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Varoufakis: Capitalism is dead, long live Technofeudalism
- barrysteve 3y agoThe death of the liberal individual is where my agreement starts.. His conclusion for collective ownership of cloud platforms is uninteresting. The web crushed and locks out many competing ideas that serve in their own way. The fear of domestic american terrorists has been used as a dogwhistle for total control of the web. We need to get computing away from the cloud and invest in tech that allows communication and commerce in favour of conscious liberal individuals. Private networks and technology that darkens the mind of the CPU, is the only way to re-establish conscious liberal control over one's electronic life. Black boxes (and more) are the way out, from mental serfdom to a machine owned and run by foreign interests.
- auggierose 3y agoWell, "Technofeudalism" is on Amazon, and it has DRM. Enough said. He could at least have made it DRM free, like Doctorow did with "The Internet Con".
- roschdal 3y ago[flagged]
- nonrandomstring 3y agoI think he spelt Technofascism wrong. To whomever "flagged" my post. I am saddened that your mind is not open enough to seriously consider the implied political question and that you cower behind anonymous censorship. It seems wretched to implicitly deem Feudalism "acceptable", beside a title that announces the "death of capitalism", and yet fail to have the stomach to entertain for a second that - in an era of rising authoritarianism - the logical trajectory is indeed a form of technologically applied fascism? Does the word scare you so much? Consider carefully your position and what you are being part of.
- tored 3y agoBut how is it fascism? These corporations are above the nation state.
- Terr_ 3y agoBased on the definitional ideas of Griffin's "Palingenetic Ultranationalism" [0] (where "fascism" is identifiable primarily by motiviational myths) any corporations that operate with impunity could still qualify as fascist if they are still promising to snatch the last hope of a restored golden age for the "right" people, etc. Somehow makes me think of the scene from Iron Man (2008) where Tony Stark boasts that he's successfully privatized world peace... except imagine the untouchable CEO of SacreBleuCorp boasting that they've outdone the government to restore the glory and honor of the French or whatever. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palingenetic_ultranationalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palingenetic_ultranationalism
- nonrandomstring 3y ago> "fascism" is identifiable primarily by motiviational myths I always found "The Singularity" and the dreams of the cosmist elites to transcend mere humanism to be a quite grand "myth", easily comparable with any Thousand Year Reich.
- tored 3y agoAnd what group today is the "right people" that these corporations push for?
- Terr_ 3y agoI can't speak for the other poster, but I'm not saying I believe that's happening now. I'm merely pointing out that it's possible without being a contradiction in terms, especially if it gets to the point where there's ambiguity between the de jure state versus the de facto state. (Or worse, a Snow Crash scenario.)
- dwd 3y ago
- Finnucane 3y agoOne could just as easily argue that technofeudalism is in fact the endgame of capitalism, not the death of capitalism. In old-school feudalism, wealth came from the land, owning the land and the productive capacity of the land. Labor has no value and only serves to extract wealth for the benefit of the owning class. Capitalism abstracts this. Wealth comes from owning 'assets.' The position of labor remains the same. 'Consumers' are just the middle piece, necessary to churn the inputs and outputs. In a highly technological society, 'assets' can be very abstract and the extraction of value from the labor and consumer classes very efficient.
- kmeisthax 3y agoCapitalism is a necessary transition between feudalism and feudalism.
- omnimus 3y agoThis is one of the most memeable comments ive seen in a while. Applaud.
- qm9 3y agoim going to put this up as my readme slogan. how should i quote you?
- kmeisthax 3y agoDon't cite it to me, I stole it from a reply to a Cory Doctorow post on Mastodon about technofeudalism. That post itself was rephrasing of a Russian meme about the end of the Soviet Union[0]. So I don't think this one is necessarily citable. [0] Socialism is a necessary step in the transition between capitalism and capitalism.
- tored 3y agoI guess it comes down to the definition of capitalism, Mr Varoufakis says that it is markets and profits. I'm not an economist, thus a layman, but I can't entirely agree with that, in my opinion it is perfectly fine to have capitalism without markets, e.g. private monopoly (or oligopoly). From that perspective you can argue that is sort of like feudalism where privileges where used to create monopiles.
- jamesblonde 3y agoOne thing is sure that since Hayek's time, the market has become more efficient at creating and fulfilling the desires of consumers. The obligatory recommendation to see the Century of the Self by Adam Curtis for a historical perspective on consumerism. However, Varoufakis has a point that a monopolist capitalism, enabled by technology, is not an attractive system.
- camillomiller 3y agoI would indeed go rather with Oligocapitalism, than Technofeudalism.
- panick21_ 3y agoYes, lets create more xxxxxcapitalisms, its not as if we don't have enough of those. But I guess to include 'capitalism' in title always gives your arguments more meaning among leftists.
- camillomiller 3y agoWell, check Wikipedia, my man. Y'all think capitalism is one monolithic thing, but it is not. It's a multifaceted hydra, and it's totally fine to find names for the new heads that keep on popping out as soon as one gets cut.
- labrador 3y ago> The obligatory recommendation to see the Century of the Self by Adam Curtis or you could take a shortcut and ask Bard: "Advertising existed before Freud's nephew Edward L. Bernays came along. What new thing did he contribute to deserve to be called the father of modern advertising?"
- abdullahkhalids 3y ago> However, Varoufakis has a point that a monopolist capitalism, enabled by technology, is not an attractive system. Not only is it not a attractive state, in the sense of the capitalistic economic system being a dynamical system, it is a attractor state [1] of the system. That is what the core of the issue is. To fix things, you can't just stay within the capitalistic system. You have to change to a different dynamic system with a different attractor state. [1] Tongue-in-cheek pun fully intended.
- zolbrek 3y ago"While privatisation and private equity asset-strip all the material wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains. If each of us is to reclaim ownership of our individual minds, we need to collectively take ownership of cloud capital, instead of submitting to a few feudal overlords. It will be damn hard. But it’s the only way we can turn our cloud-based artefacts from a means of behaviour modification to a means of emancipation." I wish Varoufakis expanded on this more. Does he mean choosing alternatives like Mastodon over X FKA Twitter, or does he actually intend to say we need to collectively take ownership of giants like Amazon? I can't say I see the possibility of the latter.
- nomel 3y agoMy ISP, a monopoly, says I cant host any service. i asked them if their business plan allowed hosting, and they said no...
- hgdfhgfdhgdf 3y agoDo you not have access to AT&T and Verizon?
- nomel 3y agoI do not. I have exactly one ISP available in my region. This isn’t rare, in the US: https://ilsr.org/report-most-americans-have-no-real-choice-in-internet-providers/ https://ilsr.org/report-most-americans-have-no-real-choice-i...
- sublinear 3y agoI can certainly see how some businesses may handle sensitive data that require certifications and on-premises solutions. I'm curious why that's necessary for you though? Wouldn't a VPS be cheaper anyway?
- catgary 3y agoTaking ownership of Amazon seems crazy, but I do wonder if there’s some logic to the idea that it might be time to consider “public utility” versions of apps. Like a crown-corporation cloud services provider or a municipality-operated DoorDash.
- eli_gottlieb 3y agoAdkins et al provide a bit more of a sober take in "The Asset Economy", describing a shift in the dynamics of capitalism from classes being polarized by the ownership and sale of commodities (most people's only commodity being labor-power) to that of assets (with many people owning real-estate and therefore having a stake in continued asset inflation). https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Asset+Economy-p-9781509543458 https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Asset+Economy-p-978150954345...
- panick21_ 3y agoWow didn't know it was knew that people owned land. Truly something we only just introduce in the last two decades.
- eli_gottlieb 3y agoMost households being property owners is actually a new development of the post-WW2 social order.
- camillomiller 3y agoCertainly a captivating thesis, but it fails under its own intellectual hubris. While I'm a big fan of Mr. Varufakis' thinking, I believe in this case he is a little bit too enamoured of the elegant redefinition he's come up with. Some figures are also sketchy, like the "40%" in fees assigned to Amazon Marketplace (it's much less, between 8 and 15% based on category). Also, in feudalism the owners of the land would not provide services as these platforms do, they would only exert the power of ownership. The relationship here is more complex, as the cloud-serfs are also a source of capital as they buy the items sold by the platforms. That is certainly not a relationship that reminds of feudalism.
- ricardobeat 3y agoSellers using FBA can get up to that 40% mark. Yes, you’re paying for services, but Amazon is capturing all of it.
- imbnwa 3y ago>The relationship here is more complex, as the cloud-serfs are also a source of capital as they buy the items sold by the platforms Varoufakis makes the point in an interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy, on this same subject, that this trend towards this 'asset-stripping'/unpaid labor trades off with aggregate demand, so central banks have to print more money to make up for the fact that people have less and less purchasing power.
- chimpanzee 3y ago> Also, in feudalism the owners of the land would not provide services as these platforms do, they would only exert the power of ownership. The relationship here is more complex, as the cloud-serfs are also a source of capital as they buy the items sold by the platforms. Both of these claims (that owners did not provide services and that serfs were not sources of capital) is contradicted by wikipedia: “Serfs … were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence. Serfs were often required not only to work on the lord's fields, but also in his mines and forests and to labour to maintain roads.” The source for the Wikipedia text isn’t quite clear to me, but the content jibes with my prior understanding of serfdom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
- b112 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A4dMK7S6KE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A4dMK7S6KE interview on the same topic.
- Mainan_Tagonist 3y agoThe same old rant, over and over... Communistic rethoric is unable to evolve, it merelly reproduces the same criticism over time, pinpointing the same flaws just changing the target. Ho, and punching Hayek, 30 years after his death, is really beneath contempt. Technofeudalism is something you can choose to be a part of or not. You can (and should) pay for email, news and other services and you may or may not choose the cloud, most do not by the way. So really, who is Varoufakis talking about?
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago> Communistic rhetoric You remind me of my friend, who calls everything communist. I recited to him some writing from the French revolution, apparently it was communist before communism was invented.
- treyd 3y agoMany people do not have the disposable income to pay for email, news, or other services and even among those who do, aren't economically educated enough to think about the systemic downsides of taking the free option. Systemic problems are uniquely difficult to address at the individual level through individual action.
- tored 3y agoYou may have the skill, knowledge and wealth to pay for email, news and services, but a large part of the population doesn't and they will drag you down with them. Edit: typo, 'to' instead of 'the'
- Mainan_Tagonist 3y agoyes, and this large part of the population does not therefore have the means to become a technoserf.
- tored 3y agoWhy not? Non-engineers seems always be the most eager to use the cloud to the most extreme. It is your tech-illiterate friends that hook you into the toxic cloud merely by having your contact information. Technology changes social interactions.
- Geee 3y ago[flagged]
- ianbutler 3y agoThis is just a new spin on the same situation we had with Standard Oil and US Steel from the late 19th through the 20th century. History is repeating itself.
- dlkf 3y ago[flagged]
- seydor 3y agoWhat's making this guy so popular i wonder? The thesis here in particulr is very weak, technofeudalism is just the latest form of capitalism, it s not the end of it. we ve seen this kind of rhetoric before, like when TV advertising manufactured consumerism. Capitalism didn't die, quite the opposite
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y agoJust to be clear, whomever Varoufakis is popular with, that's not Greek voters. In the recent parliamentary elections the party he leads, MeRa25, received less than 3% of the vote (2.50%) and thus missed the threshold for seats in parliament: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2023_Greek_legislative_election#Results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2023_Greek_legislative_el... MeRa25's is row 9 in the table at the top of the section. Of course, the same parliamentary elections gave more than 3% and seats in parliament to various far-right remnants of Golden Dawn, like the "Spartans" (4.68%, 12 seats), "Victory" (3.70%, 10 seats) and "Greek Solution" (4.44%, 12 seats), and the Greek Communist Party (7.69%, 21 seats) so Varoufakis popularity is really no criterion for anything at all. At this point Greeks might next vote for Karagiozis (our version of Bozo the clown ish) for all the difference it will make.
- notacoward 3y ago> technofeudalism is just the latest form of capitalism Just so you know, some people might not see that as the strong defense you seem to think it is.
- the_biot 3y agoThe fact that Varoufakis still expounds on anything at all after his disastrous term in the Greek government proves that he's utterly shameless, and possibly has little self-awareness. But to see some people taking him serious and even discussing his writings with a straight face is surreal. This emperor has no clothes; publicly flashed Greece and all of Europe during its worst crisis in decades.
- iamsaitam 3y agoPlease elaborate on the everlasting effects of his disastrous campaign as Greece's finance minister.
- staunton 3y agoWhat exactly is disastrous about his term? He pushed for certain unorthodox policies, which may or may not have been economically prudent, but his boss decided not to go for them after all when pressured by the EU, at which point Varoufakis resigned because his political bit was over.
- inglor_cz 3y agoPolicies can't be divorced from reality, especially if you are a finance minister of a vulnerable, small, broke nation in hands of giants.
- staunton 3y agoI totally agree with what you're saying. However, does it apply to Varoufakis? Can you cite sources or outline an argument that his policies actually were divorced from reality? What would have happened if the Greek government had not backed down? Would it have been worse than what's slowly happening now? (Honest questions, I don't know enough economics to judge)
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago>> What exactly is disastrous about his term? He gambled with the fortunes of an entire country just to satisfy his ego. I'm Greek and I watched the events of the disastrous Greek delegation to Europe unfold from abroad, the UK where I'm an immigrant. Varoufakis was such an obvious clown, devoid of every possible sense of reality, let alone any kind of competence in technical matters, that he made me appreciate Angela fucking Merkel. That's right. I'm Greek and watching Varoufakis interact with Merkel, I ended up admiring Merkel. That's how disastrous was his term.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jokethrowaway 3y agoVaroufakis misses two key points: - Our crony capitalism is shaped by central regulators, which push the creation of monopolies through favouritism, bailouts, pure corruption and public education making employee slaves out of children. I argue most of the largest companies would be network of indipendente providers if competition without regulations existed and VC didn't distort the markets. Monopolies are made by the state and their crooked friends. - We don't have free will, we never had. We're biological machines with chemical mechanisms which are easily hacked. Our environment, most crucially other people, will shape what we want. Tech doesn't change the dynamics. The rest is pure nonsense, I was expecting more from Varoufakis.
- over_bridge 3y agoI wonder about index funds as well. How much are we entrenching the top 500 companies by having everyone buying the S&P500? What kind of advantage does number 500 have over 501 just by being included in the index? Companies need to be able to fail and turnover with newer and better ones but the whole economy seems pegged to the biggest ones staying at the top, deserved or otherwise. Should we ban index funds? (spontaneous question, not suggestion)
- havershank 3y ago[dead]
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoThe technofuedalists get to stay in power because people so happened to put their data in these data bases / technokeeps, and all the law is focused on anti-circumvention, on adding legal might to the high walls and big moats these folks eventually roll out (enshittification). For a while humanity had some property rights to the things they bought, to what happened in their home. But the big shift is that every device now has it's own terms of use, that these services get to write whatever contract they want to dictate to the world how it can use it's devices and it's data. Shout-out to this post highlighting "Web scraping for me but not for thee" highlighting Mark Lemley making this point (the shift from pro-humanity property rights to pro corporation contract law) 20 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970 https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-for-me-but-not-for-thee-guest-blog-post.htm https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-f... My personal opinion here, IP and anti-circumvention laws should be gutted & are a scourge against the human spirit. We should be encouraging mashup culture & rising off the shoulders of giants, not being crushed under their heels.
- dwd 3y agoUnfortunately for Varoufakis who is a self-proclaimed Trekkie and Liberal Marxist, the technology isn't there yet to backup his dream of a more equable, StarTrek-like world, and while we may grow enough food to feed to world; energy and water are still treated as zero-sum games with the inevitable conflict. Still, I greatly admired him for his stand against Scholz and the bullies from the EU, IMF and World Bank; who did everything to ignore and silence him over the Greek austerity measures in 2015. In a way his sacking which allowed Greece to capitulate, made him a celebrity and elevated his cause. "If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine." Still waiting for his grand theory comparing between Star Wars (Feudalism/Roman Empire) and StarTrek (Liberal Commmunism) as SciFi greatly influences how he considers the world, including writing his own dystopian/utopian fiction.
- panick21_ 3y agoAs somebody who likes history, I hate how feudalism has become to be used by so many public intellectuals. Just come up with something new, comparing our current crazy society with early medieval Europe is just absurd.
- 0dayz 3y agoSorry but this sounds more of making shit up to sound fancy, what he's talking about is just plain old monopolistic company. Also unherd is such a red flag for me when you look who gets to usually write, and about which topic (right wing align and the "left" which is just blue labour, effectively spcially conservative, economically labour), it's usually very one-sided and slanted to the right, the "left" are either writing on issues the right (conservative) agree on like progressive liberals are bad because they support LGBT (usually its against the T) or they write something vague like this that anyone can sort of agree on.