7 ms·

Are We Transitioning from Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom?

64 points by jlpcsl 3y ago

malermeister 3y ago
Varoufakis is one of the few that accurately describes the situation we find ourselves in. We'd do well to heed his warnings.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  The core derangement of the current zeitgeist is the bravest truth tellers* are the most marginalized people, conflated with fringe conspiracy theorist wingnuts. Perhaps it is a result of "digital hallucinations" filter bubble reality bifurcation such that there is essentially no apparent common context or stable community with which to discover and relate to other people, and secondly, the unreasonable simultaneous apparent widening of digital community participation freedoms, with declines in locality connected in the real world and declines in purchasing power and wealth for most. (A good fraction on HN didn't experience the struggle of the downward leg of the K-shaped recovery, but I imagine some of us did.) Compounded also by a widespread lack of reading books and long-form articles. * Varoufakis, Chomsky, Hedges, Assange, Snowden ... EDIT: More examples of "...": Yousafzai, Thunberg, Navalny.
  - malermeister 3y ago
    I like Zizek's thoughts on ideology to further explain why things are the way you describe.
js8 3y ago
My question to Varoufakis is this (and I used to be skeptical of his distinction because of this, but I am less so today). If these systems of power are maintaining themselves through cultural hegemony, as Gramsci has described, what is the cultural hegemony, or ideology, here? The traditional capitalism has ideology rooted in liberalism and the concept of meritocracy. You are good at what you do, you sell it in the free market, you make money. So how this transformed in the cloud feudalism?
- blacksmith_tb 3y ago
  Well Gramscian hegemony requires the participation of the oppressed in their ongoing oppression... so I'd say that Amazon Prime membership qualifies. One obvious parallel with feudal lords would be venerating the super-bosses, the new 'lords of the manor' to keep it feudal, which certainly also seems to be happening. This is of course culturally backward-looking, the appeal of the strongman (in business or politics) should be waning, replaced by efficient tecnhocrats, but when you look around the world... Varoufakis may be on to something.
- dariosalvi78 3y ago
  just look at comments here from Apple fanboys and you can see how the culture (everything that Apple does is good) shapes the behaviour (buy more, at inflated prices, accept all of the anticompetitive stuff they do)
- tareqak 3y ago
  > The traditional capitalism has ideology rooted in liberalism and the concept of meritocracy. You are good at what you do, you sell it in the free market, you make money. So how this transformed in the cloud feudalism? "Move fast and break things." [0] "Software is eating the world" [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Move_fast_and_break_things_(motto) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Move_fast_and_break_things_(mo... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Industry_influence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Industry_influ...
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  It is rapidly becoming evident that all direct and indirect income sheet and balance sheet liquid value (including that held indirectly through corporations) over a very large sum, say $30 M USD in income and $300 M in property indexed to inflation, should be taxed heavily and redistributed as monthly prosperity dividends to all citizens to ease the burden of ultra capital concentration due to many factors and causing many corrosive socioeconomic problems leading to third-world like inequities. It would also put money back into the economy due to the higher MPC (due largely to the inelastic nature of non-discretionary expenses) of people who aren't UHNWIs. While this would lead to some customary inflation, it overall would stabilize the purchasing power of individuals and make any UBI scheme moot. Without enacting such a scheme, the long-term conclusion will be a dystopian future with several trillionaires, 10 billion impoverished people living in favelas, and an infinitesimal middle-class confused and unaware that anyone has a problem. Already, there are 2-3 million people sleeping rough in the US (5-6x higher than actual figures because the way they count unhoused people has been debunked as wildly inaccurate and flawed.)
Anotheroneagain 3y ago
I don't think this is a good comparison. The core problem we face is overproduction. Vastly more can be produced than can be consumed. When you try to boost the economy by "job creation" and investing more money, you essentially pay people to keep other people busy. It isn't serfdom, they don't serve their lords, who take a share of their work. They work to reduce the available workforce, so that overproduction is avoided, and markets don't crash like they did in 1929.
- FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
  Overproduction of what? Not of houses. Not of medical services (it takes forever to get an appointment). Yes, maybe there was/is overproduction of software nonsense, but I don't think that's overproduction overall in the economy; rather it's a misallocation.
  - Anotheroneagain 3y ago
    Of course of houses. Houses are the best example - they can be built for invested money, then bought as an investment, closing the loop. The fact that you can't afford one is secondary, there are thousands of empty houses anywhere, their prices are just kept high by the incoming capital.
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      USA housing starts is collapsing. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST It's no wonder why house prices are so high when we are (inadvertently) cutting housing supply. USA production of houses needs to be twice as much compared to 50 years ago to keep up with population growth... But we've lost housing production in recent years, not gained it. We are moving in the wrong direction. ---------- There's plenty of debate on why housing starts is declining. I don't care too much of the details though, the focus needs to be a concerted effort to reverse the trend and fix our country wide housing problem
      - 3y ago
zer00eyz 3y ago
The fundamental flaw in this argument is that it does not account for every corporation that came before tech. What about RCA, GE, Westinghouse? What about US Steel, what about Standard Oil, what about AT&T. IBM, Intel have already started to fall. What makes this crop of companies any different than all the ones that has come before them. Nothing. The singer sewing machine came out at 125 bucks per unit. The annual salary in America was 500 bucks a year. Now, a sewing machine is 100 bucks and the average salary is what? The cost of a car is still the same as a model T, with more features and safety. Aside from software bloat, and maybe ML how have computers improved in the last decade. Power has gone down but they aren't really doing more.
- sdenton4 3y ago
  Did you not read the article? The premise is that the current tech giants are effectively only wanting to set up situations where they can extract rents. This is different from making sewing machines in a competitive market, or even in a monopoly. I think the argument has problems for other reasons - there's still lots of innovation going on, for example - but I think there is a line to be drawn between current vc preferences and historical capitalist or monopoly behavior.
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    The people can write whatever laws they want. We are also slowly sliding toward innovating with the overall system. Wealth can be redistributed with the flick of a wrist.
  - zer00eyz 3y ago
    I did read the article. Rent only happens when cost is high and supply is constrained. Look at housing. Rent seeking isnt sustainable as compute gets cheaper and cheaper. Access is knowledge, sewing, second hand cars: access is portion of knowledge.
    - xg15 3y ago
      Companies are increasingly using lock-in strategies too keep their users in their own walled gardens. Apple and Google can collect rent from the entire app economy solely for the privilege of being listed in app stores (while at the same time controlling the rules of that economy and being able to advantage their own offerings). Amazon can do the same with the Amazon marketplace. There is lots of rent seeking going on.
isityouyesitsme 3y ago
What did I just (halfway) read? This person is incoherent and rambling, raptured with their own brilliance. There may be solid points in there, I will never know. I automatically cannot take anyone as serious who writes this way. They do not want to be taken seriously. They want to be congratulated on their keen observations.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- fwip 3y ago
  You may lack the background reading to understand him, but he is certainly not incoherent.
  - isityouyesitsme 3y ago
    I do not disagree that I may lack sufficient background for this. It was clearly written for "those in the know," people who already share a common viewpoint and vocabulary, and only differ on minor nuance. A bit like getting a bunch of mechanics to argue about cars. In this regard, the writing is definitely rambling and incoherent. It's one big mutual academic exercise (I am avoiding the use of a sexual term here).
    - fwip 3y ago
      Most articles written by experts are written for those "in the know." To extend your analogy, I'd much rather read a bunch of mechanics discussing the repairability of various cars than a bunch of lay people sharing anecdotal experiences. If I didn't understand the jargon and their concerns, I'd assume that they'd spent a lot more time thinking about these problems and possess insights that I don't have. If I didn't have a software background, I'd likely find much of the more interesting articles here to be similarly dense and impenetrable, because expert discussion often assumes a certain level of expertise from the reader.
DenisM 3y ago
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37631727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37631727
iwontberude 3y ago
I have listened to Bezos pontificate about how he’s leading us to a future where trillions will live in the solar system on space stations and take vacations to earth for a glimpse of the life they could have enjoyed if they were privileged. I don’t want any part in that.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  I don't understand. The privileged remain on Earth while the lower classes live in space?
  - genocidicbunny 3y ago
    That's pretty much exactly it. Oye Beltalowda!
    - add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
      If his envisioned space experience is known or planned to be shitty, why would Bezos say so? How would he sell it?
      - iwontberude 3y ago
        If I work hard enough and get the right opportunities, I might have a chance to transfer off of Deep Space 42 to a space station a little bit closer to Earth so my trips to earth only take a couple years.
      - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
        Less like "sell", more "shove it down your throats," same as today's exploitation. I'm not sure we need to go to space though. The word "beltalowda" comes from the sci-di series "the expanse" which is a great watch and explores some of these themes.
      - genocidicbunny 3y ago
        Well, it doesn't sound shitty to me if you're part of the group that gets to stay on earth and enjoy the fruits of others' labour.
yakau 3y ago
Capitalism is inherently flawed as it relies on infinite growth in a finite world, to put it simply.
- mlazos 3y ago
  Innovation enables growth without raw natural resources. For example, the internet drastically improved productivity (GDP/time) by making communication faster. Also services are intangible, but provide economic value. If someone can now provide services to millions, that’s growth. We are nowhere near the terminal point of growth in my opinion.
  - yakau 3y ago
    That it does, but all sources of innovation are fueled by natural resources in some form further down the supply chain from thought to product.
  - philposting 3y ago
    I'm not so sure that the internet has improved productivity — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
- anonuser123456 3y ago
  Not really.
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  That isn't true in both ways. The "world" is effectively not finite (we keep learning new ways to more efficiently make use of stuff), and capitalism doesn't rely on infinite growth.
  - yakau 3y ago
    What it costs in resources to maintain the modern lifestyle and civilization, is quite finite. We learn new ways to spend and consume, and innovation in sustainability is not the priority in a Capitalist economy.
mlazos 3y ago
Describing tech platforms as a place where users work for no pay is quite an exaggeration. Apple and Microsoft for example do not conform to this business model. In fact the business models amongst the tech giants are so varied to group them all into “cloud capital” is ridiculously reductionist, and gives grift vibes to just capitalize on the current change in attitudes toward big tech. Honestly this article is so unspecific as to feel that it’s saying nothing. Maybe that’s on purpose to market for the book but I can’t tell. In the end, the pursuit of monopolies currently is the exact same mission that all capitalists have had for generations, he fails to make a distinction in my opinion between then and now. I think the current state of the world can still be described using the rules of a capitalist system, and I fee that competition between the tech giants more fierce now than it has been in the past decade.
Zpalmtree 3y ago
This is just nonsense
- itisit 3y ago
  It's also a failed finance minister promoting his latest "God is dead" style polemic. Give him a break. He's just trying to earn a living!
j-j-j-j 3y ago
There is no feudalism without violence. No one is forcing anyone to host stuff in the cloud, no one is forcing anyone to use Gmail, no one is forcing anyone to use iPhone or Android device, use Facebook or Twitter, etc. Everybody does it because with their personal calculation they figured out they rather suffer some loss in freedom than spend time on alternatives. There are just some good old fashion monopolies/oligopolies extracting as much value as they can. Without state forcing something (which is possible but currently does not seem to happen), there is no serfdom. No one is using Apple laptops because they were forced at the gunpoint. They are just preferring longer battery life or whatever excuse over the ownership of their device and software. It's not a cage if the door is open and you're just too lazy to leave. As a matter of fact FOSS alternatives are better than ever were, and hosting stuff outside of major clouds is also very convenient.
- greenhexagon 3y ago
  > No one is forcing anyone to host stuff in the cloud, no one is forcing anyone to use Gmail Contrast with: https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-... Even someone, with expert skills, decades of experience and the time, energy and willpower to try to do it on their own, can't.
  - j-j-j-j 3y ago
    Sure email became terribly centralized to the point of self-hosting being near impossible. Primarily because it's super old. But you can still use Protonmail or Fastmail. And email is less important as a communication platform than it ever was . Nowadays it feels like mostly an ID-verification system. If things become bad enough - people will just use something else.
    - Gud 3y ago
      I switched to proton mail myself when Gandi.net started demanding money for my mailbox. The problem with proton mail, that I later discovered after paying, is that they don’t support IMAP…
snapplebobapple 3y ago
I don't know why I read articles from Jacobin when they are posted on hacker news. The decision tree in my head goes something like "Well, it's jacobin, so it's either going to say something that sounds witty while completely missing the point or outright be some really stupid marxist BS... But I respect hacker news these guys aren't going to be tricked by stupid marxist BS or not notice that they have completely missed the point..." and then I read the article and every freaking time, you guys have been tricked by sounding witty while completely missing the point! No, we are not transitioning to silicon serfdom, it's just the same old BS where a monopolist has built or stumbled upon a competitive mote and is rent seeking.
dewaltamy36 3y ago
[dead]

64 points by jlpcsl 3y ago

Varoufakis is one of the few that accurately describes the situation we find ourselves in. We'd do well to heed his warnings.

1letterunixname 3y ago
The core derangement of the current zeitgeist is the bravest truth tellers* are the most marginalized people, conflated with fringe conspiracy theorist wingnuts. Perhaps it is a result of "digital hallucinations" filter bubble reality bifurcation such that there is essentially no apparent common context or stable community with which to discover and relate to other people, and secondly, the unreasonable simultaneous apparent widening of digital community participation freedoms, with declines in locality connected in the real world and declines in purchasing power and wealth for most. (A good fraction on HN didn't experience the struggle of the downward leg of the K-shaped recovery, but I imagine some of us did.) Compounded also by a widespread lack of reading books and long-form articles. * Varoufakis, Chomsky, Hedges, Assange, Snowden ... EDIT: More examples of "...": Yousafzai, Thunberg, Navalny.
- malermeister 3y ago
  I like Zizek's thoughts on ideology to further explain why things are the way you describe.

js8 3y ago

My question to Varoufakis is this (and I used to be skeptical of his distinction because of this, but I am less so today). If these systems of power are maintaining themselves through cultural hegemony, as Gramsci has described, what is the cultural hegemony, or ideology, here? The traditional capitalism has ideology rooted in liberalism and the concept of meritocracy. You are good at what you do, you sell it in the free market, you make money. So how this transformed in the cloud feudalism?

blacksmith_tb 3y ago
Well Gramscian hegemony requires the participation of the oppressed in their ongoing oppression... so I'd say that Amazon Prime membership qualifies. One obvious parallel with feudal lords would be venerating the super-bosses, the new 'lords of the manor' to keep it feudal, which certainly also seems to be happening. This is of course culturally backward-looking, the appeal of the strongman (in business or politics) should be waning, replaced by efficient tecnhocrats, but when you look around the world... Varoufakis may be on to something.
dariosalvi78 3y ago
just look at comments here from Apple fanboys and you can see how the culture (everything that Apple does is good) shapes the behaviour (buy more, at inflated prices, accept all of the anticompetitive stuff they do)
tareqak 3y ago
> The traditional capitalism has ideology rooted in liberalism and the concept of meritocracy. You are good at what you do, you sell it in the free market, you make money. So how this transformed in the cloud feudalism? "Move fast and break things." [0] "Software is eating the world" [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Move_fast_and_break_things_(motto) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Move_fast_and_break_things_(mo... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Industry_influence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Industry_influ...
1letterunixname 3y ago
It is rapidly becoming evident that all direct and indirect income sheet and balance sheet liquid value (including that held indirectly through corporations) over a very large sum, say $30 M USD in income and $300 M in property indexed to inflation, should be taxed heavily and redistributed as monthly prosperity dividends to all citizens to ease the burden of ultra capital concentration due to many factors and causing many corrosive socioeconomic problems leading to third-world like inequities. It would also put money back into the economy due to the higher MPC (due largely to the inelastic nature of non-discretionary expenses) of people who aren't UHNWIs. While this would lead to some customary inflation, it overall would stabilize the purchasing power of individuals and make any UBI scheme moot. Without enacting such a scheme, the long-term conclusion will be a dystopian future with several trillionaires, 10 billion impoverished people living in favelas, and an infinitesimal middle-class confused and unaware that anyone has a problem. Already, there are 2-3 million people sleeping rough in the US (5-6x higher than actual figures because the way they count unhoused people has been debunked as wildly inaccurate and flawed.)

Anotheroneagain 3y ago

I don't think this is a good comparison. The core problem we face is overproduction. Vastly more can be produced than can be consumed. When you try to boost the economy by "job creation" and investing more money, you essentially pay people to keep other people busy. It isn't serfdom, they don't serve their lords, who take a share of their work. They work to reduce the available workforce, so that overproduction is avoided, and markets don't crash like they did in 1929.

FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
Overproduction of what? Not of houses. Not of medical services (it takes forever to get an appointment). Yes, maybe there was/is overproduction of software nonsense, but I don't think that's overproduction overall in the economy; rather it's a misallocation.
- Anotheroneagain 3y ago
  Of course of houses. Houses are the best example - they can be built for invested money, then bought as an investment, closing the loop. The fact that you can't afford one is secondary, there are thousands of empty houses anywhere, their prices are just kept high by the incoming capital.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    USA housing starts is collapsing. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST It's no wonder why house prices are so high when we are (inadvertently) cutting housing supply. USA production of houses needs to be twice as much compared to 50 years ago to keep up with population growth... But we've lost housing production in recent years, not gained it. We are moving in the wrong direction. ---------- There's plenty of debate on why housing starts is declining. I don't care too much of the details though, the focus needs to be a concerted effort to reverse the trend and fix our country wide housing problem
    - 3y ago

zer00eyz 3y ago

The fundamental flaw in this argument is that it does not account for every corporation that came before tech. What about RCA, GE, Westinghouse? What about US Steel, what about Standard Oil, what about AT&T. IBM, Intel have already started to fall. What makes this crop of companies any different than all the ones that has come before them. Nothing. The singer sewing machine came out at 125 bucks per unit. The annual salary in America was 500 bucks a year. Now, a sewing machine is 100 bucks and the average salary is what? The cost of a car is still the same as a model T, with more features and safety. Aside from software bloat, and maybe ML how have computers improved in the last decade. Power has gone down but they aren't really doing more.

sdenton4 3y ago
Did you not read the article? The premise is that the current tech giants are effectively only wanting to set up situations where they can extract rents. This is different from making sewing machines in a competitive market, or even in a monopoly. I think the argument has problems for other reasons - there's still lots of innovation going on, for example - but I think there is a line to be drawn between current vc preferences and historical capitalist or monopoly behavior.
- datavirtue 3y ago
  The people can write whatever laws they want. We are also slowly sliding toward innovating with the overall system. Wealth can be redistributed with the flick of a wrist.
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  I did read the article. Rent only happens when cost is high and supply is constrained. Look at housing. Rent seeking isnt sustainable as compute gets cheaper and cheaper. Access is knowledge, sewing, second hand cars: access is portion of knowledge.
  - xg15 3y ago
    Companies are increasingly using lock-in strategies too keep their users in their own walled gardens. Apple and Google can collect rent from the entire app economy solely for the privilege of being listed in app stores (while at the same time controlling the rules of that economy and being able to advantage their own offerings). Amazon can do the same with the Amazon marketplace. There is lots of rent seeking going on.

isityouyesitsme 3y ago

What did I just (halfway) read? This person is incoherent and rambling, raptured with their own brilliance. There may be solid points in there, I will never know. I automatically cannot take anyone as serious who writes this way. They do not want to be taken seriously. They want to be congratulated on their keen observations.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fwip 3y ago
You may lack the background reading to understand him, but he is certainly not incoherent.
- isityouyesitsme 3y ago
  I do not disagree that I may lack sufficient background for this. It was clearly written for "those in the know," people who already share a common viewpoint and vocabulary, and only differ on minor nuance. A bit like getting a bunch of mechanics to argue about cars. In this regard, the writing is definitely rambling and incoherent. It's one big mutual academic exercise (I am avoiding the use of a sexual term here).
  - fwip 3y ago
    Most articles written by experts are written for those "in the know." To extend your analogy, I'd much rather read a bunch of mechanics discussing the repairability of various cars than a bunch of lay people sharing anecdotal experiences. If I didn't understand the jargon and their concerns, I'd assume that they'd spent a lot more time thinking about these problems and possess insights that I don't have. If I didn't have a software background, I'd likely find much of the more interesting articles here to be similarly dense and impenetrable, because expert discussion often assumes a certain level of expertise from the reader.

DenisM 3y ago

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37631727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37631727

iwontberude 3y ago

I have listened to Bezos pontificate about how he’s leading us to a future where trillions will live in the solar system on space stations and take vacations to earth for a glimpse of the life they could have enjoyed if they were privileged. I don’t want any part in that.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
I don't understand. The privileged remain on Earth while the lower classes live in space?
- genocidicbunny 3y ago
  That's pretty much exactly it. Oye Beltalowda!
  - add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
    If his envisioned space experience is known or planned to be shitty, why would Bezos say so? How would he sell it?
    - iwontberude 3y ago
      If I work hard enough and get the right opportunities, I might have a chance to transfer off of Deep Space 42 to a space station a little bit closer to Earth so my trips to earth only take a couple years.
    - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
      Less like "sell", more "shove it down your throats," same as today's exploitation. I'm not sure we need to go to space though. The word "beltalowda" comes from the sci-di series "the expanse" which is a great watch and explores some of these themes.
    - genocidicbunny 3y ago
      Well, it doesn't sound shitty to me if you're part of the group that gets to stay on earth and enjoy the fruits of others' labour.

yakau 3y ago

Capitalism is inherently flawed as it relies on infinite growth in a finite world, to put it simply.

mlazos 3y ago
Innovation enables growth without raw natural resources. For example, the internet drastically improved productivity (GDP/time) by making communication faster. Also services are intangible, but provide economic value. If someone can now provide services to millions, that’s growth. We are nowhere near the terminal point of growth in my opinion.
- yakau 3y ago
  That it does, but all sources of innovation are fueled by natural resources in some form further down the supply chain from thought to product.
- philposting 3y ago
  I'm not so sure that the internet has improved productivity — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
anonuser123456 3y ago
Not really.
dukeyukey 3y ago
That isn't true in both ways. The "world" is effectively not finite (we keep learning new ways to more efficiently make use of stuff), and capitalism doesn't rely on infinite growth.
- yakau 3y ago
  What it costs in resources to maintain the modern lifestyle and civilization, is quite finite. We learn new ways to spend and consume, and innovation in sustainability is not the priority in a Capitalist economy.

mlazos 3y ago

Describing tech platforms as a place where users work for no pay is quite an exaggeration. Apple and Microsoft for example do not conform to this business model. In fact the business models amongst the tech giants are so varied to group them all into “cloud capital” is ridiculously reductionist, and gives grift vibes to just capitalize on the current change in attitudes toward big tech. Honestly this article is so unspecific as to feel that it’s saying nothing. Maybe that’s on purpose to market for the book but I can’t tell. In the end, the pursuit of monopolies currently is the exact same mission that all capitalists have had for generations, he fails to make a distinction in my opinion between then and now. I think the current state of the world can still be described using the rules of a capitalist system, and I fee that competition between the tech giants more fierce now than it has been in the past decade.

Zpalmtree 3y ago

This is just nonsense

itisit 3y ago
It's also a failed finance minister promoting his latest "God is dead" style polemic. Give him a break. He's just trying to earn a living!

j-j-j-j 3y ago

There is no feudalism without violence. No one is forcing anyone to host stuff in the cloud, no one is forcing anyone to use Gmail, no one is forcing anyone to use iPhone or Android device, use Facebook or Twitter, etc. Everybody does it because with their personal calculation they figured out they rather suffer some loss in freedom than spend time on alternatives. There are just some good old fashion monopolies/oligopolies extracting as much value as they can. Without state forcing something (which is possible but currently does not seem to happen), there is no serfdom. No one is using Apple laptops because they were forced at the gunpoint. They are just preferring longer battery life or whatever excuse over the ownership of their device and software. It's not a cage if the door is open and you're just too lazy to leave. As a matter of fact FOSS alternatives are better than ever were, and hosting stuff outside of major clouds is also very convenient.

greenhexagon 3y ago
> No one is forcing anyone to host stuff in the cloud, no one is forcing anyone to use Gmail Contrast with: https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-... Even someone, with expert skills, decades of experience and the time, energy and willpower to try to do it on their own, can't.
- j-j-j-j 3y ago
  Sure email became terribly centralized to the point of self-hosting being near impossible. Primarily because it's super old. But you can still use Protonmail or Fastmail. And email is less important as a communication platform than it ever was . Nowadays it feels like mostly an ID-verification system. If things become bad enough - people will just use something else.
  - Gud 3y ago
    I switched to proton mail myself when Gandi.net started demanding money for my mailbox. The problem with proton mail, that I later discovered after paying, is that they don’t support IMAP…

snapplebobapple 3y ago

I don't know why I read articles from Jacobin when they are posted on hacker news. The decision tree in my head goes something like "Well, it's jacobin, so it's either going to say something that sounds witty while completely missing the point or outright be some really stupid marxist BS... But I respect hacker news these guys aren't going to be tricked by stupid marxist BS or not notice that they have completely missed the point..." and then I read the article and every freaking time, you guys have been tricked by sounding witty while completely missing the point! No, we are not transitioning to silicon serfdom, it's just the same old BS where a monopolist has built or stumbled upon a competitive mote and is rent seeking.

dewaltamy36 3y ago

[dead]