7 ms·

Technofeudalism

81 points by mindaslab 3y ago

fithisux 3y ago
Highly recommended.
voxleone 3y ago
He may have been wrong in the past, but this insight seems to be spot on. I'm pretty satisfied with what is to me a faithful description of the zeitgeist. Related article: https://theconversation.com/is-capitalism-dead-yanis-varoufakis-thinks-it-is-and-he-knows-who-killed-it-213992 https://theconversation.com/is-capitalism-dead-yanis-varoufa...
- cma 3y ago
  He worked for Valve, a 30% app store, on making an economy of consumer producers to make digital hats for them to resell, but never seems to mention it in interviews for this new book. Does he discuss it in the book? He seems to have been an early architect of the "cloud capital"/"technofeudalism" system.
  - timeagain 3y ago
    Often those closest to the problem are most apt to describe it. Lots of people become disillusioned with their work.
    - AniseAbyss 3y ago
      [dead]
yamazakiwi 3y ago
It's difficult to take this seriously. Cloud Serfs? ...really? He names these new capitalists Vassal Capitalists and then makes the title of the book What Killed Capitalism.
- davisr 3y ago
  "I won't take his ideas seriously because of superficial reasons, and I don't have any actual arguments against his thesis, so I must throw mud and hope something sticks."
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - yamazakiwi 3y ago
    Because this thesis is stupid This framing is silly. He says we're Cloud Serfs because we do unpaid work whenever we use our phones... You're not a Serf for using social media or watching videos online, regardless of how much value is extracted by these companies. You contributed nothing to the dialogue surrounding the topic that you are supposedly defending from mud throwing.
    - n_ary 3y ago
      Which is true... Think of it this way, your phone does social media, which doesn't work unless ypu engage. When you engage there, mote people adapts it due to community, more eyeballs for sweet ad money. These medias also grow large and relies on other services to scale and perform those ad workload so they also build or pay someone else for the resources. In the end what you get is a good feelong in the heart that people liked that one post/photo while they got sweet ad money and someone actually bought a product and someone else made more money. However that engagement has a cost, you are the acrobat in their circus stage, but you get no pay and while at it you also paid for that over complex device that they also sold(charged you money to give your performance). Of course, you can nitpick all you want from my bad example, and do a lot of what-aboutism, but the point is clear I hope.
      - yamazakiwi 3y ago
        I agree with everthing you said, but again, contextually users aren't doing any "work". That is the distinction I'm trying to draw. You are less like a serf and more like a thief victim, making the writers comparisons quite stretched by definition. We could be discussing these problems straight-forward as you have described them instead of trying to make it sound like skynet has turned us into actual slaves and selling people on 24 news-cycle style dystopia bait.
dingnuts 3y ago
I haven't read the book but in this pull quote from a related article linked in the comments >Traditional capitalists, he proposes, have become “vassal capitalists”. They are subordinate and dependent on a new breed of “lords” – the Big Tech companies – who generate enormous wealth via new digital platforms. A new form of algorithmic capital has evolved – what Varoufakis calls “cloud capital” – and it has displaced “capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits”. How is it that creating a new type of capital paradoxically brings about the end of capital? Also, in this definition, why are the "lords" able to "generate enormous wealth" just like capitalists? In feudalism, lords were lords over their vassals due to violent power, literally the threat of the sword, and did not create wealth the way a capitalist does by directing the application of capital to generate more wealth, but instead used the threat of violence to take a portion of what their vassals would otherwise generate anyway, in exchange for using that violence against foreign enemies as well. So.. is Facebook forcing me to hand over some of my wealth by using violence, with the agreement that they will also use their monopoly on violence to protect me from Snapchat, if I sign up to Facebook? If not, this seems like someone wanted a book about "technofeudalism" and "capitalism" because they are words that will sell books, and worked backwards to make whatever claims they wanted to make without any real interest in what feudalism or capitalism even actually are.
- arrosenberg 3y ago
  > Also, in this definition, why are the "lords" able to "generate enormous wealth" just like capitalists? Feudal lords generated their wealth from exploiting the lands they held. Generally, they don't make more land, but when the world wide web came into being, there was suddenly a ton of new land! Between 2000-2015, the tech giants consolidated much of that land (and thus the wealth) - giants like Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Adobe and MSFT can absolutely be viewed as imperialist, and they operate in that manner internally. > So.. is Facebook forcing me to hand over some of my wealth by using violence, with the agreement that they will also use their monopoly on violence to protect me from Snapchat, if I sign up to Facebook? Kind of. Facebook is using economic and legal violence, rather than physical. They won't send a squad of knights to your house to punish you, but they are attempting to create a system where your only options are to use their service, in the manner they want you to use it (i.e. the one that maximizes their revenues). Why run a business when you can collect the gabelle? Sure, they don't own Snapchat, they certainly tried, but they own Instagram, Whatsapp, and hundreds of other startups they've taken out of the market. You still have some options (TikTok, Snapchat) because Meta's dominance is incomplete and the state doesn't fully support them having a monopoly.
butternick 3y ago
https://youtu.be/VatYrw0uqjU?si=0PIFTf_O36oTHGBu https://youtu.be/VatYrw0uqjU?si=0PIFTf_O36oTHGBu Here’s a great interview with the author
beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
Evgeny Morozov wrote a very interesting, but also quite long, critique of the "technofeudalism" concept from a Marxist perspective in the New Left Review back in 2022: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii133/articles/evgeny-morozov-critique-of-techno-feudal-reason https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii133/articles/evgeny-moroz... > In the case of well-known figures like Varoufakis and Mazzucato, tantalizing their audiences with invocations of feudal glamour may provide a media-friendly way to recycle arguments they have made before. In Varoufakis’s case, techno-feudalism seems to be mostly about the perverse macroeconomic effects of quantitative easing. For Mazzucato, ‘digital feudalism’ refers to the unearned income generated by tech platforms. Neo-feudalism is often proposed as a way to bring conceptual clarity to the most advanced sectors of the digital economy, where the left’s brightest minds still find themselves very much in the dark. Are Google and Amazon capitalists? Are they rentiers, as Brett Christophers’s Rentier Capitalism suggests? What about Uber? Is it just an intermediary, a rent-taking platform that has inserted itself between drivers and passengers? Or is it producing and selling a transportation service? These questions are not without consequences for how we think about contemporary capitalism itself, heavily dominated by technology companies. > The idea that feudalism is making a comeback also coheres with left critiques condemning capitalism as extractivist. If today’s capitalists are mere lazy rentiers who contribute nothing to the production process, don’t they deserve to be downgraded to the status of feudal landlords? This embrace of feudal imagery by media- and meme-friendly figures of the left intelligentsia shows no signs of ceasing. 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. In what follows I delve into some landmark debates on the distinguishing features that differentiate capitalism from earlier economic forms—and those that define political-economic operations in the new digital economy—in hope that a critique of techno-feudal reason may throw fresh light on the world we’re in.
- ajkjk 3y ago
  Wow, I tried to read it and mostly managed to, although I ended up skimming the end. It is really everything that is wrong with bitter overintellectual leftism: endless babble littered with pointless historical references and a neverending adoration of 'theory' while totally misunderstanding the rest of the world's moral opinions on, well, anything. The worst passage I found was this: >If these are lazy waterfall-owning rentiers, they are peculiarly masochistic ones: why not just rest on their laurels, fire everyone and stop spending? And who, looking at these numbers, could really believe—together with the post-workerists—that capitalists are now external to production? What then are they spending all this r&d money on? The gist: if you choose the dumbest possible interpretation of what 'technofeudalism' is referring to and couch it in enough verbiage and citations you can dismiss the concept without ever having to see why people find it so appealing or realize that you're missing the point. It's really simple. It's the monopolies and their walled gardens and moats and manipulations... and the lack of accountability to the public. What's feudalistic is the lack of accountability. It only incidentally has to do with any particular model of what capitalism or feudalism is according to some random texts or endless theory and everything to do with the fact that everyone hates the system but can't seem to change it and make it follow prosocial dignity-preserving rules. More specifically: although theorists have opinions about whether this is some sort of 'alternative' to capitalism (if what we're 'in' can even be called capitalism anymore, even before the internet...).. The reason the concept rings true and has staying power is not those theories; it is that the modern world emotionally pattern matches to aspects of feudalism. No doubt people felt the same way circa 1900 in the first big era of capitalist monopolies. Regardless, labeling what 'mode of production' we're in is really not the appeal of the phrase (or, imo, a very useful concept at all).
sinistersnare 3y ago
I have been listening to Yanis a lot lately. His ideas are quite provocative. His economic ideas are quite refreshing, to hear an economist talking about what a post-subjective-money world may look like. Today, we have a new class of people, who to borrow Yanis's metaphor I would call Techno-peasants, who exist in a grand subjugation. Any reader of these comments would do well to listen to a few interviews of his.
- TheCapeGreek 3y ago
  Let's not forget economic minister of Greece, as disastrous as that was. I do like his ideas, but he just really did not seem to play nice in politics.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
    'Nice' is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_an_Illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_an_Illusion
bilvar 3y ago
So watching cat videos is somehow akin to serfdom now. I swear the over-intellectualism of the left makes them sound dumber and dumber. Why do they have to make everything so idiotically complex? Is it an occult/esoteric thing in order to signal authority to the masses?
- latency-guy2 3y ago
  Its the utter domination of capitalism that they truly do not realize how ridiculous they look every day. Capitalism has answered all that communists and socialists could never even fathom, and more. It used to be a caricature to portray the rich as fat men with monocles, now the world is in an obesity crisis. Leftists are stuck in the 1800s, and the only thing they do is talk like it as well. They really have nothing else going for them. Its all a performance, we can only hope that the few that are honest would admit it.
RecycledEle 3y ago
Yanis Varoufakis: Welcome to the age of technofeudalism from UnHerd on YouTube [36:22] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MXHukxnEZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MXHukxnEZM

81 points by mindaslab 3y ago

Highly recommended.

He may have been wrong in the past, but this insight seems to be spot on. I'm pretty satisfied with what is to me a faithful description of the zeitgeist. Related article: https://theconversation.com/is-capitalism-dead-yanis-varoufakis-thinks-it-is-and-he-knows-who-killed-it-213992 https://theconversation.com/is-capitalism-dead-yanis-varoufa...

cma 3y ago
He worked for Valve, a 30% app store, on making an economy of consumer producers to make digital hats for them to resell, but never seems to mention it in interviews for this new book. Does he discuss it in the book? He seems to have been an early architect of the "cloud capital"/"technofeudalism" system.
- timeagain 3y ago
  Often those closest to the problem are most apt to describe it. Lots of people become disillusioned with their work.
  - AniseAbyss 3y ago
    [dead]

yamazakiwi 3y ago

It's difficult to take this seriously. Cloud Serfs? ...really? He names these new capitalists Vassal Capitalists and then makes the title of the book What Killed Capitalism.

davisr 3y ago
"I won't take his ideas seriously because of superficial reasons, and I don't have any actual arguments against his thesis, so I must throw mud and hope something sticks."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- yamazakiwi 3y ago
  Because this thesis is stupid This framing is silly. He says we're Cloud Serfs because we do unpaid work whenever we use our phones... You're not a Serf for using social media or watching videos online, regardless of how much value is extracted by these companies. You contributed nothing to the dialogue surrounding the topic that you are supposedly defending from mud throwing.
  - n_ary 3y ago
    Which is true... Think of it this way, your phone does social media, which doesn't work unless ypu engage. When you engage there, mote people adapts it due to community, more eyeballs for sweet ad money. These medias also grow large and relies on other services to scale and perform those ad workload so they also build or pay someone else for the resources. In the end what you get is a good feelong in the heart that people liked that one post/photo while they got sweet ad money and someone actually bought a product and someone else made more money. However that engagement has a cost, you are the acrobat in their circus stage, but you get no pay and while at it you also paid for that over complex device that they also sold(charged you money to give your performance). Of course, you can nitpick all you want from my bad example, and do a lot of what-aboutism, but the point is clear I hope.
    - yamazakiwi 3y ago
      I agree with everthing you said, but again, contextually users aren't doing any "work". That is the distinction I'm trying to draw. You are less like a serf and more like a thief victim, making the writers comparisons quite stretched by definition. We could be discussing these problems straight-forward as you have described them instead of trying to make it sound like skynet has turned us into actual slaves and selling people on 24 news-cycle style dystopia bait.

dingnuts 3y ago

I haven't read the book but in this pull quote from a related article linked in the comments >Traditional capitalists, he proposes, have become “vassal capitalists”. They are subordinate and dependent on a new breed of “lords” – the Big Tech companies – who generate enormous wealth via new digital platforms. A new form of algorithmic capital has evolved – what Varoufakis calls “cloud capital” – and it has displaced “capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits”. How is it that creating a new type of capital paradoxically brings about the end of capital? Also, in this definition, why are the "lords" able to "generate enormous wealth" just like capitalists? In feudalism, lords were lords over their vassals due to violent power, literally the threat of the sword, and did not create wealth the way a capitalist does by directing the application of capital to generate more wealth, but instead used the threat of violence to take a portion of what their vassals would otherwise generate anyway, in exchange for using that violence against foreign enemies as well. So.. is Facebook forcing me to hand over some of my wealth by using violence, with the agreement that they will also use their monopoly on violence to protect me from Snapchat, if I sign up to Facebook? If not, this seems like someone wanted a book about "technofeudalism" and "capitalism" because they are words that will sell books, and worked backwards to make whatever claims they wanted to make without any real interest in what feudalism or capitalism even actually are.

arrosenberg 3y ago
> Also, in this definition, why are the "lords" able to "generate enormous wealth" just like capitalists? Feudal lords generated their wealth from exploiting the lands they held. Generally, they don't make more land, but when the world wide web came into being, there was suddenly a ton of new land! Between 2000-2015, the tech giants consolidated much of that land (and thus the wealth) - giants like Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Adobe and MSFT can absolutely be viewed as imperialist, and they operate in that manner internally. > So.. is Facebook forcing me to hand over some of my wealth by using violence, with the agreement that they will also use their monopoly on violence to protect me from Snapchat, if I sign up to Facebook? Kind of. Facebook is using economic and legal violence, rather than physical. They won't send a squad of knights to your house to punish you, but they are attempting to create a system where your only options are to use their service, in the manner they want you to use it (i.e. the one that maximizes their revenues). Why run a business when you can collect the gabelle? Sure, they don't own Snapchat, they certainly tried, but they own Instagram, Whatsapp, and hundreds of other startups they've taken out of the market. You still have some options (TikTok, Snapchat) because Meta's dominance is incomplete and the state doesn't fully support them having a monopoly.

butternick 3y ago

https://youtu.be/VatYrw0uqjU?si=0PIFTf_O36oTHGBu https://youtu.be/VatYrw0uqjU?si=0PIFTf_O36oTHGBu Here’s a great interview with the author

beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago

Evgeny Morozov wrote a very interesting, but also quite long, critique of the "technofeudalism" concept from a Marxist perspective in the New Left Review back in 2022: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii133/articles/evgeny-morozov-critique-of-techno-feudal-reason https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii133/articles/evgeny-moroz... > In the case of well-known figures like Varoufakis and Mazzucato, tantalizing their audiences with invocations of feudal glamour may provide a media-friendly way to recycle arguments they have made before. In Varoufakis’s case, techno-feudalism seems to be mostly about the perverse macroeconomic effects of quantitative easing. For Mazzucato, ‘digital feudalism’ refers to the unearned income generated by tech platforms. Neo-feudalism is often proposed as a way to bring conceptual clarity to the most advanced sectors of the digital economy, where the left’s brightest minds still find themselves very much in the dark. Are Google and Amazon capitalists? Are they rentiers, as Brett Christophers’s Rentier Capitalism suggests? What about Uber? Is it just an intermediary, a rent-taking platform that has inserted itself between drivers and passengers? Or is it producing and selling a transportation service? These questions are not without consequences for how we think about contemporary capitalism itself, heavily dominated by technology companies. > The idea that feudalism is making a comeback also coheres with left critiques condemning capitalism as extractivist. If today’s capitalists are mere lazy rentiers who contribute nothing to the production process, don’t they deserve to be downgraded to the status of feudal landlords? This embrace of feudal imagery by media- and meme-friendly figures of the left intelligentsia shows no signs of ceasing. 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. In what follows I delve into some landmark debates on the distinguishing features that differentiate capitalism from earlier economic forms—and those that define political-economic operations in the new digital economy—in hope that a critique of techno-feudal reason may throw fresh light on the world we’re in.

ajkjk 3y ago
Wow, I tried to read it and mostly managed to, although I ended up skimming the end. It is really everything that is wrong with bitter overintellectual leftism: endless babble littered with pointless historical references and a neverending adoration of 'theory' while totally misunderstanding the rest of the world's moral opinions on, well, anything. The worst passage I found was this: >If these are lazy waterfall-owning rentiers, they are peculiarly masochistic ones: why not just rest on their laurels, fire everyone and stop spending? And who, looking at these numbers, could really believe—together with the post-workerists—that capitalists are now external to production? What then are they spending all this r&d money on? The gist: if you choose the dumbest possible interpretation of what 'technofeudalism' is referring to and couch it in enough verbiage and citations you can dismiss the concept without ever having to see why people find it so appealing or realize that you're missing the point. It's really simple. It's the monopolies and their walled gardens and moats and manipulations... and the lack of accountability to the public. What's feudalistic is the lack of accountability. It only incidentally has to do with any particular model of what capitalism or feudalism is according to some random texts or endless theory and everything to do with the fact that everyone hates the system but can't seem to change it and make it follow prosocial dignity-preserving rules. More specifically: although theorists have opinions about whether this is some sort of 'alternative' to capitalism (if what we're 'in' can even be called capitalism anymore, even before the internet...).. The reason the concept rings true and has staying power is not those theories; it is that the modern world emotionally pattern matches to aspects of feudalism. No doubt people felt the same way circa 1900 in the first big era of capitalist monopolies. Regardless, labeling what 'mode of production' we're in is really not the appeal of the phrase (or, imo, a very useful concept at all).

sinistersnare 3y ago

I have been listening to Yanis a lot lately. His ideas are quite provocative. His economic ideas are quite refreshing, to hear an economist talking about what a post-subjective-money world may look like. Today, we have a new class of people, who to borrow Yanis's metaphor I would call Techno-peasants, who exist in a grand subjugation. Any reader of these comments would do well to listen to a few interviews of his.

TheCapeGreek 3y ago
Let's not forget economic minister of Greece, as disastrous as that was. I do like his ideas, but he just really did not seem to play nice in politics.
- LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
  'Nice' is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_an_Illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_an_Illusion

bilvar 3y ago

So watching cat videos is somehow akin to serfdom now. I swear the over-intellectualism of the left makes them sound dumber and dumber. Why do they have to make everything so idiotically complex? Is it an occult/esoteric thing in order to signal authority to the masses?

latency-guy2 3y ago
Its the utter domination of capitalism that they truly do not realize how ridiculous they look every day. Capitalism has answered all that communists and socialists could never even fathom, and more. It used to be a caricature to portray the rich as fat men with monocles, now the world is in an obesity crisis. Leftists are stuck in the 1800s, and the only thing they do is talk like it as well. They really have nothing else going for them. Its all a performance, we can only hope that the few that are honest would admit it.

RecycledEle 3y ago

Yanis Varoufakis: Welcome to the age of technofeudalism from UnHerd on YouTube [36:22] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MXHukxnEZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MXHukxnEZM