Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism - Interview with Yanis Varoufakis
Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism - Interview with Yanis Varoufakis
In Yanis Varoufakis’ latest book, the former Greek finance minister argues that companies like Apple and Meta have treated their users like modern-day serfs.
You can introduce interoperability. I am on X. I can't go to Bluesky. Let's say that Elon Musk decides to block me because I said something he didn't like. He has blocked me before for a couple of weeks. Now, I have more than a million followers on X. I cannot leave without losing them. If I go to Bluesky, I have 10 followers. Interoperability would mean that if I go to another platform, to Bluesky, when I post something on Bluesky, then my 1 million followers on X can hear it.
Sounds like Fediverse's ActivityPub
This is the way.
That would mean you would be indefinitely supporting and sending traffic to X. Why not tell your million followers "I will only be posting on Bluesky now - please check out my profile there [link]" and dump X? If you're worried about your numbers dropping moving to the other platform, then your "followers" probably don't mean much or weren't that interested in what you have to say anyway (so what's the point other than a score)? Maybe I'm just doing the old man shaking his fist at the sky routine.
Technofeudalism
Nope. We've been over this. It's still just capitalism and regular old fascism and neo-feudalism. Don't need a new term to try to imply that technology is the cause. Doesn't matter that the tech industry is involved, it's still just wealthy people using profitable industry to try to cement power over others.
Have you happened to read the book? He has a chapter dedicated to his decision to call it technofeudalism rather than capitalism, hypercapitalism, technocapitalism, etc. Basically he's saying profits have been decoupled from a company's value, and that it's no longer about creating a product to exchange for profit (which, in his words, are beholden to market competition) but instead about extracting rent (which is not beholden to competition -- his example is while a landowner's neighbors increase the values of their properties, the landowner's property value also increases).
Anyways he describes Amazon, Apple store, Google Play, cloud service providers, as fiefdoms that collect rent from actual producers of products (physical goods, but also applications), and don't actually produce anything, themselves, besides access to customers, while also extracting value from users of their technologies through personal information. They're effectively leasing consumer attention in the same way landowners leased their lands to workers.
It sounds pretty accurate to me, but I haven't had much time to chew on it. What's your take on that idea?
This isn't capitalism it's feudalism and technology is a dependency. You're still much more correct than that headline.
To Varoufakis, every time you post on X, formerly Twitter, you’re essentially toiling Elon Musk’s estate like a medieval serf. Musk doesn't pay you. But your free labor pays him, in a sense, by increasing the value of his company. On X, the more active users there are, the more people can be shown advertising or sold subscriptions.
The irony being you can buy it on Amazon...
Varoufakis likes to say what a lot of people like to hear 🤣😉.
Is that a way of saying you think he's wrong?
I thought the book had an interesting core idea, even if his grasp on technology seems rather loose and I really disliked the literary device he used to explain said idea.
What's your take on it?
Varoufakis likes to position himsetas a sage. Someone that "saw it coming and warned everyone but nobody listened". He likes to pop back and pretend he had solutions or influence but the world just conspired against him.
I don't know if he's wrong on this one. I do know he often sprays a bunch of doomsayer predictions and only reviews the ones he was vaguely in the same ballpark for. He's the classic embodiment of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy and, naturally, a lot of people want to believe what he's pedaling. If he sells a few books or gets paid to give speeches here and there then so be it. After all.... he did warn us.