I don't disagree with Varoufakis necessarily on his technofeudalism hypothesis, but he makes several claims in this video that are just ~completely false~ misle

I don't disagree with Varoufakis necessarily on his technofeudalism hypothesis, but he makes several claims in this video that are just ~completely false~ misleading and poorly cited, as far as I can tell, and that annoys me, so I'm just going to do my best to respond to them here as a sort of vent LOL. 1. He claims that Google and Facebook and the like only spend 1% of their revenue paying their employees and that therefore any money that goes to them sort of stays out of the circular economy. As far as I can tell, there are absolutely no sources to back this up available online. Not from Google's official reporting, and not even from him: he himself just states the number, but doesn't explain how or where he got it from. In my search I haven't found a case where he cites it, either. ~All I can really find is that Google's operating expenses are around $261 billion as of this year[1], and their revenue was $385[2] — and since operating expenses are usually at least substantially payroll, it's hard to tell.~ Edit: At least two commenters below did a quick back of the napkin calculation, multiplying the median salary of a Google employee by the number of Google employees to get something like 36 billion, which is about 10% of the companies overall revenue. So maybe that's what he meant. But it would have been good for him to actually — first of all — not get the number an order of magnitude off, and second of all, to actually explain how he got that number! 2. Then he brings up the idea that someone's Tesla was remotely deactivated. This was debunked[3]. Edit: Another commenter pointed out that maybe he meant this story where full self-driving got remotely disabled on a car that was bought secondhand[7]. This does match better the part where he mentioned that the car was sold secondhand before it got deactivated. So there's that. But again, it would have been good if he had actually gotten his facts straight. 3. He brings up this idea that Teslas sell your user data Amazon. This is, at least, roundly contradicted by their legally binding privacy policy, and even according to the Mozilla Foundation there's no evidence of Tesla ever selling driver data to a third party[4] (although they've been very, shall we say, uncareful about it in at least two instances, but those don't resemble anything like what he's claiming). One random user on a Tesla owners' forum got freaked out because they saw the car sending data to "Amazon", but when they checked on the IP addresses, it became clear it was using just sending information to AWS servers, which are almost certainly run and owned by Tesla, not Amazon[5], which is what a technically savvy person would assume to begin with anyway. 4. He argues that Volkswagen electric cars can't compete with Teslas because Volkswagen cars "don't have access to cloud capital", which he says gives Tesla an advantage because they do, based on point 3. But given that there's absolutely no evidence of that anywhere, I feel like his entire argument crumbles, because it becomes very unclear how Tesla is benefiting from cloud capital in a way Volkswagen it is not. *Especially* since according to the Mozilla Foundation, Volkswagen not only gathers much more data about you, but actually actively sells it to third parties for advertising purposes, which they openly admit[6]. [1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/operating-expenses https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/ope... [2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/revenue https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve... [3]: https://www.theverge.com/tesla/757594/tesla-cybertruck-deactivated-viral-video-fake https://www.theverge.com/tesla/757594/tesla-cybertruck-deact... [4]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/tesla/ https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/tesl... [5]: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/uploaded-data-to-amazon.162582/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/uploaded-data-to-ama... [6]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/volkswagen/ https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/volk... "What does VW say they can do with this vast treasure trove of personal information, car data, and inferences they collect on you? Well, they use it to make more money, of course. Because selling cars isn't a big enough business these days, now, your personal information is another gold mine for all car companies to tap into. And tap into it they do. VW says they can use it for their own personalized and targeted advertising purposes or those or their affiliates, business partners, or other third parties. They can share it with third parties who can use it for the commercial purpose of marketing their products and services to you. They also say they can use or disclose your de-identified data for "any purpose." " [7]: https://www.jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-features-from-customer-1841472617/ https://www.jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-fe...