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Autoenshittification. How the computer killed capitalism. – by Cory Doctorow

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Re: Autoenshittification. How the computer killed capitalism. – by Cory Doctorow

#121

Post by gonehome »

jmclnx wrote: post #7

>Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism: This to me is what is really happening. A good symbol of this is income inequality and to a lesser extent, no real action on climate change. Eventually, the "lords" will be in their castles were we most people bake. The "knights" could be the tech people.

I wrote a blog post playing on this idea a while back (though narrowly focused on FB and social media): https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...

In it the Knights were the devs, CEOs were earls, Kings were presidents/dictators.

Users (naturally) were serfs.

It fits pretty well to current megacorp structure.

Re: Autoenshittification. How the computer killed capitalism. – by Cory Doctorow

#122

Post by uoaei »

SlackSabbath wrote: post #111
neovialogistics wrote: post #37

He's arguing that capitalist systems morph over time into feudalistic systems and the argument is pretty persuasive but there's an issue: capitalism initially emerged out of feudalism. The text's theory of history requires a hidden variable that controls the feudalism->capitalism->feudalism process, but no candidate for a hidden variable is suggested by the author. Sure, any reader can think up some candidates for th…

I think feudalism is a misnomer here. Feudalism is a historiographically messy concept to begin with and many Medievalists reject the term outright. But even if we were to distill it down to some simplistic yet workable definition I still don't think whatever we come up with would be applicable to the present situation without seriously torturing the analogy. 'Rentier capitalism' would be more apt.

I've been throwing around the term "neo-feudalism" and people seem to get the gist of what I mean intuitively (paying dues to the monopolistic ownership class, only now you're working digital land) but your suggestion of "rentier capitalism" does ultimately fit much better.

Re: Autoenshittification. How the computer killed capitalism. – by Cory Doctorow

#123

Post by code_duck »

e_i_pi_2 wrote: post #104
carom wrote: post #17

>Today, we live in a rentier's paradise. People don't aspire to create value – they aspire to capture it... don't provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer I think the customer has just changed. Consumers don't have money anymore. Businesses do. Maybe said a different way, for the highest margin products you are targeting businesses. A consumer spending 100k…

Yeah the title seems backwards - this is capitalism corrupting computers, not the other way around

His claim is that capitalism is being replaced with a form of feudalism.

Re: Autoenshittification. How the computer killed capitalism. – by Cory Doctorow

#126

Post by uoaei »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #39

I still have a belief that capitalism and free markets are superior, but not the way we're doing it now. I'm not trying to no true scotsman here, but a man born in germany to 2 austrian parents and dressed in a kilt is no true scotsman. as i see things there are some major issues are - Removing money from gold standard, allowing power to accrue to those who can control the supply. Instead of competing for what consum…

Limited reply to requiring zero debt:

Public assets (roads, sewers, other kinds of infrastructure) are always going to be "debt" in the myopic accounting from the perspective of the government. Requiring zero debt means selling these assets off to (presumably private) entities, which sounds like a terrible idea for reasons aligned closely with the kinds of arguments found in Doctorow's blog post.

Re: Autoenshittification. How the computer killed capitalism. – by Cory Doctorow

#128

Post by api »

carom wrote: post #17

>Today, we live in a rentier's paradise. People don't aspire to create value – they aspire to capture it... don't provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer I think the customer has just changed. Consumers don't have money anymore. Businesses do. Maybe said a different way, for the highest margin products you are targeting businesses. A consumer spending 100k…

I think a more significant factor is growth rate. Free stuff can grow orders of magnitude faster than anything consumers buy for the simpler reason that signups or downloads can be zero friction. Even a little friction slows down growth.

The game online for a very long time has been: grow as fast as possible, then figure out a way to monetize. Free wins in this game, making it almost impossible for anything paid for by the consumer to compete.

So thus we have today's world where the game is: grow fast with free, then enshittify once your network effect has locked everyone in.

It works incredibly well.

Re: Autoenshittification. How the computer killed capitalism. – by Cory Doctorow

#129

Post by BizarroLand »

It is just me, or is having every paragraph of a 200 paragraph essay punctillated by a link that takes you to another page full of paragraphs dotted with links a little too overwhelming?

I didn't follow the links. I generally like Cory Doctorow but this was just a huge doom rant.

Everythings' terrible. Got it.

Now how do I participate in fixing it?

Re: Autoenshittification. How the computer killed capitalism. – by Cory Doctorow

#130

Post by topaz0 »

MrOwnPut wrote: post #105
topaz0 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. "the invisible hand" sounds good and all, but the problem is that if the owners of capital control the profits produced by the mobilization of capital, then money and power will inevitably become concentrated enough that those capitalists both benefit from and become capable of restricting market freedom. The idea that free markets are a stable state of affairs is…

While I don't agree with your hyperbole, yes it is an imperfect system, but it is the best system we have.

You have not understood what I said. I'm not talking about unappealing features of the idealized version of capitalism that GP is lionizing. I'm talking about how capitalism as described brings about the conditions that undermine free competition, by its nature. You're talking about it as though we can just agree as a society "we're doing free competition now" and that's that. Capitalists won't agree to this -- every incentive leads them to want to restrict competition. And they have too much control for a notional agreement among citizens or whatever to overcome.
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