Technology

This is always the goal of capitalism, no need to give it some alternative name on order to white wash the brand.

The answer is Democratic socialism. It's our stuff they're stealing, we can take it back.

Silicon Serfdom?

No that's still capitalism. Capitalism is still the problem. To call it anything else is apologetics, the core issue is that the private ownership of the means of production leads to a concentration of power in the hands of precisely the wrong kind of people after selecting for and reinforcing the most selfish behaviors in them. It then allows them to essentially usurp whatever form of government exists.

Wait. Capitalism isn’t silicon serfdom?

lol Yanis is def making the rounds cuz of his new book. He also talked about this on Adam Conover's podcast, Factually a few weeks ago.

iirc he's saying that we're at the point where some of the richest people have moved from owning the means to actually produce things to providing platforms for exchanging goods for money to happen on, while basically charging rent. He compares it to feudalism in that a company like Amazon or Apple with its app store are feudal lords who come in and collect money off of each transaction made by the "serfs" (people who sell and buy things on these markets), basically in exchange for being allowed to list. And increasingly, its getting harder and harder to do business without dealing with one of these tech giants. I think he mentioned how WeChat is another good example of this in China, where they're involved in like everything

It's really scary how much money Uber/Uber Eats/Amazon etc sucked out of local economies.

We don't serfdom well. Rich techbros can expect feces in their food and spittle in their drink, and eventially a guillotine party. Maybe armies of patrol drones will slow it down but the opportunities for mischief will be exciting.

FDR's New Deal was to prevent a communist revolution. And here we are, again.

Now serfdom would work if they recognized people need bare minimums that keep them warm, fed and comfortable. But aristocrats always take thr serfs for granted.

One of the things not addressed in this interview is how the ideology of libertarianism is central to the transition from markets to fiefdoms. All the big tech bros are huge libertarians and that's not an accident.

And I do think this is a new phenomena unlike classic capitalism. Marx thought that a post-scarcity society would mean more leisure, he didn't anticipate that that leisure was just another source of value to exploit. Think of reddit selling it's "content" to an AI company. That content wasn't produced by coerced labor paid unfairly, it was produced by voluntary labor paid nothing.

To refer to this as feudalism gives an impression that capitalism functions effectively and we are transitioning away from it; however, in reality, we are merely progressing into the advanced stages of the same system. Let us simply acknowledge that it is indeed capitalism.

You're saying that capitalism isn't serfdom?

Clearly, y'all need to play more Shadowrun. 🤘🏽🤷🏼‍♂️

I've been seeing Yanis pop up a bit more recently, seems like he's selling a book. Not complaining, could be good. I will give it a read and see if this really is a "new thing" or a new label stuck on an old thing.

What a load of hogwash.

I understand the railing against rent seeking. It’s my land too, so why am I paying for it, and all. I mean, I disagree with the notion, but I understand it.

This is entirely different. Cloud services haven’t been built for nothing - they are massive investment projects and like anything else we build that many use, capital allows us to distribute the cost. Yes there’s a profit motive and one could argue against it or not, but these services didn’t exist as natural resources that the cloud-lords dominated by force and then rented back to us. They built new lands and asked if anybody want to come live there.

Not sure if I understand this correctly:

Cloud capital is fundamentally different because it can be copied infinitely like a digital copy and requires exponentially less labor. This is different from owning and operating a factory (requires labor) or owning or renting land (limited). There might still be labor but it's insignificant and it scales almost infinitely. That is why it's rent on capitalism. It's this infinite scalability that is the difference.

You could develop a perfect alternative to amazon, ebay, paypal, facebook or google, messaging apps, app stores: The cloud capital isn't in the software or the servers, it's in the account network. Everyone can theoretically move services but that incurs costs by loosing your connections in the network. And marketing makes it so that the majority of people won't do it. So once the network is established it extracts wealth without being productive.

Another example would be paypal - they take something like 1.5% to 3% of all online transactions, practically a tax on all consumer transactions.

And you use digital services all the time and are increasingly dependent on them. And they extract wealth without them having to produce content or advertising, they just rent their ad spaces.

AI generation and robotics will become much more advanced in the coming decades. This too could become cloud capital and wealth extraction without requiring significant labor. Especially once we reach "robots building robots".

I'm also seeing a power grab for the means of generation coming. If public learning data has to be licensed especially for AI to learn from them, it will mean that the cloud capitalists will own the generative AIs. In their anger about big AI "stealing muh data", people will help that IP law will change so that serfs will not be able to use generative AI freely. Maybe LLMs and generative AI are over hyped but they've come a long way in just a few years, in one or two decades it could be incredible cloud capital that extracts wealth to no end, without any labor involved at all.

The feudalism bit I'm not sure about - presumably the scale of social media creates not just cloud capital and massive rents, it also creates political power. By subtly shaping how algorithms present content, we are being ruled by algorithms. The content we see makes us think certain things, argue about this and that and distracts us. MAGA is an example of a sub population mostly disconnected from reality and trapped in a prison for the mind. This is political power similar to a serf under a lord. Not sure how well that relates.

He also mentions the global financial system, I imagine that globalization and increasing refinement of "financial products" also serve as a form of cloud capital that is no longer really tethered to real labor. It's more and more speculative. The central bank constantly prints money and injects it and somehow it ends up in the hands of the cloud capitalists? But that existed before.

Not sure if patents or IP fit into this. And again, not sure if I understand any of this correctly or if I buy any of this. But it's certainly possible that the scale of certain forms of capital create completely different emergent structures. Even if it's fundamentally the same mechanisms, technology might turn it into a completely different beast.

He definitely didn't do a great job explaining this - presumably Yanis Varoufakis wants us to buy his book. That old capitalist trick!