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Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Anyways, he also has a long critique of Thomas Picketti's Capital in the 21st Century (another good read btw, though I did this book on Audible which was quite good).
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue69/Varoufakis69.pdf
Great comment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 resis…
I agree that the definition of "work" has changed over time and I'm not trying to be pedantic so let's get to the point, does it matter if it's considered work or not? The real issue most people would agree with is the bad guys are extracting tons of value through the actions of their users. Should those users be paid? The answer is: it depends.
In our current system we would create an organization that can generate money by holding the tech companies responsible to pay users when it is deemed to do so. Unfortunately I don't see the money amounting to very much unless laws change drastically since even class-action lawsuits for leaked data provide very little. I'm guessing that measuring "phone work" would amount to micro-cents regardless of value directly generated.
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-own…
These are very old arguments. The difference in my mind is merely the label. Morozov said it well:
https://jacobin.com/2023/04/evgeny-morozov-critique-of-techn...
I swear the over-intellectualism of the left makes them sound dumber and dumber. Why do they have to make everything so idiotically complex? Is it an occult/esoteric thing in order to signal authority to the masses?
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 “…
Because large banks don't have enormous revenue or profits while not being super reliant on the tech lords? Traditional capitalist are doing quite well, I think.
I think the respect to which this worldview holds up is the definition of the "cloud capital" that Yanis has constructed, but isn't really able to make a concrete definition of. He isn't an engineer. But in a banking system, the series of transactions are liable to the bank itself, but can only happen really with the assistance of cloud service providers. In the book, he argues for a more centralized system of payment guaranteed by a government, preferably democratically. Whether you agree or not, it is a compelling lens to look through the emergence of Wechat payments in China, or the rolling out of Fed Now servicing, where governments themselves are trying to centralize computation around payments and transaction settling.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Explain how we are not cloud serfs?
Serfs work, it is not work to read blogs or watch videos.
The point is that you can't choose what you read or watch. We still can somewhat - we can install adblock and decide what media to consume. But instead of a "capitalist" effort to simply try to to invest in better "content", you could make the case that cloud companies are simply holding content hostage and demanding more of your attention, money, and time. Even at the expense of civil rights like privacy. It is stuff that gets talked about every day on Hackernews. It isn't that far fetched that antagonistic serfdom is basically the type of relationship large tech conglomerates treat their users. Dark UI patterns. EULAs.
I would agree that it doesn't make sense on it's face, but only in the context of a comprehensive macroeconomic analysis. That's what the good deal of the book is about.
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 connection…
The closest contemporary analog to being extorted by force is, of course, our relationship to our governments.
One of the most interesting aspects of libertarian thought is their notion that the liberal revolution (which began in 1776 and spread to Europe in 1789) is not, as we are inclined to think, complete. They argue that it is still in its infancy, and in some ways has regressed. This becomes clear when you consider the number of ways in which our modern governments are similar to those states (some feudal) which existed prior to the onset of the liberal revolution. You can now leave your lord's land without permission... but only if some other lord gives you permission to enter theirs. Our lords take far more of our incomes than was taken in the past (even under feudalism), and just as in the days of old, our lords dole that money out in a way which is best suited to their retention of power. If your entire village (or entire region!) doesn't support the elected lord, and endeavors to create a state of your own with a new lord (perhaps because you have been influenced by dangerous ideas like "[sometimes] it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them") then your lord reserves the right to reestablish the "consent of the governed" by force of arms! The primary difference is that they had no say in who their lord would be, whereas you decide (or, you are at best 120,000,000th of the decider) who yours is (so long as they come from one of the two established factions, of course).
When put in the appropriate context, the use of the term feudalism to refer to LinkedIn seems rather a stretch.
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-own…
I've never played in the start up major leagues, but it sure isn't a meritocracy in regards to who gets funding (or can self-fund). After working in and adjacent to multiple startups of this "game industry legend", I concluded that a lot of his ideas were crap, and his one successful startup had succeeded in spite of him.
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.
I do like his ideas, but he just really did not seem to play nice in politics.