[epups]

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.

[jahnu]

Regardless of where you stand on this issue I feel that's a bit of a pointless nit-pick, because he's obviously not referring to those cases where mall rents are based on percentages. He clearly would argue that those would be the same system as the one he is arguing against. It's clear he's talking about the case he sets up to contrast two different models.

[epups]

If it's not about percentages, then what's the difference here? Walmart and Amazon are not fundamentally different. If the Apple Store can be compared to a mall, then we are in the same economic model we've been for decades.

[Lutger]

I imagine he would argue that such type of malls are a bit like feudal lords, he's otherwise clearly assuming malls have fixed rent.

The missing part, I think, is the monopolistic nature of big tech. In some domains, you can't do business anymore if you're not on one or most of meta's networks. You can't publish an app anymore if you don't pay rent to google or apple. The technoserf has no choice but to voluntarily share profits with his feudal lord.

[tmcb]

This is interesting because many Georgists would say that commercial arrangements like malls only exist because land wealth is a leftover from Feudalist societies.

[project2501a]

It's not about the percentages. It is about the ownership of the means of this centralized techno-capital, to which we have none. It is about the democratization of that capital, even if we have to nationalize it.

[flakeoil]

At least there is competition between malls. You can always move to another mall.