13 ms·

Interview with Yanis Varoufakis on Technofeudalism

181 points by helloplanets 3y ago

throwaway4good 3y ago
https://archive.md/4kcVN https://archive.md/4kcVN
squeegmeister 3y ago
“To Varoufakis, every time you post on X, formerly Twitter, you’re essentially toiling Elon Musk’s estate like a medieval serf. Musk doesn't pay you. But your free labor pays him, in a sense, by increasing the value of his company.” This sounds disanalogous to me. When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. All at no monetary cost to you. Meanwhile, twitter has the costs of paying for servers and infrastructure and salaries of those required to support the site
- soco 3y ago
  Also a serf status can be boosted by receiving a visit from the lord, which has quite some costs with his court.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- bluetomcat 3y ago
  > you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following Ultimately, it's a zero-sum game for all the "posters". The attention and time of your following is finite, and other posters are fighting for it, too. The "cloud algorithm" defines the rules of the game and matches your content to its consumers.
  - ctrw 3y ago
    So long as the user base is growing its not zero sum.
    - mzitelli 3y ago
      Exactly, X userbase is going down. So less than zero sum.
      - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
        That's because Musk doesn't understand what he bought and lacks the finesse to manage it productively. And that's a good thing, because if someone as toxic and unhinged as Musk understood how SM really works, it would be a global disaster. We've already seen what happens with that in the MSM space. So far, SM has only had fragmentary versions of that kind of propaganda monolith - Cambridge Analytica, bot farms, and so on. Those are all bad enough. But a global platform that existed purely for propaganda and disinformation while pretending not to would be horrific.
  - pas 3y ago
    No, it's not. If there's good quality content, scintillating discussions, amazing insights and whatnot on twiXter it will attract more users. If all of that is there but the toxic sludge level in the cesspool is already at the dear users' elbows, then it probably discourage new (and old) users from jumping in.
    - bluetomcat 3y ago
      It might be subjective, but I'm having trouble finding any quality content on media platforms driven by engagement. Most content is engineered to provoke an initial dopamine reaction with a funny face, a shiny product or a curious situation. Even tech articles feel promotional. You rarely get any deep insight about a topic.
      - pas 3y ago
- iamcurious 3y ago
  If you depend on that brand and following for your livelihood and they arbitrarily ban you, what rights do you have?
  - theGeatZhopa 3y ago
    6 months ago. I was dependent on my Boss for my livelihood. Worked there for 14 years. But they arbitrarily fired me. What rights do I have? I guess, when I was dependent on that brand and they ban me - yeah, that's life. Happens millions of times to millions. So what? End of life?
- pas 3y ago
  Serfs got protection (and other services, like justice! uh.) from the feudal lord. I don't like Varoufakis' typical oversimplification, but this one doesn't seem that bad.
  - tored 3y ago
    But I get no protection from these tech overlords, they can close me down at anytime or give my data away to third party or the government without my knowledge.
    - pas 3y ago
      The analogy is that you get to use their platform to build your 'brand'. Of course other important aspect is that even if you are free to move to a different platform - in contrast to serfs, who in general had to ask for permission to move - you can't move your followers. So in that sense every second of effort put into a twitter profile is improvement to the land that you can't take with you. And, as we know, while brands are important users are lazy and stick to platforms much more than to brands. (While, again of course, there's usually a very devoted core community around content creators, but that's not true at all of most brands, and especially not true of regular users who just want to have some Reddit or forum-discussion-like experience.)
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    they also tended to live in poverty and die horribly. this occasionally led them to rise up and kill their lords; the medieval social contract was constantly in flux. but make no mistake it led to absolutism.
- ilayn 3y ago
  Whatever you get out for your own self is a secondary by-product. You are bounded to that platform to get what you get and cannot leave by taking what you already contributed. While you are benefiting from certain social returns, you are also the reason why someone else's brand is growing by the same argument. Hence the platform is doing nothing but increasing its importance for its matchmaking value. That is the premise. At some critical threshold, the platform achieves the "I'm too big to bother with individual users" and declares the feudal lordship (remember similar Stackoverflow and Reddit dramas with "We do as we please" attitude and nothing happened to the platforms because users could not give up - the following mod saga for reddit and so on and accepted their fate). It already happened with social media platforms long time ago.
  - bdowling 3y ago
    > cannot leave by taking what you already contributed. Of course you can. Twitter/X doesn’t own your tweets. You can take them and post them somewhere else if you want. This is all clearly stated in the Twitter/X terms of service. https://twitter.com/en/tos https://twitter.com/en/tos
    - ilayn 3y ago
      Your contribution is not the storage of your tweets. You can delete them one by one or with API but it won't make any difference at this point. And you need to repost it somewhere. You have contributed to keep the platform relevant. So no you can't take them anywhere else.
      - bdowling 3y ago
        > And you need to repost it somewhere. Exactly, you can repost them elsewhere. That is the opposite of “you can’t take them anywhere else.”
    - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
      Twitter owns the contextual value of your tweets. It owns the virtual land on which you can seed tweets to grow value. And it sells access to the virtual land to advertisers who put up billboards all over it. And it gives Musk powers that feudal lords never had. He has total control over which content grows value, and which remains ignored and barren.
- usrnm 3y ago
  And serfs were allowed to work the land belonging to the lord and produce food for themselves and their families.
  - kjksf 3y ago
    "serfs were peasants who were bound to the land they worked on and were under the authority of the landowners or lords" Last time I checked Twitter (the supposed lord) doesn't have the power to make you (the supposed serf) post on Twitter. That is, I would say, a crucial distinction that makes the serf comparison ultra ridiculous. Then again if Varoufakis said that the relationship between Twitter and its users is based on mutual benefit but Twitter gets more benefit, then it wouldn't make you as angry as saying that they people are serfs of techno-feudalists.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > This sounds disanalogous to me. When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. As someone who co-runs a >>70k account: Yes, that is possible, but it's very very rare for those creating a following primarily via Twitter to actually make money with it. Maybe if you got an 0nlyfans account. Meanwhile, the content you create lures in other people and with them, eyeballs that Twitter can make money with by selling advertising time to these people. > Meanwhile, twitter has the costs of paying for servers and infrastructure and salaries of those required to support the site The legitimate costs required to run something like Twitter or Whatsapp can be pretty darn small. Whatsapp ran with 50 employees up until 1 billion (!) users [1]. The point is to not unfocus too much - for all the bad Musk did to Twitter, he did show that there indeed was a lot of dead weight hanging around the place, no wonder it was hemorraging money. [1] https://blog.quastor.org/p/whatsapp-scaled-1-billion-users-50-engineers https://blog.quastor.org/p/whatsapp-scaled-1-billion-users-5...
  - blitzar 3y ago
    > no wonder it was hemorraging money I love how history has been rewritten such that a company that was profitable was "hemorraging money". Now that they are actually hemorraging money under new management it is somehow a case study in profitability. If everyone clicks their heels three times and says it - of course it will be true.
    - theblobawakens 3y ago
      If, instead of selling a product, when one gets regular huge investments from second/third world regimes, which are in reality to pay for salaries 19K+ regional language moderators and censors, 500 programmers for censorship and related algos, but only 500 people to run the actual "freemium" product is not exactly "profitable" either...
      - blitzar 3y ago
        The definition is clear and well defined, making up new definitions to justify a lie is deliberately obtuse. profitable /ˈprɒfɪtəbl/ adjective adjective: profitable 1. (of a business or activity) yielding profit or financial gain.
- r0ckarong 3y ago
  > All at no monetary cost to you. Except the fee for the blue tick. And whatever they charge you if you actually want to place ads for users instead of "pushing content" to those that follow you. I also don't think the serf image is perfect but there clearly is an "access level" difference to where value is created and extracted.
- Timwi 3y ago
  Twitter (and other platforms like it) self-impose those costs on themselves in order to maintain the feudalist structure. If all software were just open-source, anyone could run their own Twitter and make it interoperable. Except this already exists and is called Mastodon, or more generally, the Fediverse. The fact that billions of people still choose to use Twitter instead of the sensible alternative shows that the feudalist gambit (using algorithms to make people angry and turn on each other) is working.
  - pas 3y ago
    According to Apptopia analysis, X/Twitter is estimated to have around 121 million daily active users, significantly lower compared to company announcements. Elon of course says that it's around 300M and all-time-high was 550M in 2023. (Whatever that means.)
  - non-chalad 3y ago
    How much does the electricity cost to run the servers? How much for the maintenance of those computers running the software? How about rental fees for the space they are kept in, air conditioning, sewer, taxes? Nah… doesn't exist. It's self-imposed feudalism.
    - piva00 3y ago
      The issue is not giving you the option by making Twitter interoperable with an open protocol. Imagine if the web was like that instead of being an open network where if you follow a few protocols you can access it through any protocol-compliant software (aka: a browser) giving you the option to self-host or pay some service to host it for you, if it was a single service operated by a Big Tech that closes off this web based on their whims, locking out competing browsers, impossible to access outside of their provided clients, etc. It's self-imposed feudalism, Twitter created a feud, API access has been curtailed, you have to access it through their provided means. Open protocols is what made the web as powerful as it is, the closing of parts of it is a disgrace.
      - theGeatZhopa 3y ago
- tiborsaas 3y ago
  > Musk doesn't pay you. What is this then? https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1770239673014595718 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1770239673014595718
- m463 3y ago
  Is reddit is a better example. People post and comments add up. But ads are being served, people are being tracked, and eventually the data is sold so AI models can be trained on everything. But the main product (in silicon valley) is stock, which all the reddit folks have been selling wildly the past few weeks.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > This sounds disanalogous to me Varoufakis always misrepresents capitalism and feudalism. That's the only way his ideas can get their undeserved attention. Peasants worked the land for their lords but also for themselves and their families. Peasant revolts were not unheard of but peasants were generally treated fairly enough to avoid revolts. Rent-seeking does not magically transform capitalism into feudalism. Capitalism is built on the idea of "investing" capital and "profiting" from others. And in fact, there's the concept of rentier capitalism.
- pipes 3y ago
  It also ignores a simple fact, we do not have to post on twitter. It is a choice, it is a free exchange, presumably the people who post on twitter enjoy it and Elon makes money. Serfs, well they were forced to work someone else's land and in return they maybe got enough to eat. It's a ridiculous comparison.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > presumably the people who post on twitter enjoy it I do not share this presumption. https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?si=Wr4GgIzWyA-lhsOU https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?si=Wr4GgIzWyA-lhsOU Disagreement (like mine with you :P) also drives engagement, and quite possibly more than positive vibes do.
    - theGeatZhopa 3y ago
      Not just quite possible, but it is like that. The reason all the platforms got that big is engagement and engagement can be provoked if you give the people a possibility to take their stand. But for one taking a stand you need something that is big enough for the stand taker to take the stand. It's disagreement. And provoking. The classical tools of Internet trolls. They're a part of the game too.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    It's damn near impossible to work as an independent creator of books, music, art, streaming videos of all kinds, and so on, without a social media presence. Many people do not enjoy SM at all, but the alternative is zero income.
- tmcb 3y ago
  Medieval serfs could be rewarded with food housing at no monetary cost as well, but it didn't make the system any less unjust. Also, having the company pay for infrastructure costs does not necessarily imply that users are getting the upper hand in this deal. They are providing "value" (quotes intentional) to customers at the lowest cost possible, otherwise it would not be a viable business.
- eesmith 3y ago
  A serf working the field is still rewarded with (part of) the harvest, the knowledge of having done good work, and the respect of neighbors. Praskovia Kovalyova-Zhemchugova "was a Russian serf actress and soprano opera singer", with her own brand and following ("Figes describes her as Russia's first "superstar"); quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praskovia_Kovalyova-Zhemchugova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praskovia_Kovalyova-Zhemchugov... I think it's a tricky argument since there the feudal system was much more complicated than, say, sharecropping or tenant farming, as the lord was obliged to protect his serfs and protect their right to use the land. I think sharecropping is a better analogy. It's also tricky as serfdom and feudalism cover a wide range of systems which are not well described in popular culture. Serfdom in 1800s Russia was far different from serfdom in 1400s England. When you write "All at no monetary cost to you", remember that serfs mostly paid in time and work, not money. And the lord had costs as well, like the cost of providing military protection.
- lm28469 3y ago
  > you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. I'm reading this over and over trying to comprehend how we ended up in a world in which this sentence isn't satirical
  - exe34 3y ago
    It's like the old "do it for me for free and you'll get exposure!"
    - boffinAudio 3y ago
      No, it is that and the attitude is not old but rather encoded in every damn EULA under the sun ..
  - Beldin 3y ago
    I figured it was a troll attempt. Judging by the replies, I'm not sure if the troller would be pleased (quantity) or sad (lack of outrage). ETA: The idea of a troller losing faith in humanity because his trolls are taken seriously but do not stir up emotions is somewhat funny.
- krapp 3y ago
  >When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. All at no monetary cost to you. Yes we call that "being paid in exposure" and outside of Silicon Valley it's widely recognized as a scam. Also bear in mind that content and engagement serves the purpose of driving ad revenue and creating a monetizable social graph, so it's less a "reward" and more "unpaid labor."
- Lutger 3y ago
  > When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following wikipedia on serfdom: >Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned that land. In return, they were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence.
roenxi 3y ago
The obvious problem with a title like "technofeudalism" is it sounds prejudicial. Something like historical feudalism was troubling because people couldn't just walk away from it. A string of fiefdoms is actually a pretty decent organisational model as long as you don't have to inhabit ones that are hostile to your interests. At the technical level it is trivial to set up competitors and it remains the case that nobody needs to use these sites. I don't have a Twitter account, so over the years I have been more or less locked out of using it, in fact. These sites are fine.
- sabellito 3y ago
  Your argument is incorrect in regards to many of these social networks. Wanna be a photographer? You must have an Instagram account. Want to talk to some government services? You must use WhatsApp. Want to sell something used? You must have a Facebook account. Want to read what your politicians have to say? You must have a twitter account. Want to see the phone number of a restaurant? Gotta go over to Google maps. Also, no real alternative to YouTube's content. And so on and so forth. The argument "just don't use it" is disconnected from reality.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    That list is mostly false. I've used government services, sold used things on the internet, read what politicians say (in detail) and bought food online without using those sites. Twitter is in fact a bad place to engage with politicians because, by design, you only get soundbites. It is much more informative to go straight to the parliamentary records if you care about politics. > Also, no real alternative to YouTube's content. About 40-50% of what I watch is being sloooowly driven off YouTube because they don't like right wing opinions. They all have duplicate channels on multiple sites. And even a lot of the non-political stuff is starting to appear in a few places because it makes more economic sense.
    - lentil_soup 3y ago
      that's great that you were able to do all of that, but that's not true for everyone. You can't deny that for a lot of people these networks are their day to day, and have become a necessity. Just like someone can make an effort and live off-the-grid just fine, it doesn't mean it is possible for everyone to do it.
aaron695 3y ago
> you’re essentially toiling Elon Musk’s estate like a medieval serf. Musk doesn't pay you. Yes he does, he literally changed Twitter to pay people... so why should I keep reading another article from someone who got too old to talk about tech and has some Musk derangement syndrome? HN doesn't pay anyone. Y Combinator is worth $20+ billion? Oh no we are all serfs.
- lm28469 3y ago
  > HN doesn't pay anyone. Y Combinator is worth $20+ billion? Oh no we are all serfs. Except HN has nothing to do with Y combinator valuation, we're just the funny monkeys in the circus on the outskirt of the city
- tmcb 3y ago
  You seem confused. It is not your fault, commenters here are focusing too much on the X/Twitter quote from the article, which by the way comes from its introduction and not from the interview proper. The crux of the matter is not the compensation (or lack thereof) for the content produced, but the fact that, for companies like Amazon or Apple, their main mode of wealth extraction is not wealth but rent. In traditional advertising, for instance, the publisher is not entitled to a cut of your sales. Companies pay a fixed price for the front page ad in a print newspaper. In digital platforms, it is not the case anymore. The same applies to social media, but on a different manner which I will not cover here. If you are an ordinary consumer of these platforms, you help companies enable their business model, but the dollars are not coming off your pocket.
chaostheory 3y ago
Unlike the “serfs” tech companies actually pay for in developing countries to do stuff manually training AI, we don’t “toil” in their “fields”. Instead, we choose to frolic in them. It’s a choice, and we have more of it in the developed world. Just like how we still have a choice as to where and how we work. I interact with social media for leisure and not for influence or work. Most people are just in it for bread and circus, even on HN. His argument is terrible and nonsensical. A better analogy for the majority of the population is that tech companies are narco drug pushers and we’re the addicts. That analogy also only works if you ignore the fact that payment is cheap if you’re just paying with attention
- tmcb 3y ago
  Science has very solid evidence on social networks being extremely addictive, and there are growing suspicions that some companies have it like this by design. It might be a choice, yes, but this is not a black-and-white situation.
  - constantcrying 3y ago
    >and there are growing suspicions that some companies have it like this by design That is completely ridiculous. Obviously literally every social media company wants to generate sustained user engagement, this isn't a "growing suspicion" it is their business model to act that way.
    - tmcb 3y ago
      Sorry, I am not sure if this is sarcasm :)
      - itsoktocry 3y ago
        It's not sarcasm. Their entire purpose is to maintain engagement, it's not a conspiracy.
        3y ago
epups 3y ago
I like Varoufakis in general and I find this analogy interesting. However, his answer to this question was not satisfactory in my opinion, as many commercial arrangements including malls, are also based on percentages: Q: A company like Apple might argue that instead of being a fiefdom, maybe the Apple App Store is more like a mall where companies have to rent their stores from whomever owns the building. How is technofeudalism different from the mall dynamic? A: Well, hugely. Say you and I were going into partnership together with a fashion brand. We go to the shopping mall and we hire a shop, the rent is fixed. It is not proportional to our sales. The more money we make, the higher our price-to-rent margin. With the Apple Store, they get 30 percent of all sales. That’s not at all the same thing. That is the equivalent of the ground rent that the feudal lord used to extract from vassal capitalists.
- jahnu 3y ago
  Regardless of where you stand on this issue I feel that's a bit of a pointless nit-pick, because he's obviously not referring to those cases where mall rents are based on percentages. He clearly would argue that those would be the same system as the one he is arguing against. It's clear he's talking about the case he sets up to contrast two different models.
  - epups 3y ago
    If it's not about percentages, then what's the difference here? Walmart and Amazon are not fundamentally different. If the Apple Store can be compared to a mall, then we are in the same economic model we've been for decades.
    - ilayn 3y ago
      You can switch to a different location and continue business, should a conflict arises with a landlord in a mall. With Amazon, if you have a conflict, you are done. You cannot come back to the mall. And there is a single (or very few malls). In other words, it is not a market, where people come together for business) anymore it is being bound to a higher power to grant you rights of doing business.
Hrnrurj 3y ago
[flagged]
- tomhoward 3y ago
  Comments like this are against the HN guidelines as they are at odds with the site's purpose, which is to gratify intellectual curiosity. There are plenty of ways people can discuss ideas from Varoufakis, Marx and other writers/philosophers from all parts of the ideological landscape without resorting to simplistic barbs like this, and without wanting a society that remotely resembles North Korea or any other authoritarian state.
1oooqooq 3y ago
i will apply for a grant just to analyze the insanity of the cope arguments in this thread. pure gold
- brutusborn 3y ago
  What do you mean? Coping as in pretending they aren't Technoserfs?
  - ravelfan 3y ago
    [flagged]
- mandmandam 3y ago
  This would be a genuinely interesting and fruitful exploration. At first glance, it looks like awful reading comprehension - but these are people perfectly capable of reading technical topics without difficulty. You can say, well, these people have a salary that depends on them ignoring their complicity in a vast evil that has been warned about since the 50's; or even since the 80s in popular culture, creating an entire genre replete with subgenres and subcultures. And that says a lot. But what role does education play? Nationalism? Media capture? I sincerely believe this is a crucial question that gets surprisingly little self reflection in the tech community. Where usually we love to pat ourselves on the back about our important role in the modern world, when it comes to our role in maintaining class structures, it's crickets at best and blind fury as standard - to the point where it seems people can't even understand simple sentences.
- epilys 3y ago
  Temporarily embarrassed feudal lords.
cladopa 3y ago
"Take the Apple Store. You are producing an app, Apple can withhold 30 percent of your profits [through a commission fee]. That's a rent." Funny because I remember the days before Apple Store where telecom companies did you a favor if you sold them your game for $100 to put on their phones. Telefonica got crazy and offered $200 to the winner of a phone game competition in an engineering University. I have also worked with retailers that expect to get over 50% of the profit of anything you sell on their stores. I also have maintained my blogs, email and webpages on my own servers, something that you can do today with no problem, cheaper than ever. For Vanufakis, it looks like people are forced at gunpoint to use X. Mr Vanufakis believe that countries have the right to ask for money, spend it and never give it back, with no consequences. But of course the world does not work this way. In the real world, you don't pay your debts, they send you a hitman, specially if you expect paying back nothing.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  > Mr Vanufakis believe that countries have the right to ask for money, spend it and never give it back, with no consequences. "People on here often mock varoufakis for looking like voldemort, being incredibly vain and spending years trading off a job he had for 5 months, but they never give him credit for how funny he is" [0]: Varoufakis was elected secretary of the Black Students Alliance, a choice that caused some controversy, given that he is not black, to which he responded "that black was a political term and, as a Greek, on the grounds of ethnicity he had as much reason to be there as anyone else." [1] [0] https://twitter.com/khartoum_of/status/1710020375604555984 https://twitter.com/khartoum_of/status/1710020375604555984 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis
- tmcb 3y ago
  > Mr Vanufakis believe that countries have the right to ask for money, spend it and never give it back, with no consequences. This is actually the opposite of what happened. The Greek government, which was already virtually bankrupt in 2010, took a 110b EUR loan from the IMF on very harsh conditions, and Varoufakis was very vocal against it at that point already. He was appointed Minister of Finance, he simply tried to renegotiate the terms of the deal, which the other involved parts refused.
yareal 3y ago
Imagine looking at tech and saying, "this is a problem with tech companies, not a systemic flaw in capitalism itself". The tech companies are bad, but only uniquely bad in that they are efficient at what they do. You think Boeing, General Mills, or ford wouldn't want you to be a dev if they could figure out how to do it?
- tmcb 3y ago
  What does it have to do with devs? Those are business models devised by business people, some of them devs, some of them not. The article mentions enshittification. BMW is offering heated seats on a monthly subscription [1]. If an average teams of devs was asked to implement that as a practical joke, they would certainly be able to do it. Some of them can't quite make the jump between that and the fact that companies do expect to make a profit out of it. [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription...
  - bathtub365 3y ago
    Just because developers aren’t coming up with the business models doesn’t mean they bear no responsibility. You can’t go to work every day for a company that makes bad things, as someone making bad things at that company, and claim no responsibility for their existence in the world. This is especially true when employee mobility is so high in software. Surely if developers had a mature sense of professional ethics and strong personal values they would be sure they worked at a company that they felt aligned with them, or admit that they have compromised their values for a larger paycheck. That BMW article is from 2022. They don’t offer that anymore[1]. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/7/23863258/bmw-cancel-heated-seat-subscription-microtransaction https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/7/23863258/bmw-cancel-heated...
    - tmcb 3y ago
      That is not how I interpreted GP's point. It sounded to me as if they were saying that anyone in tech could move to other industries and make big bucks if the points in the interview were true. Thing is, even if the points in the interview are false, that would not apply, as devs are not the ones making the shots. Edit: btw, thanks for the heads-up about the heated seats subscription thing. I hope it doesn't make the point moot.
hal_9000 3y ago
[flagged]
matthewfelgate 3y ago
[flagged]
- m000 3y ago
  > European leaders need to spend less time bashing successful US tech companies and more time thinking why Europe has so few. Or maybe US leaders need to spend less time bashing at EU for the absence of local technolords and more time thinking why US has so many.
  - matthewfelgate 2y ago
    The US is a successful economy.
fluffet 3y ago
I've actually read this book recently. I thought it was quite interesting, but would be better with less political stuff (most if it is at the end though). My favourite thoughts and takeaways (that are not in the article): We trained the algorithms to predict our desires so well, that they turned on us. Now they effectively train us by informing us or feeding us with what we would or should like. This is the power every marketer would like to have. They ("techno lords") can nudge our feeds however they want and manipulate. We wouldn’t know. Another one is: Technofeudalism has smashed the veil between refuge from markets (usually when you got home, you were home, but now you are on your phone); and one such market is the market of “self-discovery”. You need an identity online today, or you basically don’t exist. But what happens then is: you have to think before you post about “who could read this?” What does that entail? Well, that causes you to curate what you broadcast – so what you broadcast the best version of your identity. You should “be yourself!” – but at the same time noone is themselves. You can see this effect on Instagram quite clearly. Nobody posts their “real” authentic day when they binge series in sweatpants – they post their vacation and food pictures. I'm sure there is some equivalent version of that here on HN!
- libertine 3y ago
  > They ("techno lords") can nudge our feeds however they want and manipulate. We wouldn’t know. But there's a detail here that its hard to answer, or at least for some platforms. Given the complexity of some of these algorithms, do the techno lords have that sort of control of deliberate control, or it's just the uncontrolled optimization for a given outcome? I'm not saying that reality is better, it might be even worse to know that no one is at the wheel. > Technofeudalism has smashed the veil between refuge from markets (usually when you got home, you were home, but now you are on your phone); and one such market is the market of “self-discovery”. You need an identity online today, or you basically don’t exist. But what happens then is: you have to think before you post about “who could read this?” What does that entail? I think that's a tremendous insight to be put forward, especially because we know this and yet the vast majority of people still act it out. Some time ago I saw an interview with Slavoj Zizek where he went deep into this phenomenon with the example of Santa Claus: Parents know it is a lie, yet they act it out to their children who at some point know it's a lie but still act it out not to disappoint their parents and keep that illusion, and this goes on for generations. This is the exact same thing as this culture of self-discovery/acceptance, everyone preaches it, but end up boiling everything down to their best moments and highlights. It's a collective lie that everyone plays with, and I don't know if there's a clear purpose to it other than to sustain itself.
fmajid 3y ago
I live in the UK, where we can only aspire to technofeudalism, being stuck in medievofeudalism, where most of the land is still owned by the feudal aristocracy, i.e. parasites descended from thugs, and most people don't own the land beneath their homes, being effectively serfs to their freeholders.
- discodachshund 3y ago
  Actually we have both, as this technofeudalism refers to digital capital and not land capital.
- aembleton 3y ago
  Do those leaseholds keep up with inflation? I know there's been a scandal about some new builds increasing rents each year, but ours was set 150 years ago at £5/year and never goes up. We don't even know who to pay it to and no ones bothered to collect it. Its too small a figure. I don't consider myself a serf, if I even had to pay £5/year.
Dylanfm 3y ago
There's also a recent interview with the same title on the Debunking Economics podcast https://debunkingeconomics.com/episode/yanos-varoufakis-on-technofeudalism https://debunkingeconomics.com/episode/yanos-varoufakis-on-t...
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
Actually, isn’t self-hosting and federation more like feudalism and the Big Tech more like a modern central state. When self-hosting say Mastodon, you have to have a relationship with the hosting provider, the software developer, your users, and any other servers you federate with. This is more reminiscent of the network of relationships that dominated Feudal Europe. Whereas, if you use Twitter, you basically have just a single, more comprehensive relationship to Twitter, which is closer to the central state model, where there is a central authority that subsumes and manages these relationships. Also, in a feudal system, if you got robbed/assaulted there would be a very complicated means of trying to hold people responsible as there would be multiple domains and authorities involved. Similarly, fighting spam in a federated model is also complicated. Ina nation-state model, it’s much easier to at least try to impose a uniform standard of justice. Similarly, “Big Tech” can deal with spam much easier than federation. Also, Apple’s App Store fees do not indicate feudalism. People in the modern world also pay various taxes to governments, even though we don’t have a feudal system. So I think federation is more like feudalism and Big Tech is more analogous to the modern central government.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  This, the more centralized the less feudal it could possibly be, for better and for worse .
- tmcb 3y ago
  Varoufakis' point is not about the size of those entities, but rather the nature of economical relationships inside these realms. Of course the analogy will break at some point. Every single analogy will. We should also ask which kind of power structures have nation states borrowed from feudalism, and which ones were borrowed again by big tech.
- rsolva 3y ago
  I get your angel, and partly agree. Feudalism might not be a perfect way to describe this tension. But at it's core, we are talking about a concentration of power. Feudalism is defined by a few noblemen owning huge swats of land, lending it out in exchange for labor. The fewer owners of land, the more concentrated is their power. They dictate the rules. That is Meta, Google, Amazon etc today – a lot of power held by a few men. The more interoperability we implement in this web we call the internet, the more diversity we get. It has made it possible for me to host my own presence on the social web from a tiny computer sitting next to my freezer. I'm using GoToSocial, which is a piece of software built by a bunch of people collaborating. They have much less power over my online social life than what Mark Zuckerberg had when I was still using Facebook! I can contribute to GoToSocial at their code forge, adding code, bug reports, feature request or voice my opinion on the direction of the project. If I would hit a major disagreement, I could relatively easily move to one of the many other software projects that uses the same protocol and not risk being cut off from my entire social network online. To me, this feels very empowering!
randomcarbloke 3y ago
stay in your lane hat-man.
seydor 3y ago
Technofeudalism is just the current incarnation of capitalism , its nature hasnt changed. Both capitalists and politicians have sought to increase their power post-war, and as long as some war doesnt stop them they will keep doing so. When politicians blame billionaires it's because they are taking away 'power space' from them , and the same goes when billionaires accuse politicians. Democracy or free market are not really putting a brake to this process of power concentration and erosion of individual freedoms, because they can be gamed, via addictive products and political manipulation/populism. Unfortunately only wars have historically broken this power-concentration game
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  or revolutions. tree of liberty refreshed with the blood of patriots, etc. etc.
wellthisisgreat 3y ago
a career politician whose whole MO is by definition power mongering is upset that some other org is wielding power. I’ll take corporate power that is predictable as it’s based on profit over political power that is unpredictable as it’s fed by vanities and human deficiencies any day.

181 points by helloplanets 3y ago

https://archive.md/4kcVN https://archive.md/4kcVN

“To Varoufakis, every time you post on X, formerly Twitter, you’re essentially toiling Elon Musk’s estate like a medieval serf. Musk doesn't pay you. But your free labor pays him, in a sense, by increasing the value of his company.” This sounds disanalogous to me. When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. All at no monetary cost to you. Meanwhile, twitter has the costs of paying for servers and infrastructure and salaries of those required to support the site

soco 3y ago
Also a serf status can be boosted by receiving a visit from the lord, which has quite some costs with his court.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bluetomcat 3y ago
> you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following Ultimately, it's a zero-sum game for all the "posters". The attention and time of your following is finite, and other posters are fighting for it, too. The "cloud algorithm" defines the rules of the game and matches your content to its consumers.
- ctrw 3y ago
  So long as the user base is growing its not zero sum.
  - mzitelli 3y ago
    Exactly, X userbase is going down. So less than zero sum.
    - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
      That's because Musk doesn't understand what he bought and lacks the finesse to manage it productively. And that's a good thing, because if someone as toxic and unhinged as Musk understood how SM really works, it would be a global disaster. We've already seen what happens with that in the MSM space. So far, SM has only had fragmentary versions of that kind of propaganda monolith - Cambridge Analytica, bot farms, and so on. Those are all bad enough. But a global platform that existed purely for propaganda and disinformation while pretending not to would be horrific.
- pas 3y ago
  No, it's not. If there's good quality content, scintillating discussions, amazing insights and whatnot on twiXter it will attract more users. If all of that is there but the toxic sludge level in the cesspool is already at the dear users' elbows, then it probably discourage new (and old) users from jumping in.
  - bluetomcat 3y ago
    It might be subjective, but I'm having trouble finding any quality content on media platforms driven by engagement. Most content is engineered to provoke an initial dopamine reaction with a funny face, a shiny product or a curious situation. Even tech articles feel promotional. You rarely get any deep insight about a topic.
    - pas 3y ago
iamcurious 3y ago
If you depend on that brand and following for your livelihood and they arbitrarily ban you, what rights do you have?
- theGeatZhopa 3y ago
  6 months ago. I was dependent on my Boss for my livelihood. Worked there for 14 years. But they arbitrarily fired me. What rights do I have? I guess, when I was dependent on that brand and they ban me - yeah, that's life. Happens millions of times to millions. So what? End of life?
pas 3y ago
Serfs got protection (and other services, like justice! uh.) from the feudal lord. I don't like Varoufakis' typical oversimplification, but this one doesn't seem that bad.
- tored 3y ago
  But I get no protection from these tech overlords, they can close me down at anytime or give my data away to third party or the government without my knowledge.
  - pas 3y ago
    The analogy is that you get to use their platform to build your 'brand'. Of course other important aspect is that even if you are free to move to a different platform - in contrast to serfs, who in general had to ask for permission to move - you can't move your followers. So in that sense every second of effort put into a twitter profile is improvement to the land that you can't take with you. And, as we know, while brands are important users are lazy and stick to platforms much more than to brands. (While, again of course, there's usually a very devoted core community around content creators, but that's not true at all of most brands, and especially not true of regular users who just want to have some Reddit or forum-discussion-like experience.)
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  they also tended to live in poverty and die horribly. this occasionally led them to rise up and kill their lords; the medieval social contract was constantly in flux. but make no mistake it led to absolutism.
ilayn 3y ago
Whatever you get out for your own self is a secondary by-product. You are bounded to that platform to get what you get and cannot leave by taking what you already contributed. While you are benefiting from certain social returns, you are also the reason why someone else's brand is growing by the same argument. Hence the platform is doing nothing but increasing its importance for its matchmaking value. That is the premise. At some critical threshold, the platform achieves the "I'm too big to bother with individual users" and declares the feudal lordship (remember similar Stackoverflow and Reddit dramas with "We do as we please" attitude and nothing happened to the platforms because users could not give up - the following mod saga for reddit and so on and accepted their fate). It already happened with social media platforms long time ago.
- bdowling 3y ago
  > cannot leave by taking what you already contributed. Of course you can. Twitter/X doesn’t own your tweets. You can take them and post them somewhere else if you want. This is all clearly stated in the Twitter/X terms of service. https://twitter.com/en/tos https://twitter.com/en/tos
  - ilayn 3y ago
    Your contribution is not the storage of your tweets. You can delete them one by one or with API but it won't make any difference at this point. And you need to repost it somewhere. You have contributed to keep the platform relevant. So no you can't take them anywhere else.
    - bdowling 3y ago
      > And you need to repost it somewhere. Exactly, you can repost them elsewhere. That is the opposite of “you can’t take them anywhere else.”
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    Twitter owns the contextual value of your tweets. It owns the virtual land on which you can seed tweets to grow value. And it sells access to the virtual land to advertisers who put up billboards all over it. And it gives Musk powers that feudal lords never had. He has total control over which content grows value, and which remains ignored and barren.
usrnm 3y ago
And serfs were allowed to work the land belonging to the lord and produce food for themselves and their families.
- kjksf 3y ago
  "serfs were peasants who were bound to the land they worked on and were under the authority of the landowners or lords" Last time I checked Twitter (the supposed lord) doesn't have the power to make you (the supposed serf) post on Twitter. That is, I would say, a crucial distinction that makes the serf comparison ultra ridiculous. Then again if Varoufakis said that the relationship between Twitter and its users is based on mutual benefit but Twitter gets more benefit, then it wouldn't make you as angry as saying that they people are serfs of techno-feudalists.
mschuster91 3y ago
> This sounds disanalogous to me. When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. As someone who co-runs a >>70k account: Yes, that is possible, but it's very very rare for those creating a following primarily via Twitter to actually make money with it. Maybe if you got an 0nlyfans account. Meanwhile, the content you create lures in other people and with them, eyeballs that Twitter can make money with by selling advertising time to these people. > Meanwhile, twitter has the costs of paying for servers and infrastructure and salaries of those required to support the site The legitimate costs required to run something like Twitter or Whatsapp can be pretty darn small. Whatsapp ran with 50 employees up until 1 billion (!) users [1]. The point is to not unfocus too much - for all the bad Musk did to Twitter, he did show that there indeed was a lot of dead weight hanging around the place, no wonder it was hemorraging money. [1] https://blog.quastor.org/p/whatsapp-scaled-1-billion-users-50-engineers https://blog.quastor.org/p/whatsapp-scaled-1-billion-users-5...
- blitzar 3y ago
  > no wonder it was hemorraging money I love how history has been rewritten such that a company that was profitable was "hemorraging money". Now that they are actually hemorraging money under new management it is somehow a case study in profitability. If everyone clicks their heels three times and says it - of course it will be true.
  - theblobawakens 3y ago
    If, instead of selling a product, when one gets regular huge investments from second/third world regimes, which are in reality to pay for salaries 19K+ regional language moderators and censors, 500 programmers for censorship and related algos, but only 500 people to run the actual "freemium" product is not exactly "profitable" either...
    - blitzar 3y ago
      The definition is clear and well defined, making up new definitions to justify a lie is deliberately obtuse. profitable /ˈprɒfɪtəbl/ adjective adjective: profitable 1. (of a business or activity) yielding profit or financial gain.
r0ckarong 3y ago
> All at no monetary cost to you. Except the fee for the blue tick. And whatever they charge you if you actually want to place ads for users instead of "pushing content" to those that follow you. I also don't think the serf image is perfect but there clearly is an "access level" difference to where value is created and extracted.
Timwi 3y ago
Twitter (and other platforms like it) self-impose those costs on themselves in order to maintain the feudalist structure. If all software were just open-source, anyone could run their own Twitter and make it interoperable. Except this already exists and is called Mastodon, or more generally, the Fediverse. The fact that billions of people still choose to use Twitter instead of the sensible alternative shows that the feudalist gambit (using algorithms to make people angry and turn on each other) is working.
- pas 3y ago
  According to Apptopia analysis, X/Twitter is estimated to have around 121 million daily active users, significantly lower compared to company announcements. Elon of course says that it's around 300M and all-time-high was 550M in 2023. (Whatever that means.)
- non-chalad 3y ago
  How much does the electricity cost to run the servers? How much for the maintenance of those computers running the software? How about rental fees for the space they are kept in, air conditioning, sewer, taxes? Nah… doesn't exist. It's self-imposed feudalism.
  - piva00 3y ago
    The issue is not giving you the option by making Twitter interoperable with an open protocol. Imagine if the web was like that instead of being an open network where if you follow a few protocols you can access it through any protocol-compliant software (aka: a browser) giving you the option to self-host or pay some service to host it for you, if it was a single service operated by a Big Tech that closes off this web based on their whims, locking out competing browsers, impossible to access outside of their provided clients, etc. It's self-imposed feudalism, Twitter created a feud, API access has been curtailed, you have to access it through their provided means. Open protocols is what made the web as powerful as it is, the closing of parts of it is a disgrace.
    - theGeatZhopa 3y ago
tiborsaas 3y ago
> Musk doesn't pay you. What is this then? https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1770239673014595718 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1770239673014595718
m463 3y ago
Is reddit is a better example. People post and comments add up. But ads are being served, people are being tracked, and eventually the data is sold so AI models can be trained on everything. But the main product (in silicon valley) is stock, which all the reddit folks have been selling wildly the past few weeks.
drewcoo 3y ago
> This sounds disanalogous to me Varoufakis always misrepresents capitalism and feudalism. That's the only way his ideas can get their undeserved attention. Peasants worked the land for their lords but also for themselves and their families. Peasant revolts were not unheard of but peasants were generally treated fairly enough to avoid revolts. Rent-seeking does not magically transform capitalism into feudalism. Capitalism is built on the idea of "investing" capital and "profiting" from others. And in fact, there's the concept of rentier capitalism.
pipes 3y ago
It also ignores a simple fact, we do not have to post on twitter. It is a choice, it is a free exchange, presumably the people who post on twitter enjoy it and Elon makes money. Serfs, well they were forced to work someone else's land and in return they maybe got enough to eat. It's a ridiculous comparison.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > presumably the people who post on twitter enjoy it I do not share this presumption. https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?si=Wr4GgIzWyA-lhsOU https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?si=Wr4GgIzWyA-lhsOU Disagreement (like mine with you :P) also drives engagement, and quite possibly more than positive vibes do.
  - theGeatZhopa 3y ago
    Not just quite possible, but it is like that. The reason all the platforms got that big is engagement and engagement can be provoked if you give the people a possibility to take their stand. But for one taking a stand you need something that is big enough for the stand taker to take the stand. It's disagreement. And provoking. The classical tools of Internet trolls. They're a part of the game too.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  It's damn near impossible to work as an independent creator of books, music, art, streaming videos of all kinds, and so on, without a social media presence. Many people do not enjoy SM at all, but the alternative is zero income.
tmcb 3y ago
Medieval serfs could be rewarded with food housing at no monetary cost as well, but it didn't make the system any less unjust. Also, having the company pay for infrastructure costs does not necessarily imply that users are getting the upper hand in this deal. They are providing "value" (quotes intentional) to customers at the lowest cost possible, otherwise it would not be a viable business.
eesmith 3y ago
A serf working the field is still rewarded with (part of) the harvest, the knowledge of having done good work, and the respect of neighbors. Praskovia Kovalyova-Zhemchugova "was a Russian serf actress and soprano opera singer", with her own brand and following ("Figes describes her as Russia's first "superstar"); quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praskovia_Kovalyova-Zhemchugova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praskovia_Kovalyova-Zhemchugov... I think it's a tricky argument since there the feudal system was much more complicated than, say, sharecropping or tenant farming, as the lord was obliged to protect his serfs and protect their right to use the land. I think sharecropping is a better analogy. It's also tricky as serfdom and feudalism cover a wide range of systems which are not well described in popular culture. Serfdom in 1800s Russia was far different from serfdom in 1400s England. When you write "All at no monetary cost to you", remember that serfs mostly paid in time and work, not money. And the lord had costs as well, like the cost of providing military protection.
lm28469 3y ago
> you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. I'm reading this over and over trying to comprehend how we ended up in a world in which this sentence isn't satirical
- exe34 3y ago
  It's like the old "do it for me for free and you'll get exposure!"
  - boffinAudio 3y ago
    No, it is that and the attitude is not old but rather encoded in every damn EULA under the sun ..
- Beldin 3y ago
  I figured it was a troll attempt. Judging by the replies, I'm not sure if the troller would be pleased (quantity) or sad (lack of outrage). ETA: The idea of a troller losing faith in humanity because his trolls are taken seriously but do not stir up emotions is somewhat funny.
krapp 3y ago
>When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. All at no monetary cost to you. Yes we call that "being paid in exposure" and outside of Silicon Valley it's widely recognized as a scam. Also bear in mind that content and engagement serves the purpose of driving ad revenue and creating a monetizable social graph, so it's less a "reward" and more "unpaid labor."
Lutger 3y ago
> When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following wikipedia on serfdom: >Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned that land. In return, they were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence.

roenxi 3y ago

The obvious problem with a title like "technofeudalism" is it sounds prejudicial. Something like historical feudalism was troubling because people couldn't just walk away from it. A string of fiefdoms is actually a pretty decent organisational model as long as you don't have to inhabit ones that are hostile to your interests. At the technical level it is trivial to set up competitors and it remains the case that nobody needs to use these sites. I don't have a Twitter account, so over the years I have been more or less locked out of using it, in fact. These sites are fine.

sabellito 3y ago
Your argument is incorrect in regards to many of these social networks. Wanna be a photographer? You must have an Instagram account. Want to talk to some government services? You must use WhatsApp. Want to sell something used? You must have a Facebook account. Want to read what your politicians have to say? You must have a twitter account. Want to see the phone number of a restaurant? Gotta go over to Google maps. Also, no real alternative to YouTube's content. And so on and so forth. The argument "just don't use it" is disconnected from reality.
- roenxi 3y ago
  That list is mostly false. I've used government services, sold used things on the internet, read what politicians say (in detail) and bought food online without using those sites. Twitter is in fact a bad place to engage with politicians because, by design, you only get soundbites. It is much more informative to go straight to the parliamentary records if you care about politics. > Also, no real alternative to YouTube's content. About 40-50% of what I watch is being sloooowly driven off YouTube because they don't like right wing opinions. They all have duplicate channels on multiple sites. And even a lot of the non-political stuff is starting to appear in a few places because it makes more economic sense.
  - lentil_soup 3y ago
    that's great that you were able to do all of that, but that's not true for everyone. You can't deny that for a lot of people these networks are their day to day, and have become a necessity. Just like someone can make an effort and live off-the-grid just fine, it doesn't mean it is possible for everyone to do it.

aaron695 3y ago

> you’re essentially toiling Elon Musk’s estate like a medieval serf. Musk doesn't pay you. Yes he does, he literally changed Twitter to pay people... so why should I keep reading another article from someone who got too old to talk about tech and has some Musk derangement syndrome? HN doesn't pay anyone. Y Combinator is worth $20+ billion? Oh no we are all serfs.

lm28469 3y ago
> HN doesn't pay anyone. Y Combinator is worth $20+ billion? Oh no we are all serfs. Except HN has nothing to do with Y combinator valuation, we're just the funny monkeys in the circus on the outskirt of the city
tmcb 3y ago
You seem confused. It is not your fault, commenters here are focusing too much on the X/Twitter quote from the article, which by the way comes from its introduction and not from the interview proper. The crux of the matter is not the compensation (or lack thereof) for the content produced, but the fact that, for companies like Amazon or Apple, their main mode of wealth extraction is not wealth but rent. In traditional advertising, for instance, the publisher is not entitled to a cut of your sales. Companies pay a fixed price for the front page ad in a print newspaper. In digital platforms, it is not the case anymore. The same applies to social media, but on a different manner which I will not cover here. If you are an ordinary consumer of these platforms, you help companies enable their business model, but the dollars are not coming off your pocket.

chaostheory 3y ago

Unlike the “serfs” tech companies actually pay for in developing countries to do stuff manually training AI, we don’t “toil” in their “fields”. Instead, we choose to frolic in them. It’s a choice, and we have more of it in the developed world. Just like how we still have a choice as to where and how we work. I interact with social media for leisure and not for influence or work. Most people are just in it for bread and circus, even on HN. His argument is terrible and nonsensical. A better analogy for the majority of the population is that tech companies are narco drug pushers and we’re the addicts. That analogy also only works if you ignore the fact that payment is cheap if you’re just paying with attention

tmcb 3y ago
Science has very solid evidence on social networks being extremely addictive, and there are growing suspicions that some companies have it like this by design. It might be a choice, yes, but this is not a black-and-white situation.
- constantcrying 3y ago
  >and there are growing suspicions that some companies have it like this by design That is completely ridiculous. Obviously literally every social media company wants to generate sustained user engagement, this isn't a "growing suspicion" it is their business model to act that way.
  - tmcb 3y ago
    Sorry, I am not sure if this is sarcasm :)
    - itsoktocry 3y ago
      It's not sarcasm. Their entire purpose is to maintain engagement, it's not a conspiracy.
      - 3y ago

epups 3y ago

I like Varoufakis in general and I find this analogy interesting. However, his answer to this question was not satisfactory in my opinion, as many commercial arrangements including malls, are also based on percentages: Q: A company like Apple might argue that instead of being a fiefdom, maybe the Apple App Store is more like a mall where companies have to rent their stores from whomever owns the building. How is technofeudalism different from the mall dynamic? A: Well, hugely. Say you and I were going into partnership together with a fashion brand. We go to the shopping mall and we hire a shop, the rent is fixed. It is not proportional to our sales. The more money we make, the higher our price-to-rent margin. With the Apple Store, they get 30 percent of all sales. That’s not at all the same thing. That is the equivalent of the ground rent that the feudal lord used to extract from vassal capitalists.

jahnu 3y ago
Regardless of where you stand on this issue I feel that's a bit of a pointless nit-pick, because he's obviously not referring to those cases where mall rents are based on percentages. He clearly would argue that those would be the same system as the one he is arguing against. It's clear he's talking about the case he sets up to contrast two different models.
- epups 3y ago
  If it's not about percentages, then what's the difference here? Walmart and Amazon are not fundamentally different. If the Apple Store can be compared to a mall, then we are in the same economic model we've been for decades.
  - ilayn 3y ago
    You can switch to a different location and continue business, should a conflict arises with a landlord in a mall. With Amazon, if you have a conflict, you are done. You cannot come back to the mall. And there is a single (or very few malls). In other words, it is not a market, where people come together for business) anymore it is being bound to a higher power to grant you rights of doing business.

Hrnrurj 3y ago

[flagged]

tomhoward 3y ago
Comments like this are against the HN guidelines as they are at odds with the site's purpose, which is to gratify intellectual curiosity. There are plenty of ways people can discuss ideas from Varoufakis, Marx and other writers/philosophers from all parts of the ideological landscape without resorting to simplistic barbs like this, and without wanting a society that remotely resembles North Korea or any other authoritarian state.

1oooqooq 3y ago

i will apply for a grant just to analyze the insanity of the cope arguments in this thread. pure gold

brutusborn 3y ago
What do you mean? Coping as in pretending they aren't Technoserfs?
- ravelfan 3y ago
  [flagged]
mandmandam 3y ago
This would be a genuinely interesting and fruitful exploration. At first glance, it looks like awful reading comprehension - but these are people perfectly capable of reading technical topics without difficulty. You can say, well, these people have a salary that depends on them ignoring their complicity in a vast evil that has been warned about since the 50's; or even since the 80s in popular culture, creating an entire genre replete with subgenres and subcultures. And that says a lot. But what role does education play? Nationalism? Media capture? I sincerely believe this is a crucial question that gets surprisingly little self reflection in the tech community. Where usually we love to pat ourselves on the back about our important role in the modern world, when it comes to our role in maintaining class structures, it's crickets at best and blind fury as standard - to the point where it seems people can't even understand simple sentences.
epilys 3y ago
Temporarily embarrassed feudal lords.

cladopa 3y ago

"Take the Apple Store. You are producing an app, Apple can withhold 30 percent of your profits [through a commission fee]. That's a rent." Funny because I remember the days before Apple Store where telecom companies did you a favor if you sold them your game for $100 to put on their phones. Telefonica got crazy and offered $200 to the winner of a phone game competition in an engineering University. I have also worked with retailers that expect to get over 50% of the profit of anything you sell on their stores. I also have maintained my blogs, email and webpages on my own servers, something that you can do today with no problem, cheaper than ever. For Vanufakis, it looks like people are forced at gunpoint to use X. Mr Vanufakis believe that countries have the right to ask for money, spend it and never give it back, with no consequences. But of course the world does not work this way. In the real world, you don't pay your debts, they send you a hitman, specially if you expect paying back nothing.

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
> Mr Vanufakis believe that countries have the right to ask for money, spend it and never give it back, with no consequences. "People on here often mock varoufakis for looking like voldemort, being incredibly vain and spending years trading off a job he had for 5 months, but they never give him credit for how funny he is" [0]: Varoufakis was elected secretary of the Black Students Alliance, a choice that caused some controversy, given that he is not black, to which he responded "that black was a political term and, as a Greek, on the grounds of ethnicity he had as much reason to be there as anyone else." [1] [0] https://twitter.com/khartoum_of/status/1710020375604555984 https://twitter.com/khartoum_of/status/1710020375604555984 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis
tmcb 3y ago
> Mr Vanufakis believe that countries have the right to ask for money, spend it and never give it back, with no consequences. This is actually the opposite of what happened. The Greek government, which was already virtually bankrupt in 2010, took a 110b EUR loan from the IMF on very harsh conditions, and Varoufakis was very vocal against it at that point already. He was appointed Minister of Finance, he simply tried to renegotiate the terms of the deal, which the other involved parts refused.

yareal 3y ago

Imagine looking at tech and saying, "this is a problem with tech companies, not a systemic flaw in capitalism itself". The tech companies are bad, but only uniquely bad in that they are efficient at what they do. You think Boeing, General Mills, or ford wouldn't want you to be a dev if they could figure out how to do it?

tmcb 3y ago
What does it have to do with devs? Those are business models devised by business people, some of them devs, some of them not. The article mentions enshittification. BMW is offering heated seats on a monthly subscription [1]. If an average teams of devs was asked to implement that as a practical joke, they would certainly be able to do it. Some of them can't quite make the jump between that and the fact that companies do expect to make a profit out of it. [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription...
- bathtub365 3y ago
  Just because developers aren’t coming up with the business models doesn’t mean they bear no responsibility. You can’t go to work every day for a company that makes bad things, as someone making bad things at that company, and claim no responsibility for their existence in the world. This is especially true when employee mobility is so high in software. Surely if developers had a mature sense of professional ethics and strong personal values they would be sure they worked at a company that they felt aligned with them, or admit that they have compromised their values for a larger paycheck. That BMW article is from 2022. They don’t offer that anymore[1]. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/7/23863258/bmw-cancel-heated-seat-subscription-microtransaction https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/7/23863258/bmw-cancel-heated...
  - tmcb 3y ago
    That is not how I interpreted GP's point. It sounded to me as if they were saying that anyone in tech could move to other industries and make big bucks if the points in the interview were true. Thing is, even if the points in the interview are false, that would not apply, as devs are not the ones making the shots. Edit: btw, thanks for the heads-up about the heated seats subscription thing. I hope it doesn't make the point moot.

hal_9000 3y ago

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matthewfelgate 3y ago

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m000 3y ago
> European leaders need to spend less time bashing successful US tech companies and more time thinking why Europe has so few. Or maybe US leaders need to spend less time bashing at EU for the absence of local technolords and more time thinking why US has so many.
- matthewfelgate 2y ago
  The US is a successful economy.

fluffet 3y ago

I've actually read this book recently. I thought it was quite interesting, but would be better with less political stuff (most if it is at the end though). My favourite thoughts and takeaways (that are not in the article): We trained the algorithms to predict our desires so well, that they turned on us. Now they effectively train us by informing us or feeding us with what we would or should like. This is the power every marketer would like to have. They ("techno lords") can nudge our feeds however they want and manipulate. We wouldn’t know. Another one is: Technofeudalism has smashed the veil between refuge from markets (usually when you got home, you were home, but now you are on your phone); and one such market is the market of “self-discovery”. You need an identity online today, or you basically don’t exist. But what happens then is: you have to think before you post about “who could read this?” What does that entail? Well, that causes you to curate what you broadcast – so what you broadcast the best version of your identity. You should “be yourself!” – but at the same time noone is themselves. You can see this effect on Instagram quite clearly. Nobody posts their “real” authentic day when they binge series in sweatpants – they post their vacation and food pictures. I'm sure there is some equivalent version of that here on HN!

libertine 3y ago
> They ("techno lords") can nudge our feeds however they want and manipulate. We wouldn’t know. But there's a detail here that its hard to answer, or at least for some platforms. Given the complexity of some of these algorithms, do the techno lords have that sort of control of deliberate control, or it's just the uncontrolled optimization for a given outcome? I'm not saying that reality is better, it might be even worse to know that no one is at the wheel. > Technofeudalism has smashed the veil between refuge from markets (usually when you got home, you were home, but now you are on your phone); and one such market is the market of “self-discovery”. You need an identity online today, or you basically don’t exist. But what happens then is: you have to think before you post about “who could read this?” What does that entail? I think that's a tremendous insight to be put forward, especially because we know this and yet the vast majority of people still act it out. Some time ago I saw an interview with Slavoj Zizek where he went deep into this phenomenon with the example of Santa Claus: Parents know it is a lie, yet they act it out to their children who at some point know it's a lie but still act it out not to disappoint their parents and keep that illusion, and this goes on for generations. This is the exact same thing as this culture of self-discovery/acceptance, everyone preaches it, but end up boiling everything down to their best moments and highlights. It's a collective lie that everyone plays with, and I don't know if there's a clear purpose to it other than to sustain itself.

fmajid 3y ago

I live in the UK, where we can only aspire to technofeudalism, being stuck in medievofeudalism, where most of the land is still owned by the feudal aristocracy, i.e. parasites descended from thugs, and most people don't own the land beneath their homes, being effectively serfs to their freeholders.

discodachshund 3y ago
Actually we have both, as this technofeudalism refers to digital capital and not land capital.
aembleton 3y ago
Do those leaseholds keep up with inflation? I know there's been a scandal about some new builds increasing rents each year, but ours was set 150 years ago at £5/year and never goes up. We don't even know who to pay it to and no ones bothered to collect it. Its too small a figure. I don't consider myself a serf, if I even had to pay £5/year.

Dylanfm 3y ago

There's also a recent interview with the same title on the Debunking Economics podcast https://debunkingeconomics.com/episode/yanos-varoufakis-on-technofeudalism https://debunkingeconomics.com/episode/yanos-varoufakis-on-t...

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

Actually, isn’t self-hosting and federation more like feudalism and the Big Tech more like a modern central state. When self-hosting say Mastodon, you have to have a relationship with the hosting provider, the software developer, your users, and any other servers you federate with. This is more reminiscent of the network of relationships that dominated Feudal Europe. Whereas, if you use Twitter, you basically have just a single, more comprehensive relationship to Twitter, which is closer to the central state model, where there is a central authority that subsumes and manages these relationships. Also, in a feudal system, if you got robbed/assaulted there would be a very complicated means of trying to hold people responsible as there would be multiple domains and authorities involved. Similarly, fighting spam in a federated model is also complicated. Ina nation-state model, it’s much easier to at least try to impose a uniform standard of justice. Similarly, “Big Tech” can deal with spam much easier than federation. Also, Apple’s App Store fees do not indicate feudalism. People in the modern world also pay various taxes to governments, even though we don’t have a feudal system. So I think federation is more like feudalism and Big Tech is more analogous to the modern central government.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
This, the more centralized the less feudal it could possibly be, for better and for worse .
tmcb 3y ago
Varoufakis' point is not about the size of those entities, but rather the nature of economical relationships inside these realms. Of course the analogy will break at some point. Every single analogy will. We should also ask which kind of power structures have nation states borrowed from feudalism, and which ones were borrowed again by big tech.
rsolva 3y ago
I get your angel, and partly agree. Feudalism might not be a perfect way to describe this tension. But at it's core, we are talking about a concentration of power. Feudalism is defined by a few noblemen owning huge swats of land, lending it out in exchange for labor. The fewer owners of land, the more concentrated is their power. They dictate the rules. That is Meta, Google, Amazon etc today – a lot of power held by a few men. The more interoperability we implement in this web we call the internet, the more diversity we get. It has made it possible for me to host my own presence on the social web from a tiny computer sitting next to my freezer. I'm using GoToSocial, which is a piece of software built by a bunch of people collaborating. They have much less power over my online social life than what Mark Zuckerberg had when I was still using Facebook! I can contribute to GoToSocial at their code forge, adding code, bug reports, feature request or voice my opinion on the direction of the project. If I would hit a major disagreement, I could relatively easily move to one of the many other software projects that uses the same protocol and not risk being cut off from my entire social network online. To me, this feels very empowering!

randomcarbloke 3y ago

stay in your lane hat-man.

seydor 3y ago

Technofeudalism is just the current incarnation of capitalism , its nature hasnt changed. Both capitalists and politicians have sought to increase their power post-war, and as long as some war doesnt stop them they will keep doing so. When politicians blame billionaires it's because they are taking away 'power space' from them , and the same goes when billionaires accuse politicians. Democracy or free market are not really putting a brake to this process of power concentration and erosion of individual freedoms, because they can be gamed, via addictive products and political manipulation/populism. Unfortunately only wars have historically broken this power-concentration game

red-iron-pine 3y ago
or revolutions. tree of liberty refreshed with the blood of patriots, etc. etc.

wellthisisgreat 3y ago

a career politician whose whole MO is by definition power mongering is upset that some other org is wielding power. I’ll take corporate power that is predictable as it’s based on profit over political power that is unpredictable as it’s fed by vanities and human deficiencies any day.