Technofeudalism

Highly recommended.

It's difficult to take this seriously.

Cloud Serfs? ...really?

He names these new capitalists Vassal Capitalists and then makes the title of the book What Killed Capitalism.

I haven't read the book but in this pull quote from a related article linked in the comments

>Traditional capitalists, he proposes, have become “vassal capitalists”. They are subordinate and dependent on a new breed of “lords” – the Big Tech companies – who generate enormous wealth via new digital platforms. A new form of algorithmic capital has evolved – what Varoufakis calls “cloud capital” – and it has displaced “capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits”.

How is it that creating a new type of capital paradoxically brings about the end of capital? Also, in this definition, why are the "lords" able to "generate enormous wealth" just like capitalists? In feudalism, lords were lords over their vassals due to violent power, literally the threat of the sword, and did not create wealth the way a capitalist does by directing the application of capital to generate more wealth, but instead used the threat of violence to take a portion of what their vassals would otherwise generate anyway, in exchange for using that violence against foreign enemies as well.

So.. is Facebook forcing me to hand over some of my wealth by using violence, with the agreement that they will also use their monopoly on violence to protect me from Snapchat, if I sign up to Facebook?

If not, this seems like someone wanted a book about "technofeudalism" and "capitalism" because they are words that will sell books, and worked backwards to make whatever claims they wanted to make without any real interest in what feudalism or capitalism even actually are.

Which is true... Think of it this way, your phone does social media, which doesn't work unless ypu engage. When you engage there, mote people adapts it due to community, more eyeballs for sweet ad money. These medias also grow large and relies on other services to scale and perform those ad workload so they also build or pay someone else for the resources.

In the end what you get is a good feelong in the heart that people liked that one post/photo while they got sweet ad money and someone actually bought a product and someone else made more money.

However that engagement has a cost, you are the acrobat in their circus stage, but you get no pay and while at it you also paid for that over complex device that they also sold(charged you money to give your performance).

Of course, you can nitpick all you want from my bad example, and do a lot of what-aboutism, but the point is clear I hope.