I've actually read this book recently. I thought it was quite interesting, but would be better with less political stuff (most if it is at the end though).
My favourite thoughts and takeaways (that are not in the article):
We trained the algorithms to predict our desires so well, that they turned on us. Now they effectively train us by informing us or feeding us with what we would or should like. This is the power every marketer would like to have. They ("techno lords") can nudge our feeds however they want and manipulate. We wouldn’t know.
Another one is:
Technofeudalism has smashed the veil between refuge from markets (usually when you got home, you were home, but now you are on your phone); and one such market is the market of “self-discovery”. You need an identity online today, or you basically don’t exist. But what happens then is: you have to think before you post about “who could read this?” What does that entail? Well, that causes you to curate what you broadcast – so what you broadcast the best version of your identity. You should “be yourself!” – but at the same time noone is themselves. You can see this effect on Instagram quite clearly. Nobody posts their “real” authentic day when they binge series in sweatpants – they post their vacation and food pictures. I'm sure there is some equivalent version of that here on HN!
I live in the UK, where we can only aspire to technofeudalism, being stuck in medievofeudalism, where most of the land is still owned by the feudal aristocracy, i.e. parasites descended from thugs, and most people don't own the land beneath their homes, being effectively serfs to their freeholders.
Unlike the “serfs” tech companies actually pay for in developing countries to do stuff manually training AI, we don’t “toil” in their “fields”. Instead, we choose to frolic in them. It’s a choice, and we have more of it in the developed world. Just like how we still have a choice as to where and how we work. I interact with social media for leisure and not for influence or work. Most people are just in it for bread and circus, even on HN.
His argument is terrible and nonsensical. A better analogy for the majority of the population is that tech companies are narco drug pushers and we’re the addicts. That analogy also only works if you ignore the fact that payment is cheap if you’re just paying with attention
The obvious problem with a title like "technofeudalism" is it sounds prejudicial. Something like historical feudalism was troubling because people couldn't just walk away from it. A string of fiefdoms is actually a pretty decent organisational model as long as you don't have to inhabit ones that are hostile to your interests.
At the technical level it is trivial to set up competitors and it remains the case that nobody needs to use these sites. I don't have a Twitter account, so over the years I have been more or less locked out of using it, in fact. These sites are fine.
I like Varoufakis in general and I find this analogy interesting. However, his answer to this question was not satisfactory in my opinion, as many commercial arrangements including malls, are also based on percentages:
Q: A company like Apple might argue that instead of being a fiefdom, maybe the Apple App Store is more like a mall where companies have to rent their stores from whomever owns the building. How is technofeudalism different from the mall dynamic?
A: Well, hugely. Say you and I were going into partnership together with a fashion brand. We go to the shopping mall and we hire a shop, the rent is fixed. It is not proportional to our sales. The more money we make, the higher our price-to-rent margin. With the Apple Store, they get 30 percent of all sales. That’s not at all the same thing. That is the equivalent of the ground rent that the feudal lord used to extract from vassal capitalists.
a career politician whose whole MO is by definition power mongering is upset that some other org is wielding power.
I’ll take corporate power that is predictable as it’s based on profit over political power that is unpredictable as it’s fed by vanities and human deficiencies any day.
Technofeudalism is just the current incarnation of capitalism , its nature hasnt changed. Both capitalists and politicians have sought to increase their power post-war, and as long as some war doesnt stop them they will keep doing so. When politicians blame billionaires it's because they are taking away 'power space' from them , and the same goes when billionaires accuse politicians. Democracy or free market are not really putting a brake to this process of power concentration and erosion of individual freedoms, because they can be gamed, via addictive products and political manipulation/populism. Unfortunately only wars have historically broken this power-concentration game
This would be a genuinely interesting and fruitful exploration.
At first glance, it looks like awful reading comprehension - but these are people perfectly capable of reading technical topics without difficulty.
You can say, well, these people have a salary that depends on them ignoring their complicity in a vast evil that has been warned about since the 50's; or even since the 80s in popular culture, creating an entire genre replete with subgenres and subcultures.
And that says a lot.
But what role does education play? Nationalism? Media capture?
I sincerely believe this is a crucial question that gets surprisingly little self reflection in the tech community. Where usually we love to pat ourselves on the back about our important role in the modern world, when it comes to our role in maintaining class structures, it's crickets at best and blind fury as standard - to the point where it seems people can't even understand simple sentences.
> you’re essentially toiling Elon Musk’s estate like a medieval serf. Musk doesn't pay you.
Yes he does, he literally changed Twitter to pay people... so why should I keep reading another article from someone who got too old to talk about tech and has some Musk derangement syndrome?
HN doesn't pay anyone. Y Combinator is worth $20+ billion? Oh no we are all serfs.
Imagine looking at tech and saying, "this is a problem with tech companies, not a systemic flaw in capitalism itself". The tech companies are bad, but only uniquely bad in that they are efficient at what they do.
You think Boeing, General Mills, or ford wouldn't want you to be a dev if they could figure out how to do it?
What does it have to do with devs? Those are business models devised by business people, some of them devs, some of them not.
The article mentions enshittification. BMW is offering heated seats on a monthly subscription [1]. If an average teams of devs was asked to implement that as a practical joke, they would certainly be able to do it. Some of them can't quite make the jump between that and the fact that companies do expect to make a profit out of it.
The devil is in the details, and nuanced. A broadly capitalistic structure in the right place and time for the right society and with the right regulation, can be good.
A state stricken with, say, ethnic factionalism that, while holding fair elections, oppresses their minorities, has a problem. Is it a problem with the majority race? Is it a problem with the presence and lack of ethnic minorities in this particular state? Is it a problem with democracy in general that it is perhaps not suitable for some states?
Here the author makes the point that broadly speaking, the details of how capitalism used to be organized did not have these feudalistic aspects that aren't good, but they do now.
> Boeing, General Mills, or ford wouldn't want you to be a dev if they could figure out how to do it?
You do in fact agree with the author. He calls this subspecies cloud capitalism. In another time or place, cloud capitalism would be materially impossible, and capitalism of another flavor might still be appropriate.
You disagree with the author in that they are silent on other types of capitalism, but you are considering this to be a flaw with capitalism at large, from what I can tell.
It's not the capitalism per se, but lack of free markets and overregulation. Humanity hasn't found yet a better way for resource allocation that capitalism.
Capitalism = the system where the ownership of the capital is by private persons. (as defined by the dictionary)
Is there a systemic problem that your auto dealership is not owned by government? May be the problem is that you can't open a new one, because of zoning laws or minimum wage or something else? No markets are free, but only in countries where markets have some degree of freedom you can have the abundance (and corresponding waste of the system).
Check all centralized systems of resource allocation - from socialism, highly centralized authoritarianism, theocratic monarchies or very large companies. No competition = more waste.
Any owner of a small business understands that there is no "flaw in capitalism" itself, because you can't force your clients to buy from you. You can only do that if you have cornered the market. You can't corner the market if you play by the free market rules. But if you need a "licence", "certificate" or other non-market tool to sell your goods to the customer this is the way to kill your competition.
Varoufakis has been wrong soo many times since Greece default that it's not even worth mentioning all his predictions.
“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.”
This sounds disanalogous to me. When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. All at no monetary cost to you. Meanwhile, twitter has the costs of paying for servers and infrastructure and salaries of those required to support the site
Twitter (and other platforms like it) self-impose those costs on themselves in order to maintain the feudalist structure. If all software were just open-source, anyone could run their own Twitter and make it interoperable. Except this already exists and is called Mastodon, or more generally, the Fediverse. The fact that billions of people still choose to use Twitter instead of the sensible alternative shows that the feudalist gambit (using algorithms to make people angry and turn on each other) is working.
Whatever you get out for your own self is a secondary by-product. You are bounded to that platform to get what you get and cannot leave by taking what you already contributed.
While you are benefiting from certain social returns, you are also the reason why someone else's brand is growing by the same argument. Hence the platform is doing nothing but increasing its importance for its matchmaking value. That is the premise. At some critical threshold, the platform achieves the "I'm too big to bother with individual users" and declares the feudal lordship (remember similar Stackoverflow and Reddit dramas with "We do as we please" attitude and nothing happened to the platforms because users could not give up - the following mod saga for reddit and so on and accepted their fate). It already happened with social media platforms long time ago.
> When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following
wikipedia on serfdom:
>Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned that land. In return, they were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence.
A serf working the field is still rewarded with (part of) the harvest, the knowledge of having done good work, and the respect of neighbors. Praskovia Kovalyova-Zhemchugova "was a Russian serf actress and soprano opera singer", with her own brand and following ("Figes describes her as Russia's first "superstar"); quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praskovia_Kovalyova-Zhemchugov...
I think it's a tricky argument since there the feudal system was much more complicated than, say, sharecropping or tenant farming, as the lord was obliged to protect his serfs and protect their right to use the land. I think sharecropping is a better analogy.
It's also tricky as serfdom and feudalism cover a wide range of systems which are not well described in popular culture. Serfdom in 1800s Russia was far different from serfdom in 1400s England.
When you write "All at no monetary cost to you", remember that serfs mostly paid in time and work, not money. And the lord had costs as well, like the cost of providing military protection.
Serfs got protection (and other services, like justice! uh.) from the feudal lord. I don't like Varoufakis' typical oversimplification, but this one doesn't seem that bad.
> This sounds disanalogous to me. When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following.
As someone who co-runs a >>70k account: Yes, that is possible, but it's very very rare for those creating a following primarily via Twitter to actually make money with it. Maybe if you got an 0nlyfans account. Meanwhile, the content you create lures in other people and with them, eyeballs that Twitter can make money with by selling advertising time to these people.
> Meanwhile, twitter has the costs of paying for servers and infrastructure and salaries of those required to support the site
The legitimate costs required to run something like Twitter or Whatsapp can be pretty darn small. Whatsapp ran with 50 employees up until 1 billion (!) users [1]. The point is to not unfocus too much - for all the bad Musk did to Twitter, he did show that there indeed was a lot of dead weight hanging around the place, no wonder it was hemorraging money.
Except the fee for the blue tick. And whatever they charge you if you actually want to place ads for users instead of "pushing content" to those that follow you.
I also don't think the serf image is perfect but there clearly is an "access level" difference to where value is created and extracted.
Medieval serfs could be rewarded with food housing at no monetary cost as well, but it didn't make the system any less unjust.
Also, having the company pay for infrastructure costs does not necessarily imply that users are getting the upper hand in this deal. They are providing "value" (quotes intentional) to customers at the lowest cost possible, otherwise it would not be a viable business.
> you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following
Ultimately, it's a zero-sum game for all the "posters". The attention and time of your following is finite, and other posters are fighting for it, too. The "cloud algorithm" defines the rules of the game and matches your content to its consumers.
It also ignores a simple fact, we do not have to post on twitter. It is a choice, it is a free exchange, presumably the people who post on twitter enjoy it and Elon makes money.
Serfs, well they were forced to work someone else's land and in return they maybe got enough to eat. It's a ridiculous comparison.
Varoufakis always misrepresents capitalism and feudalism. That's the only way his ideas can get their undeserved attention.
Peasants worked the land for their lords but also for themselves and their families. Peasant revolts were not unheard of but peasants were generally treated fairly enough to avoid revolts.
Rent-seeking does not magically transform capitalism into feudalism. Capitalism is built on the idea of "investing" capital and "profiting" from others. And in fact, there's the concept of rentier capitalism.
>When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. All at no monetary cost to you.
Yes we call that "being paid in exposure" and outside of Silicon Valley it's widely recognized as a scam.
Also bear in mind that content and engagement serves the purpose of driving ad revenue and creating a monetizable social graph, so it's less a "reward" and more "unpaid labor."
Actually, isn’t self-hosting and federation more like feudalism and the Big Tech more like a modern central state.
When self-hosting say Mastodon, you have to have a relationship with the hosting provider, the software developer, your users, and any other servers you federate with. This is more reminiscent of the network of relationships that dominated Feudal Europe.
Whereas, if you use Twitter, you basically have just a single, more comprehensive relationship to Twitter, which is closer to the central state model, where there is a central authority that subsumes and manages these relationships.
Also, in a feudal system, if you got robbed/assaulted there would be a very complicated means of trying to hold people responsible as there would be multiple domains and authorities involved. Similarly, fighting spam in a federated model is also complicated. Ina nation-state model, it’s much easier to at least try to impose a uniform standard of justice. Similarly, “Big Tech” can deal with spam much easier than federation.
Also, Apple’s App Store fees do not indicate feudalism. People in the modern world also pay various taxes to governments, even though we don’t have a feudal system.
So I think federation is more like feudalism and Big Tech is more analogous to the modern central government.
I get your angel, and partly agree. Feudalism might not be a perfect way to describe this tension. But at it's core, we are talking about a concentration of power.
Feudalism is defined by a few noblemen owning huge swats of land, lending it out in exchange for labor. The fewer owners of land, the more concentrated is their power. They dictate the rules. That is Meta, Google, Amazon etc today – a lot of power held by a few men.
The more interoperability we implement in this web we call the internet, the more diversity we get. It has made it possible for me to host my own presence on the social web from a tiny computer sitting next to my freezer.
I'm using GoToSocial, which is a piece of software built by a bunch of people collaborating. They have much less power over my online social life than what Mark Zuckerberg had when I was still using Facebook! I can contribute to GoToSocial at their code forge, adding code, bug reports, feature request or voice my opinion on the direction of the project. If I would hit a major disagreement, I could relatively easily move to one of the many other software projects that uses the same protocol and not risk being cut off from my entire social network online.
"Take the Apple Store. You are producing an app, Apple can withhold 30 percent of your profits [through a commission fee]. That's a rent."
Funny because I remember the days before Apple Store where telecom companies did you a favor if you sold them your game for $100 to put on their phones. Telefonica got crazy and offered $200 to the winner of a phone game competition in an engineering University.
I have also worked with retailers that expect to get over 50% of the profit of anything you sell on their stores.
I also have maintained my blogs, email and webpages on my own servers, something that you can do today with no problem, cheaper than ever. For Vanufakis, it looks like people are forced at gunpoint to use X.
Mr Vanufakis believe that countries have the right to ask for money, spend it and never give it back, with no consequences. But of course the world does not work this way. In the real world, you don't pay your debts, they send you a hitman, specially if you expect paying back nothing.
> Mr Vanufakis believe that countries have the right to ask for money, spend it and never give it back, with no consequences.
This is actually the opposite of what happened. The Greek government, which was already virtually bankrupt in 2010, took a 110b EUR loan from the IMF on very harsh conditions, and Varoufakis was very vocal against it at that point already.
He was appointed Minister of Finance, he simply tried to renegotiate the terms of the deal, which the other involved parts refused.
> Mr Vanufakis believe that countries have the right to ask for money, spend it and never give it back, with no consequences.
"People on here often mock varoufakis for looking like voldemort, being incredibly vain and spending years trading off a job he had for 5 months, but they never give him credit for how funny he is" [0]:
Varoufakis was elected secretary of the Black Students Alliance, a choice that caused some controversy, given that he is not black, to which he responded "that black was a political term and, as a Greek, on the grounds of ethnicity he had as much reason to be there as anyone else." [1]
[+] [-] throwaway4good|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fluffet|1 year ago|reply
My favourite thoughts and takeaways (that are not in the article):
We trained the algorithms to predict our desires so well, that they turned on us. Now they effectively train us by informing us or feeding us with what we would or should like. This is the power every marketer would like to have. They ("techno lords") can nudge our feeds however they want and manipulate. We wouldn’t know.
Another one is:
Technofeudalism has smashed the veil between refuge from markets (usually when you got home, you were home, but now you are on your phone); and one such market is the market of “self-discovery”. You need an identity online today, or you basically don’t exist. But what happens then is: you have to think before you post about “who could read this?” What does that entail? Well, that causes you to curate what you broadcast – so what you broadcast the best version of your identity. You should “be yourself!” – but at the same time noone is themselves. You can see this effect on Instagram quite clearly. Nobody posts their “real” authentic day when they binge series in sweatpants – they post their vacation and food pictures. I'm sure there is some equivalent version of that here on HN!
[+] [-] fmajid|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Dylanfm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] chaostheory|1 year ago|reply
His argument is terrible and nonsensical. A better analogy for the majority of the population is that tech companies are narco drug pushers and we’re the addicts. That analogy also only works if you ignore the fact that payment is cheap if you’re just paying with attention
[+] [-] roenxi|1 year ago|reply
At the technical level it is trivial to set up competitors and it remains the case that nobody needs to use these sites. I don't have a Twitter account, so over the years I have been more or less locked out of using it, in fact. These sites are fine.
[+] [-] epups|1 year ago|reply
Q: A company like Apple might argue that instead of being a fiefdom, maybe the Apple App Store is more like a mall where companies have to rent their stores from whomever owns the building. How is technofeudalism different from the mall dynamic?
A: Well, hugely. Say you and I were going into partnership together with a fashion brand. We go to the shopping mall and we hire a shop, the rent is fixed. It is not proportional to our sales. The more money we make, the higher our price-to-rent margin. With the Apple Store, they get 30 percent of all sales. That’s not at all the same thing. That is the equivalent of the ground rent that the feudal lord used to extract from vassal capitalists.
[+] [-] wellthisisgreat|1 year ago|reply
I’ll take corporate power that is predictable as it’s based on profit over political power that is unpredictable as it’s fed by vanities and human deficiencies any day.
[+] [-] seydor|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 1oooqooq|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] epilys|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mandmandam|1 year ago|reply
At first glance, it looks like awful reading comprehension - but these are people perfectly capable of reading technical topics without difficulty.
You can say, well, these people have a salary that depends on them ignoring their complicity in a vast evil that has been warned about since the 50's; or even since the 80s in popular culture, creating an entire genre replete with subgenres and subcultures.
And that says a lot.
But what role does education play? Nationalism? Media capture?
I sincerely believe this is a crucial question that gets surprisingly little self reflection in the tech community. Where usually we love to pat ourselves on the back about our important role in the modern world, when it comes to our role in maintaining class structures, it's crickets at best and blind fury as standard - to the point where it seems people can't even understand simple sentences.
[+] [-] brutusborn|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Hrnrurj|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aaron695|1 year ago|reply
Yes he does, he literally changed Twitter to pay people... so why should I keep reading another article from someone who got too old to talk about tech and has some Musk derangement syndrome?
HN doesn't pay anyone. Y Combinator is worth $20+ billion? Oh no we are all serfs.
[+] [-] matthewfelgate|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hal_9000|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] randomcarbloke|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yareal|1 year ago|reply
You think Boeing, General Mills, or ford wouldn't want you to be a dev if they could figure out how to do it?
[+] [-] tmcb|1 year ago|reply
The article mentions enshittification. BMW is offering heated seats on a monthly subscription [1]. If an average teams of devs was asked to implement that as a practical joke, they would certainly be able to do it. Some of them can't quite make the jump between that and the fact that companies do expect to make a profit out of it.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription...
[+] [-] jhanschoo|1 year ago|reply
A state stricken with, say, ethnic factionalism that, while holding fair elections, oppresses their minorities, has a problem. Is it a problem with the majority race? Is it a problem with the presence and lack of ethnic minorities in this particular state? Is it a problem with democracy in general that it is perhaps not suitable for some states?
Here the author makes the point that broadly speaking, the details of how capitalism used to be organized did not have these feudalistic aspects that aren't good, but they do now.
> Boeing, General Mills, or ford wouldn't want you to be a dev if they could figure out how to do it?
You do in fact agree with the author. He calls this subspecies cloud capitalism. In another time or place, cloud capitalism would be materially impossible, and capitalism of another flavor might still be appropriate.
You disagree with the author in that they are silent on other types of capitalism, but you are considering this to be a flaw with capitalism at large, from what I can tell.
[+] [-] tored|1 year ago|reply
Technology has always been a double edged sword thru human history, it is just that the sword keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Capitalism can then take that sword and use one of the edges and make money out of it and that in turn wields political power.
[+] [-] freefaler|1 year ago|reply
Capitalism = the system where the ownership of the capital is by private persons. (as defined by the dictionary)
Is there a systemic problem that your auto dealership is not owned by government? May be the problem is that you can't open a new one, because of zoning laws or minimum wage or something else? No markets are free, but only in countries where markets have some degree of freedom you can have the abundance (and corresponding waste of the system).
Check all centralized systems of resource allocation - from socialism, highly centralized authoritarianism, theocratic monarchies or very large companies. No competition = more waste.
Any owner of a small business understands that there is no "flaw in capitalism" itself, because you can't force your clients to buy from you. You can only do that if you have cornered the market. You can't corner the market if you play by the free market rules. But if you need a "licence", "certificate" or other non-market tool to sell your goods to the customer this is the way to kill your competition.
Varoufakis has been wrong soo many times since Greece default that it's not even worth mentioning all his predictions.
[+] [-] squeegmeister|1 year ago|reply
This sounds disanalogous to me. When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. All at no monetary cost to you. Meanwhile, twitter has the costs of paying for servers and infrastructure and salaries of those required to support the site
[+] [-] Timwi|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ilayn|1 year ago|reply
While you are benefiting from certain social returns, you are also the reason why someone else's brand is growing by the same argument. Hence the platform is doing nothing but increasing its importance for its matchmaking value. That is the premise. At some critical threshold, the platform achieves the "I'm too big to bother with individual users" and declares the feudal lordship (remember similar Stackoverflow and Reddit dramas with "We do as we please" attitude and nothing happened to the platforms because users could not give up - the following mod saga for reddit and so on and accepted their fate). It already happened with social media platforms long time ago.
[+] [-] lm28469|1 year ago|reply
I'm reading this over and over trying to comprehend how we ended up in a world in which this sentence isn't satirical
[+] [-] Lutger|1 year ago|reply
wikipedia on serfdom:
>Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned that land. In return, they were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence.
[+] [-] eesmith|1 year ago|reply
I think it's a tricky argument since there the feudal system was much more complicated than, say, sharecropping or tenant farming, as the lord was obliged to protect his serfs and protect their right to use the land. I think sharecropping is a better analogy.
It's also tricky as serfdom and feudalism cover a wide range of systems which are not well described in popular culture. Serfdom in 1800s Russia was far different from serfdom in 1400s England.
When you write "All at no monetary cost to you", remember that serfs mostly paid in time and work, not money. And the lord had costs as well, like the cost of providing military protection.
[+] [-] pas|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] usrnm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|1 year ago|reply
As someone who co-runs a >>70k account: Yes, that is possible, but it's very very rare for those creating a following primarily via Twitter to actually make money with it. Maybe if you got an 0nlyfans account. Meanwhile, the content you create lures in other people and with them, eyeballs that Twitter can make money with by selling advertising time to these people.
> Meanwhile, twitter has the costs of paying for servers and infrastructure and salaries of those required to support the site
The legitimate costs required to run something like Twitter or Whatsapp can be pretty darn small. Whatsapp ran with 50 employees up until 1 billion (!) users [1]. The point is to not unfocus too much - for all the bad Musk did to Twitter, he did show that there indeed was a lot of dead weight hanging around the place, no wonder it was hemorraging money.
[1] https://blog.quastor.org/p/whatsapp-scaled-1-billion-users-5...
[+] [-] r0ckarong|1 year ago|reply
Except the fee for the blue tick. And whatever they charge you if you actually want to place ads for users instead of "pushing content" to those that follow you.
I also don't think the serf image is perfect but there clearly is an "access level" difference to where value is created and extracted.
[+] [-] iamcurious|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tmcb|1 year ago|reply
Also, having the company pay for infrastructure costs does not necessarily imply that users are getting the upper hand in this deal. They are providing "value" (quotes intentional) to customers at the lowest cost possible, otherwise it would not be a viable business.
[+] [-] bluetomcat|1 year ago|reply
Ultimately, it's a zero-sum game for all the "posters". The attention and time of your following is finite, and other posters are fighting for it, too. The "cloud algorithm" defines the rules of the game and matches your content to its consumers.
[+] [-] pipes|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] drewcoo|1 year ago|reply
Varoufakis always misrepresents capitalism and feudalism. That's the only way his ideas can get their undeserved attention.
Peasants worked the land for their lords but also for themselves and their families. Peasant revolts were not unheard of but peasants were generally treated fairly enough to avoid revolts.
Rent-seeking does not magically transform capitalism into feudalism. Capitalism is built on the idea of "investing" capital and "profiting" from others. And in fact, there's the concept of rentier capitalism.
[+] [-] krapp|1 year ago|reply
Yes we call that "being paid in exposure" and outside of Silicon Valley it's widely recognized as a scam.
Also bear in mind that content and engagement serves the purpose of driving ad revenue and creating a monetizable social graph, so it's less a "reward" and more "unpaid labor."
[+] [-] m463|1 year ago|reply
People post and comments add up.
But ads are being served, people are being tracked, and eventually the data is sold so AI models can be trained on everything.
But the main product (in silicon valley) is stock, which all the reddit folks have been selling wildly the past few weeks.
[+] [-] soco|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tiborsaas|1 year ago|reply
What is this then? https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1770239673014595718
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|1 year ago|reply
When self-hosting say Mastodon, you have to have a relationship with the hosting provider, the software developer, your users, and any other servers you federate with. This is more reminiscent of the network of relationships that dominated Feudal Europe.
Whereas, if you use Twitter, you basically have just a single, more comprehensive relationship to Twitter, which is closer to the central state model, where there is a central authority that subsumes and manages these relationships.
Also, in a feudal system, if you got robbed/assaulted there would be a very complicated means of trying to hold people responsible as there would be multiple domains and authorities involved. Similarly, fighting spam in a federated model is also complicated. Ina nation-state model, it’s much easier to at least try to impose a uniform standard of justice. Similarly, “Big Tech” can deal with spam much easier than federation.
Also, Apple’s App Store fees do not indicate feudalism. People in the modern world also pay various taxes to governments, even though we don’t have a feudal system.
So I think federation is more like feudalism and Big Tech is more analogous to the modern central government.
[+] [-] rsolva|1 year ago|reply
Feudalism is defined by a few noblemen owning huge swats of land, lending it out in exchange for labor. The fewer owners of land, the more concentrated is their power. They dictate the rules. That is Meta, Google, Amazon etc today – a lot of power held by a few men.
The more interoperability we implement in this web we call the internet, the more diversity we get. It has made it possible for me to host my own presence on the social web from a tiny computer sitting next to my freezer.
I'm using GoToSocial, which is a piece of software built by a bunch of people collaborating. They have much less power over my online social life than what Mark Zuckerberg had when I was still using Facebook! I can contribute to GoToSocial at their code forge, adding code, bug reports, feature request or voice my opinion on the direction of the project. If I would hit a major disagreement, I could relatively easily move to one of the many other software projects that uses the same protocol and not risk being cut off from my entire social network online.
To me, this feels very empowering!
[+] [-] tmcb|1 year ago|reply
Of course the analogy will break at some point. Every single analogy will.
We should also ask which kind of power structures have nation states borrowed from feudalism, and which ones were borrowed again by big tech.
[+] [-] MichaelZuo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cladopa|1 year ago|reply
Funny because I remember the days before Apple Store where telecom companies did you a favor if you sold them your game for $100 to put on their phones. Telefonica got crazy and offered $200 to the winner of a phone game competition in an engineering University.
I have also worked with retailers that expect to get over 50% of the profit of anything you sell on their stores.
I also have maintained my blogs, email and webpages on my own servers, something that you can do today with no problem, cheaper than ever. For Vanufakis, it looks like people are forced at gunpoint to use X.
Mr Vanufakis believe that countries have the right to ask for money, spend it and never give it back, with no consequences. But of course the world does not work this way. In the real world, you don't pay your debts, they send you a hitman, specially if you expect paying back nothing.
[+] [-] tmcb|1 year ago|reply
This is actually the opposite of what happened. The Greek government, which was already virtually bankrupt in 2010, took a 110b EUR loan from the IMF on very harsh conditions, and Varoufakis was very vocal against it at that point already.
He was appointed Minister of Finance, he simply tried to renegotiate the terms of the deal, which the other involved parts refused.
[+] [-] MrBuddyCasino|1 year ago|reply
"People on here often mock varoufakis for looking like voldemort, being incredibly vain and spending years trading off a job he had for 5 months, but they never give him credit for how funny he is" [0]:
Varoufakis was elected secretary of the Black Students Alliance, a choice that caused some controversy, given that he is not black, to which he responded "that black was a political term and, as a Greek, on the grounds of ethnicity he had as much reason to be there as anyone else." [1]
[0] https://twitter.com/khartoum_of/status/1710020375604555984
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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