7 ms·

American Big Tech Has Enslaved Us [video]

107 points by 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago

Animats 3y ago
57 minutes! Is there a summary?
- gruez 3y ago
  https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=VatYrw0uqjU https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=VatYrw0uq...
  - paulsutter 3y ago
    Thanks for posting, what a useful service (read in minutes instead of listen for an hour)
    - Animats 3y ago
      Yes, thanks. Now I get it. His big non-rant point is that the EU has failed to generate significant "cloud capital". There's no dominant European alternative to Meta/Facebook/Instagram or Google. The main competition seems to be TikTok. Amazon, though, does not dominate the online market for stuff in the EU as it does in the US.[1] Most of the EU competitors to Amazon are single-country, apparently. [1] https://sifted.eu/articles/amazon-europe-ecommerce-competitors https://sifted.eu/articles/amazon-europe-ecommerce-competito...
      - ilkke 3y ago
        How is that even remotely "his big point"? He is criticizing the wealth extraction, not lamenting that he doesn't get a better seat at its table.
        Animats 3y ago
        No, he wants a better seat at the table. He's a minor politician. Held office in Greece. Heads the " European Realistic Disobedience Front".
        trog 3y ago
        > No, he wants a better seat at the table. He's a minor politician. Held office in Greece. Heads the " European Realistic Disobedience Front". Please look him up in a bit more detail before dismissing him as a 'minor politician'.
      - snowpid 3y ago
        Varoufakis clearly has a bad record of non - successes: - Bad Greek financial minister - His stances on Ukraine conflict and Israel (why doesnt he just stop talking about these topics? It is out of his expertise!) He might ask local entrepreneurs what challenges they face in Greece / EU / Europe. But I guess this is too much work for leftie intellectual.
        jacooper 3y ago
        His stance on israel is perfect, its an apartheid occupation.
      - foogazi 3y ago
        > Most of the EU competitors to Amazon are single-country, apparently. Weird - so regardless of the Union part of the EU, European companies have not expanded beyond their home countries?
        lazide 3y ago
        Language/cultural barriers are strong in Europe.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      How accurate and trustworthy is the summarisation though?
  - paradox460 3y ago
    How's this compare to kagi's universal summarizer?
  - 6510 3y ago
    I feed the text it into invideo text to video http://go-here.nl/invideo-ai-480%20Techno-Feudalism_%20The%20New%20Power%20Game%202023-10-16.mp4 http://go-here.nl/invideo-ai-480%20Techno-Feudalism_%20The%2...
- anotherhue 3y ago
  Here is a summary of the key points from the podcast transcription: * Janis Varoufakis argues that capitalism has been replaced by a new system he calls "techno-feudalism." This is a result of the rise of "cloud capital" owned by big tech companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. * He believes cloud capital has enabled a new form of economic rent extraction, allowing tech lords like Jeff Bezos to collect huge rents from digital platforms that increasingly replace market transactions. This parallels feudal lords extracting rents from their land. * The massive money printing by central banks after the 2008 crisis provided the funding for this rapid expansion of cloud capital, further entrenching the power of techno-feudal lords. * Varoufakis sees the rise of figures like Donald Trump as a backlash against this new techno-feudalism from "petit bourgeois" capitalists and workers left behind by deindustrialization. * However, Europe is now irrelevant compared to the techno-feudal spheres of influence in the US and China, as it has no cloud capital of its own. (yt-dlp | ffmpeg | whisper-cpp | claude.ai) * The euro has locked countries like Italy and Greece into permanent austerity and decline. Leaving would be painful but may be necessary. * Covid provided an opportunity for more debt and money distribution to elites. Liberal individualism is dying as big tech shapes desires. * In summary, Varoufakis argues contemporary capitalism has been replaced by a neo-feudal system ruled by tech oligarchs extracting rents via cloud platforms.
  - KirillPanov 3y ago
    > massive money printing by central banks after the 2008 crisis provided the funding for this rapid expansion of cloud capital This phenomenon is so massively underappreciated. Now that interest rates are back to normal I am extremely interested in seeing how much of this phenomenon is permanent (i.e. path-dependent). I just hope that Big Tech hasn't become so important that it is bailout-eligible. "It isn't until the tide goes out that you see who's been swimming naked" -- various successful investors.
  - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
    If you are going to post AI generated content on this platform, well either don't. Or if there is a huge need for it, kindly label it clearly at the top as such.
samr71 3y ago
He is right, technofeudalism is the future. However, I think this will end up be being seen as a good thing, and history will ultimately look back at the transition as being as obviously good as Monarchy -> Democracy.
- polotics 3y ago
  care to explain your thinking on this one?
  - syndacks 3y ago
    Not OP but my read is that at some point we just tax the fuck out of the tech gods who “win”, creating UBI for the rest
    - polotics 3y ago
      Allright. The big problem with this approach is you've fully gotten rid of the invisible hand of the market, you're in a top-down economy, and inefficiencies are bound to explode..
      - pekantdook 3y ago
        Over hiring and laying off tens of thousands is efficiency! Sending empty planes in the air to keep take off slots is so efficient! …Stop parroting memes of the ossified that fall apart with 10 seconds of discussion.
      - kelseyfrog 3y ago
        I am like a lot of people, near the point of giving up. If the choice is between wealth inequality and market ineffeciencies, I'm going to threaten picking market ineffeciencies simply as bargaining leverage against wealth inequality. Like all go threats, I'd be willing to pull the trigger.
        arbitrary_name 3y ago
lakomen 3y ago
Yeah I've been bombarded with this through and alternative Youtube frontend on my TV, because I follow Diem25. TlDr clouds are the new land owners and have replaced capitalism. He's not wrong but not right either. I'd wager he's about 70% on the right side. You still and always have the option to not use cloud, even if there ever were no data centers available, you can still pay to be connected to whatever local data exchange for a comparable price to renting a rack, if you didn't know. But the world is not just computers. You don't need to use cloud services. Example Germany, offline water delivery is still done via phone calls, and the people running those shops don't want it any other way, because they have too many customers and not enough people willing to work for base hourly payments doing physically hard work. I'm sure more examples can be found. When it comes to jobs, I'm having a very hard time finding one which doesn't require knowledge about AWS, usually their preferred cloud operator, then comes Azure and lastly GCP, in Germany. GCP usually only if they're completely Google powered. But he doesn't mean just clouds but also the connected services. The whole deal. He's not a developer and doesn't know that everything you can do with cloud, you can do without cloud. You don't need serverless, k8s etc. But people get indoctrinated. I was too, 2013 when k8s started being popular, when docker was the great new thing, when Google+ propaganda showcased k8s, I was on board. Then I saw, hey wait a minute. Too complicated for every day use, too expensive for the little guy (me), too time intensive to maintain. That's why it got hyped. To drive business to their cloud. Yannis and others make the same mistake, they don't value their own but believe someone else can do better than they can, because they actually lack knowledge. Gaming anecdote, Battlefield 2142. Many servers had the "No fighting commander" rule, because apparently, according to them, "A commander can't fight and command". Well maybe they couldn't, but I could. And I did great and had a lot of fun. Cloud is similar. There are people who are able and stand on their own and there are people who aren't and need to pay, expensively, for the work of others. If you can cook you might go to a restaurant occasionally, but most of the time you'll cook yourself. And the meal costs 5€ and not 25€. Of course if you've got it all figured out you might have a lot of money and wouldn't mind inviting a friend and pay 80€ for the meal. Who cares, you make 700€ a day. And that friend will give make you another 200€ per day. But if you're poor 5€ is a good meal. Hey it's Sunday so don't take it all too seriously.
- antoniuschan99 3y ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
One thing he says at around 43'00" is that the shift from feudalism to capitalism, i.e., ownership of the means of production, was based on two pillars: profits and markets. However, the author says techno-feudalism's "markets", e.g. Amazon, Alibaba, Uber, are not markets in the classic sense, but "platforms" where trading, buying and selling, takes place outside the marketplace. The techno-feudal lords collect rents. Uber does not own cars. "The landlord does not participate in production." AirBnB, Amazon are other cited examples. As such, profits are replaced by rents and markets are replaced by techno-fiefdoms. His book argues that this is not "capitalism" in the classic sense. It's something else. He admits some of his colleagues would simply call it "rentier capitalism", but he prefers to ditch the term "capitalism". He argues our ancestors could have called capitalism "industrial feudalism" or "capital feudalism". He wants to make the point that this is not capitalism anymore, even though it's based on the triumph of capital. He says repeatedly that "when everything has to go through" Google, Apple, Facebook, etc., but he never uses the word "intermediary". Were feudal lords intermediaries. In the early days of the internet I recall there was talk of "disintermediation" that would be enabled through the growth of the network and yet today it feels as though the internet itself has become the source of excessive, toxic intermediation. Toxic for one because it comes with absurd levels of surveillance and data collection. The author sounds like he would be a fun professor to have as a student.
- throw310822 3y ago
  I think it's similar to the very beginning of industrialization, when factory owners were exploiting large numbers of entirely fungible unskilled labourers. Opening the gates to the factory in the morning and admitting as many desperate people as needed, paying them with the bare minimum necessary to their survival. And those who became sick were simply replaced by others. Today the factory has been replaced by the mega-corporation, and the "workers" are now smaller businesses and private entrepreneurs or individual producers. Their job is now skilled and personal, but the offer is so vast that each of them is fungible anyway. The platform, which acts as a gateway, has no obligations towards them and can replace them at any time (and therefore has complete power over them). Historically this situation has been solved by imposing limits to the freedom of factory owners and allowing workers to unionize, to restore a balance of power between the capitalists and the masses of workers. This has not been done yet with the new internet economy.
drewcoo 3y ago
It seems incredibly disingenuous for people to keep renaming the current system "not capitalism," when clearly oligopoly is the end game of unconstrained capitalism. Capitalism was marketed to us all as efficiency and prosperity. And when down on our luck, we were temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The renaming seems to be an attempt to do a sleight of hand (sleight of word?) so as not to upset all of the people to whom capitalism has been successfully marketed. Are we all so sensitive that we require misplaced blame to discuss the problems? Are we all so naive that we'll fall for the trick?
- hattmall 3y ago
  I don't really think you're correct. It is appropriate to call it not capitalism. Because that's what's happening. Capital is not controlling the means of production. Perhaps algo-ism or something. Firstly, there is nothing super special about most of these platforms that would make them difficult to reproduce even with a small amount of capital. Secondly, even with vast sums of capital you can't be assured of successfully pulling users away from an existing platform. The point of capitalism is that efficiency is created by the flow of money directing the means of production. Instead with the platforms directing things we see massive gameification of the systems and inefficient direction of production by the platform manipulating things to make the platform more money. Ultimately the will of the consumer is being misdirected by subterfuge creating inefficient markets which are no longer being directed by capital and not capitalist. The platforms all reach a point where they can't make more money by simply injecting more funds to be more productive. They can however make more money by actually being worse and extracting more value from their users though.
- randomdata 3y ago
  > when clearly oligopoly is the end game of unconstrained capitalism. The trouble (or benefit) of unconstrained capitalism is that as soon as you do anything compelling, a thousand people will jump in to copy you. This makes establishment of an oligopoly highly unlikely. We see oligopolies in our constrained environment because the artificial constraints (e.g. intellectual property laws) we apply help build 'moats', keeping those thousands away.
opportune 3y ago
Serving videos with interspersed ads or selling goods on the internet really are not complex business models. You can hardly call the fact that people choose to use these novel things - when replacements like cable TV and brick and mortar stores are still working just fine - slavery. The EU really needs to drop their victim mindset about these American software companies and critically examine why their insistence on the grant-model for innovation has resulted in failure after failure in the software space. They’ll try to start a “Silicon X” where literally the only thing in common with Silicon Valley is they try to collocate the jobs they’re creating, which is like the easiest factor to replicate as it will mostly happen naturally if they address the actual other factors like attracting venture capital, letting employees take home a lot of money and switch jobs freely, letting companies hire and fire more freely, actually valuing the software work instead of glorifying nontechnical pencil pushers like project managers…

107 points by 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago

Animats 3y ago

57 minutes! Is there a summary?

gruez 3y ago
https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=VatYrw0uqjU https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=VatYrw0uq...
- paulsutter 3y ago
  Thanks for posting, what a useful service (read in minutes instead of listen for an hour)
  - Animats 3y ago
    Yes, thanks. Now I get it. His big non-rant point is that the EU has failed to generate significant "cloud capital". There's no dominant European alternative to Meta/Facebook/Instagram or Google. The main competition seems to be TikTok. Amazon, though, does not dominate the online market for stuff in the EU as it does in the US.[1] Most of the EU competitors to Amazon are single-country, apparently. [1] https://sifted.eu/articles/amazon-europe-ecommerce-competitors https://sifted.eu/articles/amazon-europe-ecommerce-competito...
    - ilkke 3y ago
      How is that even remotely "his big point"? He is criticizing the wealth extraction, not lamenting that he doesn't get a better seat at its table.
      - Animats 3y ago
        No, he wants a better seat at the table. He's a minor politician. Held office in Greece. Heads the " European Realistic Disobedience Front".
        trog 3y ago
        > No, he wants a better seat at the table. He's a minor politician. Held office in Greece. Heads the " European Realistic Disobedience Front". Please look him up in a bit more detail before dismissing him as a 'minor politician'.
    - snowpid 3y ago
      Varoufakis clearly has a bad record of non - successes: - Bad Greek financial minister - His stances on Ukraine conflict and Israel (why doesnt he just stop talking about these topics? It is out of his expertise!) He might ask local entrepreneurs what challenges they face in Greece / EU / Europe. But I guess this is too much work for leftie intellectual.
      - jacooper 3y ago
        His stance on israel is perfect, its an apartheid occupation.
    - foogazi 3y ago
      > Most of the EU competitors to Amazon are single-country, apparently. Weird - so regardless of the Union part of the EU, European companies have not expanded beyond their home countries?
      - lazide 3y ago
        Language/cultural barriers are strong in Europe.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    How accurate and trustworthy is the summarisation though?
- paradox460 3y ago
  How's this compare to kagi's universal summarizer?
- 6510 3y ago
  I feed the text it into invideo text to video http://go-here.nl/invideo-ai-480%20Techno-Feudalism_%20The%20New%20Power%20Game%202023-10-16.mp4 http://go-here.nl/invideo-ai-480%20Techno-Feudalism_%20The%2...
anotherhue 3y ago
Here is a summary of the key points from the podcast transcription: * Janis Varoufakis argues that capitalism has been replaced by a new system he calls "techno-feudalism." This is a result of the rise of "cloud capital" owned by big tech companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. * He believes cloud capital has enabled a new form of economic rent extraction, allowing tech lords like Jeff Bezos to collect huge rents from digital platforms that increasingly replace market transactions. This parallels feudal lords extracting rents from their land. * The massive money printing by central banks after the 2008 crisis provided the funding for this rapid expansion of cloud capital, further entrenching the power of techno-feudal lords. * Varoufakis sees the rise of figures like Donald Trump as a backlash against this new techno-feudalism from "petit bourgeois" capitalists and workers left behind by deindustrialization. * However, Europe is now irrelevant compared to the techno-feudal spheres of influence in the US and China, as it has no cloud capital of its own. (yt-dlp | ffmpeg | whisper-cpp | claude.ai) * The euro has locked countries like Italy and Greece into permanent austerity and decline. Leaving would be painful but may be necessary. * Covid provided an opportunity for more debt and money distribution to elites. Liberal individualism is dying as big tech shapes desires. * In summary, Varoufakis argues contemporary capitalism has been replaced by a neo-feudal system ruled by tech oligarchs extracting rents via cloud platforms.
- KirillPanov 3y ago
  > massive money printing by central banks after the 2008 crisis provided the funding for this rapid expansion of cloud capital This phenomenon is so massively underappreciated. Now that interest rates are back to normal I am extremely interested in seeing how much of this phenomenon is permanent (i.e. path-dependent). I just hope that Big Tech hasn't become so important that it is bailout-eligible. "It isn't until the tide goes out that you see who's been swimming naked" -- various successful investors.
- abdullahkhalids 3y ago
  If you are going to post AI generated content on this platform, well either don't. Or if there is a huge need for it, kindly label it clearly at the top as such.

samr71 3y ago

He is right, technofeudalism is the future. However, I think this will end up be being seen as a good thing, and history will ultimately look back at the transition as being as obviously good as Monarchy -> Democracy.

polotics 3y ago
care to explain your thinking on this one?
- syndacks 3y ago
  Not OP but my read is that at some point we just tax the fuck out of the tech gods who “win”, creating UBI for the rest
  - polotics 3y ago
    Allright. The big problem with this approach is you've fully gotten rid of the invisible hand of the market, you're in a top-down economy, and inefficiencies are bound to explode..
    - pekantdook 3y ago
      Over hiring and laying off tens of thousands is efficiency! Sending empty planes in the air to keep take off slots is so efficient! …Stop parroting memes of the ossified that fall apart with 10 seconds of discussion.
    - kelseyfrog 3y ago
      I am like a lot of people, near the point of giving up. If the choice is between wealth inequality and market ineffeciencies, I'm going to threaten picking market ineffeciencies simply as bargaining leverage against wealth inequality. Like all go threats, I'd be willing to pull the trigger.
      - arbitrary_name 3y ago

lakomen 3y ago

Yeah I've been bombarded with this through and alternative Youtube frontend on my TV, because I follow Diem25. TlDr clouds are the new land owners and have replaced capitalism. He's not wrong but not right either. I'd wager he's about 70% on the right side. You still and always have the option to not use cloud, even if there ever were no data centers available, you can still pay to be connected to whatever local data exchange for a comparable price to renting a rack, if you didn't know. But the world is not just computers. You don't need to use cloud services. Example Germany, offline water delivery is still done via phone calls, and the people running those shops don't want it any other way, because they have too many customers and not enough people willing to work for base hourly payments doing physically hard work. I'm sure more examples can be found. When it comes to jobs, I'm having a very hard time finding one which doesn't require knowledge about AWS, usually their preferred cloud operator, then comes Azure and lastly GCP, in Germany. GCP usually only if they're completely Google powered. But he doesn't mean just clouds but also the connected services. The whole deal. He's not a developer and doesn't know that everything you can do with cloud, you can do without cloud. You don't need serverless, k8s etc. But people get indoctrinated. I was too, 2013 when k8s started being popular, when docker was the great new thing, when Google+ propaganda showcased k8s, I was on board. Then I saw, hey wait a minute. Too complicated for every day use, too expensive for the little guy (me), too time intensive to maintain. That's why it got hyped. To drive business to their cloud. Yannis and others make the same mistake, they don't value their own but believe someone else can do better than they can, because they actually lack knowledge. Gaming anecdote, Battlefield 2142. Many servers had the "No fighting commander" rule, because apparently, according to them, "A commander can't fight and command". Well maybe they couldn't, but I could. And I did great and had a lot of fun. Cloud is similar. There are people who are able and stand on their own and there are people who aren't and need to pay, expensively, for the work of others. If you can cook you might go to a restaurant occasionally, but most of the time you'll cook yourself. And the meal costs 5€ and not 25€. Of course if you've got it all figured out you might have a lot of money and wouldn't mind inviting a friend and pay 80€ for the meal. Who cares, you make 700€ a day. And that friend will give make you another 200€ per day. But if you're poor 5€ is a good meal. Hey it's Sunday so don't take it all too seriously.

antoniuschan99 3y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

One thing he says at around 43'00" is that the shift from feudalism to capitalism, i.e., ownership of the means of production, was based on two pillars: profits and markets. However, the author says techno-feudalism's "markets", e.g. Amazon, Alibaba, Uber, are not markets in the classic sense, but "platforms" where trading, buying and selling, takes place outside the marketplace. The techno-feudal lords collect rents. Uber does not own cars. "The landlord does not participate in production." AirBnB, Amazon are other cited examples. As such, profits are replaced by rents and markets are replaced by techno-fiefdoms. His book argues that this is not "capitalism" in the classic sense. It's something else. He admits some of his colleagues would simply call it "rentier capitalism", but he prefers to ditch the term "capitalism". He argues our ancestors could have called capitalism "industrial feudalism" or "capital feudalism". He wants to make the point that this is not capitalism anymore, even though it's based on the triumph of capital. He says repeatedly that "when everything has to go through" Google, Apple, Facebook, etc., but he never uses the word "intermediary". Were feudal lords intermediaries. In the early days of the internet I recall there was talk of "disintermediation" that would be enabled through the growth of the network and yet today it feels as though the internet itself has become the source of excessive, toxic intermediation. Toxic for one because it comes with absurd levels of surveillance and data collection. The author sounds like he would be a fun professor to have as a student.

throw310822 3y ago
I think it's similar to the very beginning of industrialization, when factory owners were exploiting large numbers of entirely fungible unskilled labourers. Opening the gates to the factory in the morning and admitting as many desperate people as needed, paying them with the bare minimum necessary to their survival. And those who became sick were simply replaced by others. Today the factory has been replaced by the mega-corporation, and the "workers" are now smaller businesses and private entrepreneurs or individual producers. Their job is now skilled and personal, but the offer is so vast that each of them is fungible anyway. The platform, which acts as a gateway, has no obligations towards them and can replace them at any time (and therefore has complete power over them). Historically this situation has been solved by imposing limits to the freedom of factory owners and allowing workers to unionize, to restore a balance of power between the capitalists and the masses of workers. This has not been done yet with the new internet economy.

drewcoo 3y ago

It seems incredibly disingenuous for people to keep renaming the current system "not capitalism," when clearly oligopoly is the end game of unconstrained capitalism. Capitalism was marketed to us all as efficiency and prosperity. And when down on our luck, we were temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The renaming seems to be an attempt to do a sleight of hand (sleight of word?) so as not to upset all of the people to whom capitalism has been successfully marketed. Are we all so sensitive that we require misplaced blame to discuss the problems? Are we all so naive that we'll fall for the trick?

hattmall 3y ago
I don't really think you're correct. It is appropriate to call it not capitalism. Because that's what's happening. Capital is not controlling the means of production. Perhaps algo-ism or something. Firstly, there is nothing super special about most of these platforms that would make them difficult to reproduce even with a small amount of capital. Secondly, even with vast sums of capital you can't be assured of successfully pulling users away from an existing platform. The point of capitalism is that efficiency is created by the flow of money directing the means of production. Instead with the platforms directing things we see massive gameification of the systems and inefficient direction of production by the platform manipulating things to make the platform more money. Ultimately the will of the consumer is being misdirected by subterfuge creating inefficient markets which are no longer being directed by capital and not capitalist. The platforms all reach a point where they can't make more money by simply injecting more funds to be more productive. They can however make more money by actually being worse and extracting more value from their users though.
randomdata 3y ago
> when clearly oligopoly is the end game of unconstrained capitalism. The trouble (or benefit) of unconstrained capitalism is that as soon as you do anything compelling, a thousand people will jump in to copy you. This makes establishment of an oligopoly highly unlikely. We see oligopolies in our constrained environment because the artificial constraints (e.g. intellectual property laws) we apply help build 'moats', keeping those thousands away.

opportune 3y ago

Serving videos with interspersed ads or selling goods on the internet really are not complex business models. You can hardly call the fact that people choose to use these novel things - when replacements like cable TV and brick and mortar stores are still working just fine - slavery. The EU really needs to drop their victim mindset about these American software companies and critically examine why their insistence on the grant-model for innovation has resulted in failure after failure in the software space. They’ll try to start a “Silicon X” where literally the only thing in common with Silicon Valley is they try to collocate the jobs they’re creating, which is like the easiest factor to replicate as it will mostly happen naturally if they address the actual other factors like attracting venture capital, letting employees take home a lot of money and switch jobs freely, letting companies hire and fire more freely, actually valuing the software work instead of glorifying nontechnical pencil pushers like project managers…