Technofeudalism • Hacker News Board

Re: Technofeudalism

#21

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx » Mon, Nov 13, 2023, 6:17 PM UTC

Evgeny Morozov wrote a very interesting, but also quite long, critique of the "technofeudalism" concept from a Marxist perspective in the New Left Review back in 2022:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii133/articles/evgeny-moroz...

> In the case of well-known figures like Varoufakis and Mazzucato, tantalizing their audiences with invocations of feudal glamour may provide a media-friendly way to recycle arguments they have made before. In Varoufakis’s case, techno-feudalism seems to be mostly about the perverse macroeconomic effects of quantitative easing. For Mazzucato, ‘digital feudalism’ refers to the unearned income generated by tech platforms. Neo-feudalism is often proposed as a way to bring conceptual clarity to the most advanced sectors of the digital economy, where the left’s brightest minds still find themselves very much in the dark. Are Google and Amazon capitalists? Are they rentiers, as Brett Christophers’s Rentier Capitalism suggests? What about Uber? Is it just an intermediary, a rent-taking platform that has inserted itself between drivers and passengers? Or is it producing and selling a transportation service? These questions are not without consequences for how we think about contemporary capitalism itself, heavily dominated by technology companies.

> The idea that feudalism is making a comeback also coheres with left critiques condemning capitalism as extractivist. If today’s capitalists are mere lazy rentiers who contribute nothing to the production process, don’t they deserve to be downgraded to the status of feudal landlords? This embrace of feudal imagery by media- and meme-friendly figures of the left intelligentsia shows no signs of ceasing. Ultimately, though, the popularity of feudal-speak is a testament to intellectual weakness, rather than media savviness. It is as if the left’s theoretical framework can no longer make sense of capitalism without mobilizing the moral language of corruption and perversion. In what follows I delve into some landmark debates on the distinguishing features that differentiate capitalism from earlier economic forms—and those that define political-economic operations in the new digital economy—in hope that a critique of techno-feudal reason may throw fresh light on the world we’re in.

Re: Technofeudalism

#22

Post by yamazakiwi » Mon, Nov 13, 2023, 6:20 PM UTC

n_ary wrote: post #10

yamazakiwi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this thesis is stupid This framing is silly. He says we're Cloud Serfs because we do unpaid work whenever we use our phones... You're not a Serf for using social media or watching videos online, regardless of how much value is extracted by these companies. You contributed nothing to the dialogue surrounding the topic that you are supposedly defending from mud throwing.

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 p…

I agree with everthing you said, but again, contextually users aren't doing any "work". That is the distinction I'm trying to draw. You are less like a serf and more like a thief victim, making the writers comparisons quite stretched by definition. We could be discussing these problems straight-forward as you have described them instead of trying to make it sound like skynet has turned us into actual slaves and selling people on 24 news-cycle style dystopia bait.

Re: Technofeudalism

#23

Post by yamazakiwi » Mon, Nov 13, 2023, 6:21 PM UTC

boringg wrote: post #20

yamazakiwi wrote: post #4

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.

Agreed it's a stretch at best. But to sell books you need something loud to make it through the noise.

That's a good point, and I think the topics, when not compared to feudalism are worth talking about.

Re: Technofeudalism

#24

Post by danwee » Mon, Nov 13, 2023, 6:23 PM UTC

dingnuts wrote: post #8

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 “…

> literally the threat of the sword

Obviously, we need to find contemporary analogies:

- the other day I opened (manually) a bunch of Linkedin profiles (each in one browser tab). Apparently, Linkedin thought it was a suspicious activity and blocked my account for some time (I don't remember, but in the range of hours). Luckily me, I still got my account... but it would be hard to find jobs and keep working connections without Linkedin. I dodged the sword

I'm sure one can find similar examples (or worse) for all the big companies out there (never heard of "google banned me. help!"?)

Re: Technofeudalism

#25

Post by sinistersnare » Mon, Nov 13, 2023, 6:26 PM UTC

I have been listening to Yanis a lot lately. His ideas are quite provocative. His economic ideas are quite refreshing, to hear an economist talking about what a post-subjective-money world may look like.

Today, we have a new class of people, who to borrow Yanis's metaphor I would call Techno-peasants, who exist in a grand subjugation. Any reader of these comments would do well to listen to a few interviews of his.

Re: Technofeudalism

#26

Post by yamazakiwi » Mon, Nov 13, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

n_ary wrote: post #16

dingnuts wrote: post #8

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 “…

You are picking very specific points. Think about the online death, if you misbehave or the google seo index misunderstand something, your business is theoratically dead. If FB decides to suddenly block you by automoderator a few times, you lose access to your community. If paypal bans your account by mistake or whatever, they can withold your assets in that account and you have no remedy. These techs are like feudal…

You are also picking very specific points, there are many ways that these techs are NOT like feudal lords.

Good examples though!

It is a bit complex and needs some deeper thought than these few comparisons make FB a Feudal Lord and you are a Cloud Slave.

Re: Technofeudalism

#27

Post by timeagain » Mon, Nov 13, 2023, 6:32 PM UTC

cma wrote: post #12

voxleone wrote: post #3

He may have been wrong in the past, but this insight seems to be spot on. I'm pretty satisfied with what is to me a faithful description of the zeitgeist. Related article: https://theconversation.com/is-capitalism-dead-yanis-varoufa...

He worked for Valve, a 30% app store, on making an economy of consumer producers to make digital hats for them to resell, but never seems to mention it in interviews for this new book. Does he discuss it in the book? He seems to have been an early architect of the "cloud capital"/"technofeudalism" system.

Often those closest to the problem are most apt to describe it. Lots of people become disillusioned with their work.

Re: Technofeudalism

#28

Post by beepbooptheory » Mon, Nov 13, 2023, 6:37 PM UTC

yamazakiwi wrote: post #22

n_ary wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I agree with everthing you said, but again, contextually users aren't doing any "work". That is the distinction I'm trying to draw. You are less like a serf and more like a thief victim, making the writers comparisons quite stretched by definition. We could be discussing these problems straight-forward as you have described them instead of trying to make it sound like skynet has turned us into actual slaves and selli…

Many/most economists and historians find it beneficial to understand things not by rigid or otherwise static categories and concepts, but through relations. Feudalism, insofar as it can be defined (and this is hard[1]), is probably best captured as a certain kind of relation between serfs and landlords (or whatever). Focusing on the relations between things is fruitful for analysis and research as well as being resistant to changes or transpositions in the terms in question.

It would be much harder to say that there is this one selfsame phenomena called "work" and we have done it throughout all of history. Or that we are definitely not "working" as we generate another's capital by getting brainwashed and depressed by social media. Or that the peasants living off their lord "went to work" everyday.

1. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-f-word-feudalism-1788836

Re: Technofeudalism

#29

Post by bparsons » Mon, Nov 13, 2023, 6:48 PM UTC

dingnuts wrote: post #8

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 “…

The political power these companies have is unprecedented, and makes violence unnecessary.

Governments fear these companies because their black box algorithms can easily make or break elections and even drive people into the streets to protest or riot. Also, these companies have unlimited amounts of money to promote the policies and politicians that they want to see succeed.

With the exception of the East India Company at its height of its powers, no private entity has ever been permitted to accumulate this amount of political and economic power.

Re: Technofeudalism

#30

Post by ajkjk » Mon, Nov 13, 2023, 6:54 PM UTC

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #21

Evgeny Morozov wrote a very interesting, but also quite long, critique of the "technofeudalism" concept from a Marxist perspective in the New Left Review back in 2022: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii133/articles/evgeny-moroz... > In the case of well-known figures like Varoufakis and Mazzucato, tantalizing their audiences with invocations of feudal glamour may provide a media-friendly way to recycle arguments they…

Wow, I tried to read it and mostly managed to, although I ended up skimming the end. It is really everything that is wrong with bitter overintellectual leftism: endless babble littered with pointless historical references and a neverending adoration of 'theory' while totally misunderstanding the rest of the world's moral opinions on, well, anything.

The worst passage I found was this:

>If these are lazy waterfall-owning rentiers, they are peculiarly masochistic ones: why not just rest on their laurels, fire everyone and stop spending? And who, looking at these numbers, could really believe—together with the post-workerists—that capitalists are now external to production? What then are they spending all this r&d money on?

The gist: if you choose the dumbest possible interpretation of what 'technofeudalism' is referring to and couch it in enough verbiage and citations you can dismiss the concept without ever having to see why people find it so appealing or realize that you're missing the point.

It's really simple. It's the monopolies and their walled gardens and moats and manipulations... and the lack of accountability to the public. What's feudalistic is the lack of accountability. It only incidentally has to do with any particular model of what capitalism or feudalism is according to some random texts or endless theory and everything to do with the fact that everyone hates the system but can't seem to change it and make it follow prosocial dignity-preserving rules.

More specifically: although theorists have opinions about whether this is some sort of 'alternative' to capitalism (if what we're 'in' can even be called capitalism anymore, even before the internet...).. The reason the concept rings true and has staying power is not those theories; it is that the modern world emotionally pattern matches to aspects of feudalism. No doubt people felt the same way circa 1900 in the first big era of capitalist monopolies. Regardless, labeling what 'mode of production' we're in is really not the appeal of the phrase (or, imo, a very useful concept at all).