Are We Transitioning from Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom?
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Re: Are We Transitioning from Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom?
#2Varoufakis is one of the few that accurately describes the situation we find ourselves in. We'd do well to heed his warnings.
Re: Are We Transitioning from Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom?
#3My question to Varoufakis is this (and I used to be skeptical of his distinction because of this, but I am less so today). If these systems of power are maintaining themselves through cultural hegemony, as Gramsci has described, what is the cultural hegemony, or ideology, here?
The traditional capitalism has ideology rooted in liberalism and the concept of meritocracy. You are good at what you do, you sell it in the free market, you make money. So how this transformed in the cloud feudalism?
Re: Are We Transitioning from Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom?
#4My question to Varoufakis is this (and I used to be skeptical of his distinction because of this, but I am less so today). If these systems of power are maintaining themselves through cultural hegemony, as Gramsci has described, what is the cultural hegemony, or ideology, here? The traditional capitalism has ideology rooted in liberalism and the concept of meritocracy. You are good at what you do, you sell it in the…
Well Gramscian hegemony requires the participation of the oppressed in their ongoing oppression... so I'd say that Amazon Prime membership qualifies. One obvious parallel with feudal lords would be venerating the super-bosses, the new 'lords of the manor' to keep it feudal, which certainly also seems to be happening. This is of course culturally backward-looking, the appeal of the strongman (in business or politics) should be waning, replaced by efficient tecnhocrats, but when you look around the world... Varoufakis may be on to something.
Re: Are We Transitioning from Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom?
#5I don't think this is a good comparison. The core problem we face is overproduction. Vastly more can be produced than can be consumed. When you try to boost the economy by "job creation" and investing more money, you essentially pay people to keep other people busy. It isn't serfdom, they don't serve their lords, who take a share of their work. They work to reduce the available workforce, so that overproduction is avoided, and markets don't crash like they did in 1929.
Re: Are We Transitioning from Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom?
#6The fundamental flaw in this argument is that it does not account for every corporation that came before tech.
What about RCA, GE, Westinghouse? What about US Steel, what about Standard Oil, what about AT&T. IBM, Intel have already started to fall. What makes this crop of companies any different than all the ones that has come before them.
Nothing.
The singer sewing machine came out at 125 bucks per unit. The annual salary in America was 500 bucks a year. Now, a sewing machine is 100 bucks and the average salary is what? The cost of a car is still the same as a model T, with more features and safety. Aside from software bloat, and maybe ML how have computers improved in the last decade. Power has gone down but they aren't really doing more.
Re: Are We Transitioning from Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom?
#7I don't think this is a good comparison. The core problem we face is overproduction. Vastly more can be produced than can be consumed. When you try to boost the economy by "job creation" and investing more money, you essentially pay people to keep other people busy. It isn't serfdom, they don't serve their lords, who take a share of their work. They work to reduce the available workforce, so that overproduction is av…
Overproduction of what? Not of houses. Not of medical services (it takes forever to get an appointment). Yes, maybe there was/is overproduction of software nonsense, but I don't think that's overproduction overall in the economy; rather it's a misallocation.
Re: Are We Transitioning from Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom?
#8I don't think this is a good comparison. The core problem we face is overproduction. Vastly more can be produced than can be consumed. When you try to boost the economy by "job creation" and investing more money, you essentially pay people to keep other people busy. It isn't serfdom, they don't serve their lords, who take a share of their work. They work to reduce the available workforce, so that overproduction is av…
Overproduction of what? Not of houses. Not of medical services (it takes forever to get an appointment). Yes, maybe there was/is overproduction of software nonsense, but I don't think that's overproduction overall in the economy; rather it's a misallocation.
Of course of houses. Houses are the best example - they can be built for invested money, then bought as an investment, closing the loop. The fact that you can't afford one is secondary, there are thousands of empty houses anywhere, their prices are just kept high by the incoming capital.
Re: Are We Transitioning from Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom?
#9Varoufakis is one of the few that accurately describes the situation we find ourselves in. We'd do well to heed his warnings.
The core derangement of the current zeitgeist is the bravest truth tellers* are the most marginalized people, conflated with fringe conspiracy theorist wingnuts. Perhaps it is a result of "digital hallucinations" filter bubble reality bifurcation such that there is essentially no apparent common context or stable community with which to discover and relate to other people, and secondly, the unreasonable simultaneous apparent widening of digital community participation freedoms, with declines in locality connected in the real world and declines in purchasing power and wealth for most. (A good fraction on HN didn't experience the struggle of the downward leg of the K-shaped recovery, but I imagine some of us did.) Compounded also by a widespread lack of reading books and long-form articles.
* Varoufakis, Chomsky, Hedges, Assange, Snowden ...
EDIT: More examples of "...": Yousafzai, Thunberg, Navalny.
Re: Are We Transitioning from Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom?
#10The fundamental flaw in this argument is that it does not account for every corporation that came before tech. What about RCA, GE, Westinghouse? What about US Steel, what about Standard Oil, what about AT&T. IBM, Intel have already started to fall. What makes this crop of companies any different than all the ones that has come before them. Nothing. The singer sewing machine came out at 125 bucks per unit. The annual…
Did you not read the article? The premise is that the current tech giants are effectively only wanting to set up situations where they can extract rents. This is different from making sewing machines in a competitive market, or even in a monopoly.
I think the argument has problems for other reasons - there's still lots of innovation going on, for example - but I think there is a line to be drawn between current vc preferences and historical capitalist or monopoly behavior.