher education are certainly a step in that direction. Another feature of this article is the lumping of all things 'capitalist' together, ignoring the very real distinction between commericial and investment capitalism, colloquially described as "Main Street" vs "Wall Street". Notably the latter is characterized by extreme concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a 'central committee' of Wall Street financiers; the former version of capitalism certainly has a much more distributed character in terms of wealth, power, land ownership etc. Finally, this really is a 20th century argument that misses a fundamental characteristic of the 21st century: resource limitations. Regional water scarcity due to ongoing fossil-fueled global warming is a reality in many parts of the world, and this is more fundamental than ideological wrangling about societal structures. The resulting impacts on food production are physical and ecological in nature, not ideological - although the consequences could lead to things like the French Revolution, or the rise of authoritarian power to ensure food distribution (basically, that's China writ large). I think the real split is going to be more about authoritarianism vs. libertarianism, and the libertarian track record on avoiding things like mass famine and consequent societal destabilization is perhaps not the best.
- chipotle_coyote 4y ago
  > Another feature of this article is the lumping of all things 'capitalist' together, ignoring the very real distinction between commericial and investment capitalism, colloquially described as "Main Street" vs "Wall Street". My (extremely tentative!) thesis is that there’s been a shift in language over the last decade or so in left/liberal culture, and this is part of that. “Leftists” are often very down on “liberals” -- in the telling of Left Twitter, liberals are basically centrists and centrists might as well be right-wing -- yet what “The Left” believes is, by and large, pretty much what I believed as a “liberal” two decades ago. (I suspect a lot of this is generational, driven by disillusionment at perceived failures on the part of the Clinton/Obama establishment.) Likewise, I think what’s seen as “capitalism” has made a linguistic shift. I’ve always thought of small business owners and solo entrepreneurs, from the little bookshop on Main Street down to freelance artists selling their prints at the dealers’ rooms in science fiction and comic conventions, as quintessentially capitalist, but at least on the left, that doesn’t really seem to be how it’s used anymore. The focus is squarely on the worst features of “big” capitalism, on the principle that exploitation and destruction is where capitalism always leads. Since a two-person indie software company doesn’t fit that narrative of capitalism, it’s…something other than capitalism? Frankly, I don’t think the logic fully holds up there. Back in my day [waving cane], I would have distinguished between entrepreneurship and corporatism -- which is, more or less, that “Main Street” vs. “Wall Street” distinction. (I also think it’s worth acknowledging that there are some small businesses out there which, depending on the yardstick you’re measuring by, can be truly, truly dreadful.) But, this is a hill I don’t have a real interest in dying on. If someone wants to argue that a dealer’s room at a furry con full of freelance artists selling sexy catgirl pinups isn’t capitalism but “market socialism” or whatever, then godspeed. As a unrelated note, re-reading your last sentence, though: > I think the real split is going to be more about authoritarianism vs. libertarianism, and the libertarian track record on avoiding things like mass famine and consequent societal destabilization is perhaps not the best. The authoritarian track record here does not seem to be sterling, either.
platz 4y ago
This appears to be one of the core tenets of the article: > Ultimately, though, the popularity of feudal-speak is a testament to intellectual weakness, rather than media savviness. It is as if the left’s theoretical framework can no longer make sense of capitalism without mobilizing the moral language of corruption and perversion. * downvoters - im sorry you dont like what the authors have to say.
- bsedlm 4y ago
  this is a shallow read of a really in-depth article. your comment does it no justice
  - platz 4y ago
    I maintain that it's possible to identify and extract key points of an article without having to restate the entire article.
    - bsedlm 4y ago
      I counter-maintain that to force such an in-depth article down into one key point means pretending it doesn't make another handful of key points. maybe imagine this article is not one long twitter thread, but at least 8 or 9 topically related long twitter threads.
lumost 4y ago
Given the longevity and frequent re-evolution of Feudal systems throughout history it's worth considering whether Feudalism is the default economic system. Seemingly the only times we haven't had feudal societies coincided with extreme disruption of the economic system such as occurred during the industrial revolution, the expansion of agricultural land in North America, or the rise of corporations in the 1600-1700s. When economic growth falls to zero the economy becomes zero-sum. Why wouldn't individuals secure sinecures in the form of monopolies or mega corporations ownership?
- kqr 4y ago
  It's important to account for selection bias here: feudalism generally leaves very obvious archaeological traces, both in terms of infrastructure and bureaucratic artifacts (which in turn tend to be designed for longevity.) Feudalism might not be as common as we think of it; it's simply very visible in the historic record. ---- As for why people would choose to live in more egalitarian forms: because we care. Many forms of organising humans in the past and present have had specific mechanisms installed to prevent single people from getting too much power. (Including preventing them from converting wealth into power -- something we take for granted that one can just do today.) As a case in point: I live in a condo association. We and all our neighbours collectively own and maintain this building. We vote on big issues and elect representatives for everyday duties. It would be very hard to consistently appropriate large amounts of resources over a longer time period, compared to, say, a small business owner. We can only guess, but sometimes (at least from native American verbal history) this can happen because the people have experienced feudalist systems and realised how bad that turned out. I strongly recommend reading Graeber's The Dawn of Everything to start out.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    > We can only guess, but sometimes (at least from native American verbal history) this can happen because the people have experienced feudalist systems and realised how bad that turned out. This seems like a pretty reasonable theory, but does indicate a little problem I think -- the people have experienced the feudal system will only be around for a couple generations after the change-over. So, at least to the extent that this is the cause, it would likely be a transitory configuration, right? (ignoring some unusual circumstances, like being neighbors to a particularly unpleasant feudal state and having them as a constant contrast). I wonder what that sort of configuration decays toward.
baryphonic 4y ago
> Late capitalism is certainly bad enough, with its explosive cocktail of climate change, inequality, police brutality and the deadly pandemic. Climate change: The Soviet Union was a horrible polluter, and this was well-documented.[0] When adjusted for GDP, the USSR emitted 1.5x the pollution of the US. It was worse when adjusted per capita. The CCP has also been a horrible polluter, though has made some improvements after adopting market-oriented reforms. Capitalist liberal governments have balked at treating CO2 like a pollutant, but their economies have also done far more to advance technology like electric vehicles or alternative energy than their socialist counterparts. Inequality: Yep, this one seems like a consequence of capitalism. Though left-wing governments that adopt market reforms see inequality as well. Inequality seems likely correlated with discretionary bureaucracy (particularly "clientelism"), a hallmark of socialist and progressive governance.[1] Police brutality: Police brutality hasn't increased since 2015.[2] Even police violence (including incidents where officers were clearly justified in using force) is flat. Deadly pandemic: Pandemics have been deadly throughout the history of civilization, long before the last couple hundred years of capitalism. Capitalism produced the vaccine in record time; many of the excess deaths were associated with central planning.[3] Scientific experts, the would-be rulers under progressivism, had an abysmal record at predictions & decision-making during the pandemic.[4] None of these is a slam dunk the author thinks it is. [0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0959378094900035 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/095937... [1]https://www.edgs.northwestern.edu/documents/working-papers/how-bureaucracy-affects-inequality.pdf https://www.edgs.northwestern.edu/documents/working-papers/h... [2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic... [3]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56091682 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56091682 [4]https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/18/pandemic-social-science-predictions-wrong/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/18/pandemic-social-science...
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > Inequality: Yep, this one seems like a consequence of capitalism. It's not like feudal societies were perfectly equal. There is a genuine question as to whether capitalism tends towards increased inequality over time, perhaps merely as a side effect of its faster rate of innovation, but if you want a reasonable level of "equality" you'll need to look either to pre-modern societies or to ones where redistribution is explicitly practiced.
tlholaday 4y ago
While reading the introductory paragraphs, I experienced a pleasing uncertainty: is this an homage to Borges, to Nabokov? Are the familiar names -- Thiel, Weyl, Posner -- merely there to provide substance to a New Yorker piece? But, this is the New Left Review, so ...
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Animats 4y ago
The more careful of (the critics), like Brenner, suggest that features of the current capitalist system—prolonged stagnation, politically driven upward redistribution of wealth, ostentatious consumption by the elites combined with increasing immiseration of the masses—recall aspects of its feudal predecessor, even if capitalism still very much rules the day. That's a property of feudalism, but societies with those properties are not necessarily feudal. Feudalism is rule by local armed strongmen. The lower classes get protection from other strongmen in exchange for a cut of their resources. The strongmen can be warlords, drug cartels, military, or cops. Feudalism tends to result in clashes between local strongmen, and, often, consolidation when someone wins. That's how nations are usually created. Economic oppression is common in feudal societies, but not limited to it. Capitalism offers more efficient ways to achieve economic oppression. The paper goes off into classical Marxist analysis. The trouble with Marx as a guide is that he wrote in an era of direct labor. Output was a result of the routine efforts of the proletariat. Wealth was the result of taking a cut of those efforts. The inputs from labor exceeded those of capital. Today, you look at a balance sheet, and "cost of goods sold", which includes direct labor, is often a minor item. Marketing and G&A often exceed cost of goods sold. This turns the assumptions of Marxism upside down. In many industries, a majority of corporate expenditure is devoted to battling competition and changing things, rather than just making the product. This breaks not just Marxism but much of classical economics. It's what drives industries towards monopoly today. It's not about having the biggest, most productive steel mill. It's about establishing market dominance so you don't have to compete on price. Or on wages. Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" notes "Avoid competition as much as possible." That's the key idea here. This is not feudalism. It's oligopoly. In some ways it's worse. In a feudal culture, the strongmen have some obligation to provide protection for their peasants. Oligopolists have no such obligation.
- eli_gottlieb 4y ago
  >It's what drives industries towards monopoly today. It's not about having the biggest, most productive steel mill. It's about establishing market dominance so you don't have to compete on price. Or on wages. Might one call it, perhaps, "the highest stage of capitalism" ;-)? Beyond the joke, I do often find myself thinking that the oligopoly and rentier tendencies described by terms like "neo-feudalism" are pretty much just the things designated by the old Marxist usage of "imperialism". But then the problem is that "imperialism" has been watered down into "everything your local sectarian Marxist group doesn't like."
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bsedlm 4y ago
> Key to Supiot’s legal philosophy is the distinction between government by men—typical of the feudal period, with its personal allegiances and ties of dependence—and government by law I would frame this using "government by men" speaking words at each other in contrast with "government by laws" i.e. men writing legally between them... i.e. orality vs literacy This is important because of the relation between literacy and computability > Bosses may have had a role under Fordism, but modern cognitive workers need them no more in summary your boss was a man, then it became a written document (laws), and now it's become a computer run algorithm > Techno-féodalisme argues that the rise of intangibles, usually concentrated at the most profitable points of the global value chain, led to the emergence of four new types of rent two of them are more difficult to understand (I paraphrase): innovation rents, which refers to valuable data sets that are the exclusive property of these firms the technological capabilities to make this non-exclusive is here and intangibles-differential rents refers to the ability of firms inside a single value chain to scale up their operations If I understand correctly, this is possible because internet infrastructure is already non-exclusive At the root of the issue, pretending that "intangibles"" are commodities and thus to enforce that they are treated as exclusive physical artifacts (merchandise) is to waste the potential of the internet (or, more cynically, to make a play to capture it privately) This issue is even more complicated due to the distinction (or lack of) between "exploiting" and "harvesting" (with the assumption that one harvests what one has sown) digital assets; specifically "co-created" (i.e. aggregated) data of the like that gives facebook and google such a strong position in the "competitive market". Why should "big tech" be allowed to keep their vast data troves private? On one hand, there's no real technological limitation to the exclusivity of their intangible data-troves. On the other hand, there's something to notice about how such exclusive concentration of data/knowledge generates a great amount of social and political power. IMO, this is the strongest reason behind the drive to keep intangibles as exclusive; the power generated by their exclusivity and the use of such power to capture (privatize) energy and resources. this is why sometimes I think that all of culture (specially contemporary academic culture) is but an elaborate ploy to rationalize away the grim realities of extractive post-imperialistic societies (states) Finally, I argue my position that it's now crucial to deeply question old historical positions around the nature of property (and ownership); and hence, of markets and society, based on the magnitude of what the computer revolution truly entails. In my mind (biased by me being a millennial), computers are an innovation on the scale of writing (and thus, of law). The only other innovation I can think of in an even larger scale is that of ownership over land (which I consider as civilization itself).

134 points by cribbles 4y ago

Only about a quarter of the way through this so far but am enjoying it. From the article: "Some sixty years ago, Habermas did pioneering work in this field in The Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). On his—not undisputed—account, the early-bourgeois public sphere could be seen in London’s coffee houses, important locales for the development of emancipatory discourse. Tamed by capitalists, its imperatives were then tied to those of the culture industry and its advertising complex. As a result, pre-modern, private power structures and hierarchies reemerged in what he termed the ‘re-feudalization of the public sphere’, indicating the zigzag dynamics of modernity. While Habermas eventually distanced himself from the concept of ‘refeudalization’, preferring ‘colonization of the lifeworld’ instead, some in Germany have recently recovered it." The acceptance of individual consciousness represented by the emergence of the bourgeois class as it manifested in the 19th and 20th centuries was quickly coopted, in particular, after WWII by the Cold War dialectic. In order to prove you weren't a Communist, you had to be the most Capitalistic, which made it very easy to hide the difference between the Main Street capitalism of small and medium businesses and multinational, monopolistic, crony-Capitalism. The results of that one confusion are readily apparent in the political dialogue of our times.

gumby 4y ago
> In order to prove you weren't a Communist, you had to be the most Capitalistic, which made it very easy to hide the difference between the Main Street capitalism of small and medium businesses and multinational, monopolistic, crony-Capitalism. This point is dreadfully under appreciated, and heavily exploited for political and business purposes. The US Chamber of Commerce does not have the interest of small businesses at heart and, despite the name is nothing at all like your local town’s chamber of commerce. Yet when someone says “business” the local restaurant and Exxon are considered the same.
- rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  Not sure why you’re being downvoted, this is exactly right.
  - bsedlm 4y ago
    because it's exposing a scheme (for the lack of a better word) actively being used to keep (and increase) power/wealth concentration
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topynate 4y ago

"Curtis Yarvin, who hypothesized a neo-feudal search engine, which he cutely named Feudl, as early as 2010" Did he? It's absolutely nowhere on google or DDG except in Morozov's article. Yarvin's blog archives are all indexed. "3 The ideas behind Feudl are described on Yarvin’s blog, Unqualified Reservations. Essentially, Google was not too feudal but too ‘woke’—too democratic." Yeah, I call BS. Back in 2010 the word 'woke' (as an adjective) was practically unknown outside of AAVE and had no negative connotation.

Jupe 4y ago
Maybe it was a typo? https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/03/future-of-search/ https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/03/future-of-s...
hellerve 4y ago
I presume the author is referring to this blogpost[1]. The proposed name of the system is actually "Feudle", which might have made it harder to find for you. The word "woke" did indeed not make an appearence, but this choice quote: "Eventually, all desirable content will move out of the anarchic slums and into this new, happy gated community. And junkies will be shooting up in the old Google building." His idea seems to have been that hierarchic—or "feudal"—arrangements would be preferrable to the "anarchic" ways of information indexing Google uses. 1. https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/03/future-of-search/ https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/03/future-of-s...
- topynate 4y ago
  That must be it. Thank you for finding the link. Shame that the author couldn't be bothered to leave one…
- pfisherman 4y ago
  To be fair I do not think of the proposed search as particularly “feudal”. He is basically just describing what people do by appending “Reddit” to their Google searches. I think Yarvin diagnoses partt if the problem correctly, but misses (1) the massive amount of money that can be generated from paid manipulation of rankings (by Google or others), and (2) the adversarial environment this creates.

mberning 4y ago

Capitalism is somehow responsible for police brutality and a pandemic. That was my cue to stop reading.

_alxk 4y ago
That's not what I understood from this passage: > Late capitalism is certainly bad enough, with its explosive cocktail of climate change, inequality, police brutality and the deadly pandemic. To me this says "we're at the late capitalism stage, and we're dealing with a cocktail of ..." Regarding police brutality specifically, it's not hard for me to believe that's a symptom of what they're labelling neo-feudalism. Police aren't going around beating up the ruling class. There's probably a direct correlation between where you are on the social ladder and your chances of being a victim of police brutality. That's what you'd expect of a feudal society.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  Your reading seems to omit the possessive intent of "its".
  - civilized 4y ago
    I think the sentence is just sloppy and the author himself doesn't quite know if he's talking about characteristics of late capitalism or just current events which happen to be occurring in the context of late capitalism.
    - drewcoo 4y ago
      It's not sloppy. It's quite easy to understand. Let's substitute some metasyntactic variables . . . > Foo is bar, with its baz. Clearly baz is an example of how foo is bar. https://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/subordinate_clause.htm https://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/subordinate_clause....
nonstickcoating 4y ago
Police brutality is the direct effect of a state trying to uphold it's monopoly for violence. This monopoly in turn is (in the current situation) neccessary to uphold the expolitation of labour and the functioning of the state itself. Of course this is not exlusive to the capitalist system. The expropriation of serfs in feudalist societies through the armed forces of nobility serves a similiar purpose under a different economic and political system. Just the same as capitalism has a tangible effect on how the pandemic is dealt with. Where I live for example there were multiple cases of industrial workers (often migrants working for a few month and then returning to their home country) contracting the virus en masse, which in turn had a lot to do with overcrowded houses and flats where they were forced to live.

SpicyLemonZest 4y ago

What is the point of this article? I don't have anything to do before the grocery store opens, so I gave it a full chance, and after the end I'm still really struggling to identify what the author is trying to do here. Is this an extended argument that people should avoid calling things "feudal" as a rhetorical strategy?

starkd 4y ago
It's almost like the writer exists in a very restricted echo chamber. I have trouble relating to it.
- barbecue_sauce 4y ago
  I mean, the New Left Review is an academic journal. The author is probably an academic rooted in the Marxist/Marxian strain of western philosophy and thus communicating through the appropriate vernacular of the discipline.
- mkr-hn 4y ago
  I'm pretty far to the left and have never heard of this publication. I get the feeling it's suffering the same phenomenon as movie reviews where professional critics are increasingly distant from people who watch movies for fun. People can now get their movie recs and political advocacy from people they mesh with across the world without consulting the cathedral.
paganel 4y ago
There are some of us who are interested in this type of subject, for example I do happen to have read books written by several of the authors mentioned in this article during the past year or so (in my case that's true for Mazzucato, Perry Anderson, Immanuel Wallerstein and I did try to put my hands on Brenner's Merchants and Revolution [1] but I was too lazy). The transition from feudalism to capitalism is a very interesting subject, even the discussion itself of said transition makes for an exciting piece of late 20th century (in fact the 1970s-1980s, to be fair) intellectual history. Back to the article itself (which, I admit, I hadn't finished reading until checking the comments in here), I would have personally also added a quick mention about the Asiatic mode of production [2], but seeing as I'm not a specialist on this maybe I'm talking bs. More generally speaking I fully admit that this type of discussions can be quite boring for those with no prior interest in them. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Revolution-Commercial-Political-1550-1653/dp/1859843336 https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Revolution-Commercial-Polit... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_mode_of_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_mode_of_production

robertlagrant 4y ago

Article thinks 300k views after three weeks makes a YouTube video popular.

nonstickcoating 4y ago
I think for this kind of niche, academic topic (even though the discutants are quite well known) 100k views per week after publication is nothing scoff at.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Context is that it was a popular meme on Twitter/Reddit, not just popular for an academic topic: > Plus, it makes a good meme. The hungry crowds on Reddit and Twitter love it: a YouTube video of a discussion on techno-feudalism by Varoufakis and Slavoj Žižek garnered over 300,000 views in just three weeks.
  - nonstickcoating 4y ago
    You are propably right, even though my experience with explicitly socialist (using the European meaning of the word here) topics nd discussions like this one is, that it does not get much traction outside of already quite leftist circles. I for example didn't know of the discussion they had until I read the article.

dopylitty 4y ago

This was an interesting read. I have to admit it mostly washed over me like a rainstorm given my lack of background on the subject. That being said I think I understood enough to like to see more analysis of how the companies that depend on data extraction (Google,Facebook) themselves depend on actually productive companies. They are obligate parasites. Google (for example) collects user data so it can sell targeted ads to companies that want to sell products to the users whose data was collected by Google. In the absence of these productive companies Google’s data is worthless. And similarly Google’s profit is directly tied to those upstream companies exploitation of their labor. It seems like most analyses stop at the step where Google is making money from data and don’t really get into how that data is only valuable in the context of consumer goods, which are often produced by classically extractive or exploitative companies. The article’s “userism“ can’t exist in a vacuum. That is also separate from companies that produce digital products for consumption and then profit off the “rent” of the intellectual property rights to those products.

cgio 4y ago
But products themselves are being dematerialised also. I.e. looking at my kids who constantly watch “gamers” and dream of getting the next battlepass. And games themselves are about data and IP etc.

photochemsyn 4y ago

It's rather amusing that a long-winded article stating that people shouldn't describe the current American economic system as 'feudalism' doesn't bother to include the concepts of 'the aristocratic class' or 'inherited wealth and power.' For example, one characteristic of a society divided into aristocrats and serfs (and lacking anything like the 'American middle class' of the 1960s) is a segregated educational system, with fundamentally different approaches for the posh vs. the proles. The various attacks on public schooling (like the effort to remove higher mathematics from public schools in California) and the elimination of state subsidies for higher education are certainly a step in that direction. Another feature of this article is the lumping of all things 'capitalist' together, ignoring the very real distinction between commericial and investment capitalism, colloquially described as "Main Street" vs "Wall Street". Notably the latter is characterized by extreme concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a 'central committee' of Wall Street financiers; the former version of capitalism certainly has a much more distributed character in terms of wealth, power, land ownership etc. Finally, this really is a 20th century argument that misses a fundamental characteristic of the 21st century: resource limitations. Regional water scarcity due to ongoing fossil-fueled global warming is a reality in many parts of the world, and this is more fundamental than ideological wrangling about societal structures. The resulting impacts on food production are physical and ecological in nature, not ideological - although the consequences could lead to things like the French Revolution, or the rise of authoritarian power to ensure food distribution (basically, that's China writ large). I think the real split is going to be more about authoritarianism vs. libertarianism, and the libertarian track record on avoiding things like mass famine and consequent societal destabilization is perhaps not the best.

chipotle_coyote 4y ago
> Another feature of this article is the lumping of all things 'capitalist' together, ignoring the very real distinction between commericial and investment capitalism, colloquially described as "Main Street" vs "Wall Street". My (extremely tentative!) thesis is that there’s been a shift in language over the last decade or so in left/liberal culture, and this is part of that. “Leftists” are often very down on “liberals” -- in the telling of Left Twitter, liberals are basically centrists and centrists might as well be right-wing -- yet what “The Left” believes is, by and large, pretty much what I believed as a “liberal” two decades ago. (I suspect a lot of this is generational, driven by disillusionment at perceived failures on the part of the Clinton/Obama establishment.) Likewise, I think what’s seen as “capitalism” has made a linguistic shift. I’ve always thought of small business owners and solo entrepreneurs, from the little bookshop on Main Street down to freelance artists selling their prints at the dealers’ rooms in science fiction and comic conventions, as quintessentially capitalist, but at least on the left, that doesn’t really seem to be how it’s used anymore. The focus is squarely on the worst features of “big” capitalism, on the principle that exploitation and destruction is where capitalism always leads. Since a two-person indie software company doesn’t fit that narrative of capitalism, it’s…something other than capitalism? Frankly, I don’t think the logic fully holds up there. Back in my day [waving cane], I would have distinguished between entrepreneurship and corporatism -- which is, more or less, that “Main Street” vs. “Wall Street” distinction. (I also think it’s worth acknowledging that there are some small businesses out there which, depending on the yardstick you’re measuring by, can be truly, truly dreadful.) But, this is a hill I don’t have a real interest in dying on. If someone wants to argue that a dealer’s room at a furry con full of freelance artists selling sexy catgirl pinups isn’t capitalism but “market socialism” or whatever, then godspeed. As a unrelated note, re-reading your last sentence, though: > I think the real split is going to be more about authoritarianism vs. libertarianism, and the libertarian track record on avoiding things like mass famine and consequent societal destabilization is perhaps not the best. The authoritarian track record here does not seem to be sterling, either.

platz 4y ago

This appears to be one of the core tenets of the article: > Ultimately, though, the popularity of feudal-speak is a testament to intellectual weakness, rather than media savviness. It is as if the left’s theoretical framework can no longer make sense of capitalism without mobilizing the moral language of corruption and perversion. * downvoters - im sorry you dont like what the authors have to say.

bsedlm 4y ago
this is a shallow read of a really in-depth article. your comment does it no justice
- platz 4y ago
  I maintain that it's possible to identify and extract key points of an article without having to restate the entire article.
  - bsedlm 4y ago
    I counter-maintain that to force such an in-depth article down into one key point means pretending it doesn't make another handful of key points. maybe imagine this article is not one long twitter thread, but at least 8 or 9 topically related long twitter threads.

lumost 4y ago

Given the longevity and frequent re-evolution of Feudal systems throughout history it's worth considering whether Feudalism is the default economic system. Seemingly the only times we haven't had feudal societies coincided with extreme disruption of the economic system such as occurred during the industrial revolution, the expansion of agricultural land in North America, or the rise of corporations in the 1600-1700s. When economic growth falls to zero the economy becomes zero-sum. Why wouldn't individuals secure sinecures in the form of monopolies or mega corporations ownership?

kqr 4y ago
It's important to account for selection bias here: feudalism generally leaves very obvious archaeological traces, both in terms of infrastructure and bureaucratic artifacts (which in turn tend to be designed for longevity.) Feudalism might not be as common as we think of it; it's simply very visible in the historic record. ---- As for why people would choose to live in more egalitarian forms: because we care. Many forms of organising humans in the past and present have had specific mechanisms installed to prevent single people from getting too much power. (Including preventing them from converting wealth into power -- something we take for granted that one can just do today.) As a case in point: I live in a condo association. We and all our neighbours collectively own and maintain this building. We vote on big issues and elect representatives for everyday duties. It would be very hard to consistently appropriate large amounts of resources over a longer time period, compared to, say, a small business owner. We can only guess, but sometimes (at least from native American verbal history) this can happen because the people have experienced feudalist systems and realised how bad that turned out. I strongly recommend reading Graeber's The Dawn of Everything to start out.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  > We can only guess, but sometimes (at least from native American verbal history) this can happen because the people have experienced feudalist systems and realised how bad that turned out. This seems like a pretty reasonable theory, but does indicate a little problem I think -- the people have experienced the feudal system will only be around for a couple generations after the change-over. So, at least to the extent that this is the cause, it would likely be a transitory configuration, right? (ignoring some unusual circumstances, like being neighbors to a particularly unpleasant feudal state and having them as a constant contrast). I wonder what that sort of configuration decays toward.

baryphonic 4y ago

> Late capitalism is certainly bad enough, with its explosive cocktail of climate change, inequality, police brutality and the deadly pandemic. Climate change: The Soviet Union was a horrible polluter, and this was well-documented.[0] When adjusted for GDP, the USSR emitted 1.5x the pollution of the US. It was worse when adjusted per capita. The CCP has also been a horrible polluter, though has made some improvements after adopting market-oriented reforms. Capitalist liberal governments have balked at treating CO2 like a pollutant, but their economies have also done far more to advance technology like electric vehicles or alternative energy than their socialist counterparts. Inequality: Yep, this one seems like a consequence of capitalism. Though left-wing governments that adopt market reforms see inequality as well. Inequality seems likely correlated with discretionary bureaucracy (particularly "clientelism"), a hallmark of socialist and progressive governance.[1] Police brutality: Police brutality hasn't increased since 2015.[2] Even police violence (including incidents where officers were clearly justified in using force) is flat. Deadly pandemic: Pandemics have been deadly throughout the history of civilization, long before the last couple hundred years of capitalism. Capitalism produced the vaccine in record time; many of the excess deaths were associated with central planning.[3] Scientific experts, the would-be rulers under progressivism, had an abysmal record at predictions & decision-making during the pandemic.[4] None of these is a slam dunk the author thinks it is. [0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0959378094900035 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/095937... [1]https://www.edgs.northwestern.edu/documents/working-papers/how-bureaucracy-affects-inequality.pdf https://www.edgs.northwestern.edu/documents/working-papers/h... [2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic... [3]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56091682 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56091682 [4]https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/18/pandemic-social-science-predictions-wrong/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/18/pandemic-social-science...

zozbot234 4y ago
> Inequality: Yep, this one seems like a consequence of capitalism. It's not like feudal societies were perfectly equal. There is a genuine question as to whether capitalism tends towards increased inequality over time, perhaps merely as a side effect of its faster rate of innovation, but if you want a reasonable level of "equality" you'll need to look either to pre-modern societies or to ones where redistribution is explicitly practiced.

tlholaday 4y ago

While reading the introductory paragraphs, I experienced a pleasing uncertainty: is this an homage to Borges, to Nabokov? Are the familiar names -- Thiel, Weyl, Posner -- merely there to provide substance to a New Yorker piece? But, this is the New Left Review, so ...

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Animats 4y ago

The more careful of (the critics), like Brenner, suggest that features of the current capitalist system—prolonged stagnation, politically driven upward redistribution of wealth, ostentatious consumption by the elites combined with increasing immiseration of the masses—recall aspects of its feudal predecessor, even if capitalism still very much rules the day. That's a property of feudalism, but societies with those properties are not necessarily feudal. Feudalism is rule by local armed strongmen. The lower classes get protection from other strongmen in exchange for a cut of their resources. The strongmen can be warlords, drug cartels, military, or cops. Feudalism tends to result in clashes between local strongmen, and, often, consolidation when someone wins. That's how nations are usually created. Economic oppression is common in feudal societies, but not limited to it. Capitalism offers more efficient ways to achieve economic oppression. The paper goes off into classical Marxist analysis. The trouble with Marx as a guide is that he wrote in an era of direct labor. Output was a result of the routine efforts of the proletariat. Wealth was the result of taking a cut of those efforts. The inputs from labor exceeded those of capital. Today, you look at a balance sheet, and "cost of goods sold", which includes direct labor, is often a minor item. Marketing and G&A often exceed cost of goods sold. This turns the assumptions of Marxism upside down. In many industries, a majority of corporate expenditure is devoted to battling competition and changing things, rather than just making the product. This breaks not just Marxism but much of classical economics. It's what drives industries towards monopoly today. It's not about having the biggest, most productive steel mill. It's about establishing market dominance so you don't have to compete on price. Or on wages. Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" notes "Avoid competition as much as possible." That's the key idea here. This is not feudalism. It's oligopoly. In some ways it's worse. In a feudal culture, the strongmen have some obligation to provide protection for their peasants. Oligopolists have no such obligation.

eli_gottlieb 4y ago
>It's what drives industries towards monopoly today. It's not about having the biggest, most productive steel mill. It's about establishing market dominance so you don't have to compete on price. Or on wages. Might one call it, perhaps, "the highest stage of capitalism" ;-)? Beyond the joke, I do often find myself thinking that the oligopoly and rentier tendencies described by terms like "neo-feudalism" are pretty much just the things designated by the old Marxist usage of "imperialism". But then the problem is that "imperialism" has been watered down into "everything your local sectarian Marxist group doesn't like."

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bsedlm 4y ago

> Key to Supiot’s legal philosophy is the distinction between government by men—typical of the feudal period, with its personal allegiances and ties of dependence—and government by law I would frame this using "government by men" speaking words at each other in contrast with "government by laws" i.e. men writing legally between them... i.e. orality vs literacy This is important because of the relation between literacy and computability > Bosses may have had a role under Fordism, but modern cognitive workers need them no more in summary your boss was a man, then it became a written document (laws), and now it's become a computer run algorithm > Techno-féodalisme argues that the rise of intangibles, usually concentrated at the most profitable points of the global value chain, led to the emergence of four new types of rent two of them are more difficult to understand (I paraphrase): innovation rents, which refers to valuable data sets that are the exclusive property of these firms the technological capabilities to make this non-exclusive is here and intangibles-differential rents refers to the ability of firms inside a single value chain to scale up their operations If I understand correctly, this is possible because internet infrastructure is already non-exclusive At the root of the issue, pretending that "intangibles"" are commodities and thus to enforce that they are treated as exclusive physical artifacts (merchandise) is to waste the potential of the internet (or, more cynically, to make a play to capture it privately) This issue is even more complicated due to the distinction (or lack of) between "exploiting" and "harvesting" (with the assumption that one harvests what one has sown) digital assets; specifically "co-created" (i.e. aggregated) data of the like that gives facebook and google such a strong position in the "competitive market". Why should "big tech" be allowed to keep their vast data troves private? On one hand, there's no real technological limitation to the exclusivity of their intangible data-troves. On the other hand, there's something to notice about how such exclusive concentration of data/knowledge generates a great amount of social and political power. IMO, this is the strongest reason behind the drive to keep intangibles as exclusive; the power generated by their exclusivity and the use of such power to capture (privatize) energy and resources. this is why sometimes I think that all of culture (specially contemporary academic culture) is but an elaborate ploy to rationalize away the grim realities of extractive post-imperialistic societies (states) Finally, I argue my position that it's now crucial to deeply question old historical positions around the nature of property (and ownership); and hence, of markets and society, based on the magnitude of what the computer revolution truly entails. In my mind (biased by me being a millennial), computers are an innovation on the scale of writing (and thus, of law). The only other innovation I can think of in an even larger scale is that of ownership over land (which I consider as civilization itself).