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!
> They ("techno lords") can nudge our feeds however they want and manipulate. We wouldn’t know.
But there's a detail here that its hard to answer, or at least for some platforms. Given the complexity of some of these algorithms, do the techno lords have that sort of control of deliberate control, or it's just the uncontrolled optimization for a given outcome?
I'm not saying that reality is better, it might be even worse to know that no one is at the wheel.
> 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?
I think that's a tremendous insight to be put forward, especially because we know this and yet the vast majority of people still act it out. Some time ago I saw an interview with Slavoj Zizek where he went deep into this phenomenon with the example of Santa Claus: Parents know it is a lie, yet they act it out to their children who at some point know it's a lie but still act it out not to disappoint their parents and keep that illusion, and this goes on for generations.
This is the exact same thing as this culture of self-discovery/acceptance, everyone preaches it, but end up boiling everything down to their best moments and highlights. It's a collective lie that everyone plays with, and I don't know if there's a clear purpose to it other than to sustain itself.
The first point is referred to as "criti-hype", when you criticize a thing by claiming it has almost magical powers, which is exactly what the owner would want people to think as they can charge more money for their magical services.
Similar to how the AI apocalypse-talk is hyping up the valuation of OpenAI.
At any rate, if we simplify the question it would sound something like: are the tech giants, notably social media and 24/7 smartphones with internet more efficient at influencing people than say, television or radio or the cinema was?
And the answer would be... kinda? But it's not specific to any of those platforms, rather the way the human brain is influenced when it's constantly in a crowd of their peers, so to speak. Likes, follower counts, reshares, endless feeds etc. are the innovations (over television and radio) that tap into our awareness and turn us hypersensitize. The algorithms are just there to keep hitting the nerves to keep us in that state.
In that sense, the odd feeling of constantly being online is more real than Santa Claus, and no matter how conscious someone is about how everyone is curating their very best, the images effect us all the same.
> But there's a detail here that its hard to answer, or at least for some platforms. Given the complexity of some of these algorithms, do the techno lords have that sort of control of deliberate control, or it's just the uncontrolled optimization for a given outcome?
I think in this context, the main principle (if I recall correctly) was that when we go on Amazon, we actually exit capitalism and the "free markets". You don't see the same Amazon "store window" that I do -- I will have a very different "for you" - tab. Maybe not even the same prices -- it would be hard to know. Capitalism kinda works best when the market is free and open.
I guess it's the same with my YouTube feed - I've actually picked up some hobbies and recipes and stuff from there which would never have been on my radar if I wasn't "nudged". In this case, it's probably not with intent other than engagement, and it's worked out positively, but you know, maybe my political opinions or vote could also be nudged, so the dark side here is very relevant if it was made with intent.
> This is the exact same thing as this culture of self-discovery/acceptance, everyone preaches it, but end up boiling everything down to their best moments and highlights. It's a collective lie that everyone plays with, and I don't know if there's a clear purpose to it other than to sustain itself.
I'm with you 100%.
Another anecdotal insight: the people I know with massive online followings care so much about their metrics to the point that it steers their content entirely.
"I can't post this because it wouldn't align with my followers".
> But there's a detail here that its hard to answer, or at least for some platforms. Given the complexity of some of these algorithms, do the techno lords have that sort of control of deliberate control, or it's just the uncontrolled optimization for a given outcome?
I think it doesn't matter, and we should be concerned with the outcomes instead. "Control" may be used as a metaphor here, just as OP's point is a synecdoche. They have the inherent goal of making shareholders happy (in the cases where it does apply), and maintaining domination over their respective markets; and they have enough resources for that.
If the usual faces (Bezos, Cook, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc.) are the ones making the hard decisions is unimportant, and it is even dangerous to go down this path. This is how conspiracy theorists start f**ing up everything.
> But there's a detail here that its hard to answer, or at least for some platforms. Given the complexity of some of these algorithms, do the techno lords have that sort of control of deliberate control, or it's just the uncontrolled optimization for a given outcome?
Given that most giant tech-platforms heavily conform to and moderate with a target of left-leaning values, I'd wager that deliberate control does exist.
> Given that most giant tech-platforms heavily conform to and moderate with a target of left-leaning values, I'd wager that deliberate control does exist.
You and I must have a fundamentally different definition of "left-leaning values".
> You and I must have a fundamentally different definition of "left-leaning values".
I'm sorry, but DEI committees, forced minority hiring, and continued suppression of right-of-center opinions say different.
I have worked at fortune 500 companies. I have seen their intercompany minority groups. When asked to join, I plainly said that as a typical white guy, there was no group representing me, whatever that even means. You could almost hear the coin fall, but not quite.
You can also look at Ex-Twitter or Reddit for examples of otherthink suppression. The largest German subforum was recently banned because of their immigration-critical (not even anti-immigration) stance.
I'm not even a conservative. It's just that I'm aware of my bubble's inherent bias and that I do not support the progressive-typical suppression of differing opinions in the name of any -isms. Being openly racist is different from criticizing religion or political decisions.
The only reason you don't see techcorps as left-leaning is because you misunderstand the principle of radical capitalism as being inherently conservative.
Private companies' adoption of affirmative actions is not enforced by law in most countries, I would say. In the U.S., only government contractors have this obligation---since 1965 by the way, so it is not a new thing.
So, companies may opt for it but, as other management decisions, owners are free to do with their company as they like. Of course they will might face backlash from the general public, but this should not be an issue.
So, with all due respect, what the heck are you talking about?
you're confusing what the company does internally, and what the algorithm does for customers.
cuz for all of the FAANG DEI drama -- entirely overblown, at that; doubly so since many got laid off in 2022-23 -- their algorithms sure are good at getting gamed by right wing actors. they're willing to pay for advertisements, and that's what they run.
This is such nonsense because you're claiming that these companies are actively imposing these activities in support of "left-leaning values" when there is absolutely nothing genuine with their support for those initiatives.
Companies don't push hamfisted DEI committees and diversity program because there's a leftwing bias, they push it because its good for marketing to have even just the thinnest veneer of supporting these movements (because outside of marketing, they are in fact popular. Having more diversity is a popular stance and has nothing to do with "left-leaning" values if you're actually using the left-right wing spectrum in any meaningful sense to describe a range of Marxism/socialism to capitalism/libertarianism. "Diversity" isn't a core part of either of these wings.
Companies don't practice anything from an ideology that isn't rooted in one simple factor: profit motives and advertising. All the various "*washing" phenomonens are just facsimiles to cover over the rampant racism, sexism and horrible products fo rthe environment. Pretending these are genuine ideologies is completely silly.
One more thing that's said I'd like to underline because it's often overlooked but has tremendous importance is the identity "ownership". If individuals and companies could easily prove who they are (to build trust) through government services, the internet would be a much better place. It's an idea that's almost forgotten but there have been numerous attempts in the past to make this happen, and it could be the building block of a better internet. Big companies would no longer need to be intermediaries for sorting out spam from search results and ranking trust ratings for e-commerce. A micro-payment network could fund small time creators who would also build a name. Things would be better. I'm hopeful that in the next 10 years after LLM garbage takes over the world by storm something like this will emerge.
You're right! And Yanis is open about that he is very political (and leftist).
The book is written in the form of a letter to his father. We get a lot of backstory about why and how his views are shaped, reading Marx in his childhood and seeing his friends toil away at factories. The latter part of the book is an essay of a new system that supposedly fixes a lot of shortcomings with the modern system. That's what I meant about political stuff.
I kinda just stumbled in with an open mind to learn more what "techno feudalism" and modern cloud companies worked because I'm very interested in it. But it's still an alright book. Tells the story of whats behind both the man and the idea -- the whys and how. It made it longer though.
I think this is more applicable to a specific subculture (the mainstream) that it is to everyone. For me who relies mostly on older style forums and image boards, there is no algorithm and identity is reviled. And you'd be surprised at the influence of these boards even today, not just in the english internet but internationally.
Those areas have their own cons, and the mainstream has chosen accessibility over sincerity. But looking at the damage down today, I can't say if that was the right choice to make for them.
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.
Do those leaseholds keep up with inflation? I know there's been a scandal about some new builds increasing rents each year, but ours was set 150 years ago at £5/year and never goes up. We don't even know who to pay it to and no ones bothered to collect it. Its too small a figure.
I don't consider myself a serf, if I even had to pay £5/year.
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
Science has very solid evidence on social networks being extremely addictive, and there are growing suspicions that some companies have it like this by design. It might be a choice, yes, but this is not a black-and-white situation.
>and there are growing suspicions that some companies have it like this by design
That is completely ridiculous. Obviously literally every social media company wants to generate sustained user engagement, this isn't a "growing suspicion" it is their business model to act that way.
There are effective and ineffective ways to maintain engagement. Getting users addicted is very effective.
Even scarier, this doesn't even have to be conscious on part of anyone running the companies. There is no need for bad intent. Simply optimizing for engagement leads to addictiveness.
(I'm not saying there's no bad intent, just that it's optional and we're screwed even without it)
In that case, I beg to differ, it is not cheap. When we are talking about highly addictive platforms, this is a zero-sum game (in which every second spent benefits the platform and only the platform in detriment of the user's own health).
It’s still a lot cheaper than alternatives such as actual work or gambling. It’s akin to cable television of yesterday, but cheaper since most people refuse to pay with fiat currency.
You mean you're addicted like everyone else. Every platform has highly tuned algorithms designed by some of the smartest engineering and data science teams on the planet, to keep you coming back for more, and doom scrolling for hours on end.
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.
You might not have to use these platforms, but tell a random parent to stop using Facebook and Messenger cold turkey, and they'll tell you that a lot of their kids activities (both school and otherwise) is mainly being coordinated on Facebook. The same with politics and other core societal activities – at least here in Norway.
It was never a good idea to use these services as a core communication infrastructure in the first place, but it happened non the less. It will take considerable effort to turn this around, and we should not blame the average user, but the tech companies using "growth hacking" and other unsavory tactics to lock people into their walled gardens. Also the governments for not taking action and regulating this space earlier.
To be honest, you're making it sound easier to quit Facebook than I believe it is. Humans have a multi-millennia history of successfully raising children without Facebook. We know it is possible. Facebook is more convenient than the alternatives, that much is obvious. This is a strength of fiefdoms - they can be very effective. But there aren't really any significant things holding you to them and you can drop them if you think the value isn't there.
Your argument is you can't drop them because they provide more value than they cost you. Fair enough; but that doesn't mean you can't. It means you won't because they are better than the alternatives. That isn't a bad thing, for anyone.
> It will take considerable effort to turn this around, and we should not blame the average user...
They're enabling it. I don't see anything blameworthy happening, but if there was the users would shoulder most of the blame.
> Your argument is you can't drop them because they provide more value than they cost you. Fair enough; but that doesn't mean you can't. It means you won't because they are better than the alternatives. That isn't a bad thing, for anyone.
My argument is the network effect and the lock in. As an individual user, there are no way to leave without being cut of from your groups and friends.
The product is not that great in itself, the group functionality in Facebook is a mess, and many other chat apps can do all the important things that Messenger can do. It's the lock-in effect that makes it super inconvenient to leave for most people.
I don't have kids and stopped using Facebook in 2018 without to much trouble. I joined the fediverse in 2017 and quit Twitter when Musk blocked me from mentioning my fediverse handle in my bio. But I have cared about this for quite a while, so I saw the writing on the wall and was mentally prepared to jump ship. Most people are not – although that might be changing now, actually.
Some people do not have this alternative without paying the price of being alienated from activities that are only discussed through Facebook groups or FB Messenger.
Yes, you can quit all the messenger apps, get rid of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Signal, but now you are not part of the groups interactions there. Your friends and family that don't share the same ideological drive won't increase their friction on communication just because, they will keep using whatever is providing a low friction interaction and network effects increase the friction on leaving a lot.
Network effects are huge, when it tips the scale on the friction effort to get rid of the platform they have won, the only way to quit one is if everyone else you care about also move to a different one, that's a massive effort.
If you oppose closed non-interoperable platforms and prefer open protocols.
I'd love to quit at least WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, I don't want Meta snooping on my communications to accumulate data but unfortunately my whole family uses WhatsApp, and in Sweden for some reason people use Facebook Messenger so quitting both would alienate me from communication with 95% of the people I care about.
I would prefer using a communication app that relies on a common protocol and can interoperate with different clients, so I could move clients in case one starts to act shady (in this case, Telegram can be a bit shady at times), those don't exist anymore, XMPP is basically dead and nothing has replaced it.
You are complaining that these apps locked people in by making everybody using them.
That's hilarious because it is contradictory. The value you derive from these apps is that the people you care about are on them. They wouldn't be if not for "growth hacks".
They could work on an interoperable protocol, that's the very clear core component of my complaint which I brought up completely spelled out, think you need to read it once more to help your reading comprehension: the main issue is making those apps not interoperable through a common protocol so I can jump ship when the client goes to shit without losing access to the network of people I care about.
You can read it again:
> I would prefer using a communication app that relies on a common protocol and can interoperate with different clients, so I could move clients in case one starts to act shady (in this case, Telegram can be a bit shady at times), those don't exist anymore, XMPP is basically dead and nothing has replaced it.
It is clear that you would prefer that. I would prefer pie in the sky, too. If growing an audience using a common interoperable protocol is so easy, why don't you just do it? Start with the people you care about.
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I quit after a few years of preparation, moving communications with my friends and family over to other messaging apps. It took time, and I had to accept that my extended network was still locked up in Facebook. If I had kids I fear that this would have been much harder.
It's incorrect to say that they provide more value than they cost you. They cost most users more to leave than they cost to stay. That's not the same as providing that value, they've simply found a away to become a gatekeeper to the value people get from their social contacts.
The cost to leave Facebook is precisely the cost of providing services equivalent to the value of Facebook's offering. There isn't an exit tax.
In fact, I'd speculate the cost is exactly that someone would have to ring up their friends every so often and ask what is going on in their lives. As costs go we're delving into some trivial ones.
For having taken that choice - getting off socials for ideological reasons - and now being left to do exactly what you suggest - phoning everybody regularly - I have realized that the cost in time is, in fact to trivial at all, quite the opposite.
For a few months now I set time aside every few days to do so, particularly on the week-ends. Problem is ofc that not everybody is available to answer when I call. They then call back at random times, which are not always the best, but you can't also just cut ppl off and say I'll call you later.
Digital social circles allow for asynchronous transmission, while regular comms require synchronous schedules which fast become a big opportunity cost.
As such, maintaining the knowledge of the current state of your social network without some form of localized broadcast mechanism is in truth quite expensive.
>Humans have a multi-millennia history of successfully raising children without Facebook
Facebook is also culture now. And I don't think that humans have a great history with abandoning their culture, and thriving outside of it. Personal responsibility is a thing, yes, but it's far from the be-all, end-all that people make it up to be. Humans work in a certain way and if something abuses that outright, the blame is more on the abuser, and less on the people. Yes, people should be careful, but booby traps are made to be hard to avoid.
That list is mostly false. I've used government services, sold used things on the internet, read what politicians say (in detail) and bought food online without using those sites.
Twitter is in fact a bad place to engage with politicians because, by design, you only get soundbites. It is much more informative to go straight to the parliamentary records if you care about politics.
> Also, no real alternative to YouTube's content.
About 40-50% of what I watch is being sloooowly driven off YouTube because they don't like right wing opinions. They all have duplicate channels on multiple sites. And even a lot of the non-political stuff is starting to appear in a few places because it makes more economic sense.
You claim the list is false and provide nothing of substance to back that up.
Assuming everyone simply chooses to use those services and could stop doing so in a whim is extremely naive.
If you want to participate in society today, many of those services are mandatory. Even if individuals can opt out, they can't force institutions or others to do the same, leaving them stranded.
Maybe you in particular don't care about being disconnected from all that, but that is not an argument that can be generalized. The problems caused by the network effect can't be solved by individual choices.
that's great that you were able to do all of that, but that's not true for everyone. You can't deny that for a lot of people these networks are their day to day, and have become a necessity.
Just like someone can make an effort and live off-the-grid just fine, it doesn't mean it is possible for everyone to do it.
The name doesn't matter that much. In essence, it is centralised wealth extraction on a mass scale. The "rent" extracted is disproportional to the value of the service and their operational costs.
It is not always trivial to switch. There are realistically two companies dominating phone OS, and either one comes with their poisoned pills. More importantly, I think what he is referring to here is the economical subjugation of the rest of society to tech, and to a very few tech players at that. An oligopoly might be better than a monopoly, but not much.
Facebook and co are also hard to walk away from, because even if you never registered, third party websites and other sources still sent data to them that they profiled.
> 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.
The problem is, online discourse (especially about politics) has gotten extremely limited over the last decade in where it's taking place - it's either Twitter, Reddit or Facebook. Politics journalists are still primarily going off of what's trending on Twitter, and "generic" journalists copy off of Reddit, and boomers off of Facebook.
The early days of the "modern Internet" era were more accessible - one had blogs, many of them selfhosted, web link rings, newsletters and whatnot - but spam and other rampant abuse (e.g. DDoS attacks, troll campaigns) made participating in discourse outside of the big "walled gardens" so incredibly tedious that barely anyone does that any more, and technologies/platforms like IRC or Usenet failed to keep up with technology progress or kneecapped themselves (remember Freenode?).
Can you really walk away from Facebook and other big tech? You can run away into the mountains just like peasants did. But surviving there ain’t easy, in both cases.
And technical part is the easy thing in setting up a competitor.
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.
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.
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.
You can switch to a different location and continue business, should a conflict arises with a landlord in a mall.
With Amazon, if you have a conflict, you are done. You cannot come back to the mall. And there is a single (or very few malls).
In other words, it is not a market, where people come together for business) anymore it is being bound to a higher power to grant you rights of doing business.
This is the same dynamics we have seen before. How many national supermarket chains are there? Crossing Walmart or Amazon seem very analogous here. If anything, business in the past was more feudalistic, as people were bound to a given market and they are now able to negotiate more broadly.
All of the replies here seem to point out that monopolies are bad and tech companies tend to be monopolistic. This is obvious and we all agree. However, when asked what is the difference between a mall and Apple Store, Varoufakis did not mention a monopoly or oligopoly as the issue, he mentioned rent. Specifically he mentioned that getting a percentage of profit was the biggest issue. I think this is not a strong argument for calling it a new economic model.
I would argue otherwise. I have absolutely zero negotiation power. In the past there was more. See Apple-Epic saga or multiple reports that show Amazon manufacture popular products clones and pushing the original manufacturer down in the search results. These are impossible moves with Walmart. You need to physically erase products to outcompete your competitor.
Secondly, in Walmart we are all physically seeing the same product on the same shelf. With online "markets", I don't even know if I am seeing the stuff I wanted because there is an algorithm that hides certain things from me but shows it to you. These are exceptionally intrusive moves by the mall itself. Walmart could only dream about such manipulations. In the old model, I can still stand side-by-side with my competitor as product options.
In that sense, it is fundamentally malicious and a very new economic model.
I am not that sure it was the case before either. If you have 40 very similar products at Walmart where are they placed? Which one is placed on the top shelf (less visible) which one is placed at average height? How many packages of 1 type of product you have (you can have 10 of 1 product and 1 of another product - which one will be seen first). And so on.
Yes, you can do even more with an online market, but that in my opinion is "do similar things, only faster and more dynamic". Moving products from bottom shelf to middle shelf in all supermarkets = probably 1 week planning/executing. Moving all apps from first page to 3rd search page = probably 5 minutes.
Exactly. And probably in 300-400 years from now, if Humanity is still there or it can entertain itself studying its past, they will laugh at how we permitted that.
one example - Yanis gave on channel 4: was Amazon not only owns the mall. But with their algorithm - they can decide to show you what shops they want you to see. in a regular mall -- you can explore the mall willy nilly. nothing is exactly out of bounds in terms of the shops you see. you wanna visit a sex store - that's on you.
on amazon / google etc with their algorithm certain shops / websites are blocked from you ever noticing they exist due to their algorithms.
I think this is a fantastic point. Since they own the algorithm and the store, this is like renting a slot at a mall thinking you have a good spot by the food court where you have plenty of traffic, but one day you come in and the mall has placed you at the end of a dark hallway while the mall has replaced your store with one that sells stuff just like you did, but mall branded. Yes you're still in the mall, but good luck making money.
The marketplace dynamics are different. Numerous physical malls scattered around the world sell different sets of products to local clienteles. A centralised "online" mall sells a single set of products globally, offering a particular subset to a particular customer thanks to a finely-tuned algorithm analysing individual behaviour. It's not quite a "free market" anymore.
> sell different sets of products to local clienteles
> offering a particular subset to a particular customer
Aren't those in fact the same?... It's just that you can adjust faster and more granular, but as you yourself mentioned it happened before as well.
And really everybody talks about "the evil fine tuned algorithm" but when I am looking for something to buy many times those "smart" algorithms make very stupid suggestions and I feel the same as in the supermarket - I need to be very very specific about what I want and look for myself otherwise I don't get it.
I guess another way to view the point(s) he's making is that the supplier of the thing that enables you to make your own business, prices that thing based on how hard and smart you work and not based on how hard they work.
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.
This is interesting because many Georgists would say that commercial arrangements like malls only exist because land wealth is a leftover from Feudalist societies.
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.
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.
Comments like this are against the HN guidelines as they are at odds with the site's purpose, which is to gratify intellectual curiosity. There are plenty of ways people can discuss ideas from Varoufakis, Marx and other writers/philosophers from all parts of the ideological landscape without resorting to simplistic barbs like this, and without wanting a society that remotely resembles North Korea or any other authoritarian state.
> 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.
You seem confused. It is not your fault, commenters here are focusing too much on the X/Twitter quote from the article, which by the way comes from its introduction and not from the interview proper.
The crux of the matter is not the compensation (or lack thereof) for the content produced, but the fact that, for companies like Amazon or Apple, their main mode of wealth extraction is not wealth but rent. In traditional advertising, for instance, the publisher is not entitled to a cut of your sales. Companies pay a fixed price for the front page ad in a print newspaper. In digital platforms, it is not the case anymore.
The same applies to social media, but on a different manner which I will not cover here. If you are an ordinary consumer of these platforms, you help companies enable their business model, but the dollars are not coming off your pocket.
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.
Just because developers aren’t coming up with the business models doesn’t mean they bear no responsibility. You can’t go to work every day for a company that makes bad things, as someone making bad things at that company, and claim no responsibility for their existence in the world. This is especially true when employee mobility is so high in software. Surely if developers had a mature sense of professional ethics and strong personal values they would be sure they worked at a company that they felt aligned with them, or admit that they have compromised their values for a larger paycheck.
That BMW article is from 2022. They don’t offer that anymore[1].
That is not how I interpreted GP's point. It sounded to me as if they were saying that anyone in tech could move to other industries and make big bucks if the points in the interview were true.
Thing is, even if the points in the interview are false, that would not apply, as devs are not the ones making the shots.
Edit: btw, thanks for the heads-up about the heated seats subscription thing. I hope it doesn't make the point moot.
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.
> 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.
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.
> You can only do that if you have cornered the market.
How does capitalism address the fact that so many companies have cornered their markets not on merit but on resource access inequality, and have now accumulated enough resources to engage in lobbying and legal harassment for a long time even if free-market "reforms" are eventually passed? Should these companies be closed based on their past record?
It works not in theory, but in practice. And the main reason is the freedom inherit in swapping goods for money by the 2 sides by their own will. The freedom to choose where to invest your money gives the capitalism inherently more freedom that any other centralized system of distribution.
Communism can't work because economic inefficiency kills the system. Look at Russia and Ukraine now, during Soviet times after 1970 they imported grain, now they're one of the biggest exporters. It's not only technology, it's the "capitalism" at work.
In USSR, only 3% of land produced almost all fruits and vegs in the market, because the collective farms were given the permission to allow private land use and selling of produce on the market. They needed to give the collective farm a certain percentage of the crops, but what they kept they could've sold. Again capitalism at work... Efficiency was trough the roof.
Sure, if we two meet in the forest and I swap my piece of fur for some dried meat it is a win. But the problem with capitalism is that in the long run it starts to centralize in a similar manner as communism for efficiency and thus goes against the "Local knowledge problem"[1]
As a result what typically happens is that general quality goes down and that is what we observe can right now.
Please also read my other response in this thread.
Capitalism (or more specifically, elements of it like private ownership and the market economy) has resulted in the largest increase of living standards in history.
Market economy is not necessary the same as capitalism, China is capitalist in some parts but it also a heavy state subsidized economy with a regulated market and public ownership.
And the massive increase in living standard can be attributed to multiple factors that was all needed to make it possible, superposition as it is called in physics, e.g. a proper contracting framework, a literate and educated public, technological advances, deregulating markets from the old estates system, etc.
We can take Sweden as a good example, yes the legislative change in 1864[1] that anyone could operate a business was crucial, but where did all the talent come from that actually created all those famous Swedish companies and inventions? Many came from the Swedish Army because Sweden was an old Great Power and the army needed many engineers to be able to build fortifications and such. Two of the most famous ones would be Nils Ericson[2] and his younger brother John Ericsson[3]
But you also need qualified workers and it happens that Sweden had at the time one of the most literate population in the world because of the Swedish state church. In the old days Sweden was quite strict religiously and the Swedish state church had conducted Household Examinations since 1686[4] about general knowledge in the Bible and Luther's Small Catechism. You can't really run a modern industry with an illiterate public.
Thus attributing everything to "capitalism" is gross simplification of history.
Compared to fifty years ago, are the economies of China and Poland more or less capitalist? And if the increase in the quality of life for those two places isn’t from transitioning from communist/Soviet mechanisms to more capitalist ones, what do you attribute it to?
You can stuff anything in a pigeonhole if you try hard enough. Sure there are Polish and Chinese capitalism, but it's at an individual level. At other levels (corporate and services etc) it's different. And so on.
Describe the whole system, or we're just making sophomoric comments which don't help with understanding. "It's really just capitalism!" doesn't begin to cover the cases.
I don’t think it’s that complicated of a question, and you’d be pretty hard pressed to argue that the economies aren’t more capitalist compared to their predecessors.
I ignored the rest of your reply because I specifically used China and Poland as examples. The relevance of Sweden in the 1800s is unclear to me and you didn’t tie that to the comment chain. People on HN sometimes have this tendency to throw up a bunch of unrelated citations that have nothing to do with the main point, then expect the replies to address each one.
I agree that everything can’t be summarized as a simple cause effect, but the parent comment I replied to was about comparing capitalism to communism, hence my usage of examples of states that went from communist to capitalist. In other words, this isn’t theoretical. We have examples of a capitalist state succeeding, when it was formerly communist.
Again, Sweden in the 1800s is not particularly relevant here.
It was me that was doing that comparison, agree it is not a perfect one because of many reasons, one is that communism is a political system that has an economic system (typically planned economy) and capitalism is an economic system only. Thus you can run a brutal dictatorship, like the communistic China, or benevolent democracy with capitalism.
And this is what I don't agree with the reasoning in this thread, it is a comparison of apples with oranges. Many proponents of capitalism does this error, they assume that capitalism gives political rights somehow, and they typically talk about things like freedom and such. But all of those political freedoms stem from somewhere.
And an continuation on that argument is that private companies a free to do what they want, when in reality private stock companies (in the West at least) has a separate legal entity and reduced liability as a guarantee from the state. Is that true capitalism?
Why I made the comparison between capitalism and communism is that both proponents of those systems usually reply "That is not real communism/capitalism!" about any flaw in these systems (which of course happened in this thread as well). But if every flaw is always theorized away, does it then only exist in theory?
If we look specifically at China for instance we can notice other things that has helped it, one is that greedy capitalist from the West moved industries there, China is also doing industrial espionage on Western companies, China as also aggressively spikes its currency, and it balloons it's GDP numbers by building ghost cities.
Consider that USSR was always a capitalist country, we didn't really have socialism in a lot of places, we mostly had Marxist-Leninist state capitalist states that nationalize means of production, still leaving for example the wage work relation intact.
>btw, auto dealerships are like that because territorial exclusivity by the large companies, not the "capitalism".
The auto world is cut-throat competitive. There are dealers everywhere, and most cars and features are commoditized. In every class and price range there are easily substitutable vehicles. Tech people like to talk about the auto industry like the market is scandalous.
The problem is access to the tools by independent auto shops. There is a whole industry of alternative tool providers who are sniffing and reimplementing the protocols, because of the vendor lock-in.
Yeah I continue to not understand the “late capitalism” label of current events. Very little of what we have today can be called capitalist in the original, competition-focused sense of the term. Most markets are very regulated and anticompetitive.
I recommend that anyone with these views should test them in the real world.
For example, by going to an Amazon warehouse and telling the people who work there that their wretched conditions are the result of government overreach.
The response to this is to point out that Amazon has very little competition and that in a more competitive environment, other companies would treat workers better. See: Henry Ford’s treatment of workers compared to competitors.
The idea of late-stage capitalism is that if you create a system that prizes monetary gain over all else and allow companies to become sufficiently large and powerful then in the process of optimizing for maximum profit those companies are incentivised to capture the state and wield its power.
That may be the case, but it’s not capitalism as defined by any classical theorist or economist. As in, the people that actually defined the term. What you’re describing is more like profit-maximizing corporatism. Classical capitalist theory explicitly puts competition as the solution to this.
This is like the difference between communist theory and communism as it was actually practiced in the late USSR. The former had many good intentions but no real mechanism to ensure that it wouldn’t rapidly devolve into the latter. With capitalism we even have enough economic theory to understand why businesses are incentivized to move away from the ideal competitive environment, and to undermine the political mechanisms (like anti-trust) that should keep them there.
Capitalism is not equivalent to anarchism. It’s perfectly reasonable to think that state control which incentivizes market competition is desirable, whereas state control that prevents such competition is bad.
Capitalism in the original, competition-focused sense of the term has never existed in the real world, any more than Communism in the purely egalitarian stateless and classless sense. Late stage capitalism refers to the inevitable end-state of what capitalism actually evolves into, which is essentially oligarchy, preceding collapse.
The fact that a pure thing never existed doesn’t mean that something more pure didn’t / can’t exist.
That’s also not what late stage capitalism, the term, generally refers to.
If a key part of capitalism is competition, then clearly whatever we have now is not very capitalist. The primary reason this term (late stage capitalism) is used is because people lack knowledge about economic history and can’t seem to operate on anything more complex than good-bad, capitalist-communist, private-public.
Competition isn't a key part of capitalism - it only exists where governments force markets to optimize for "fairness" over efficiency. Left to their own devices, corporations will tend towards oligopoly and monopoly, so they can control the most capital with the least risk.
Which capitalist theorists say that competition isn’t crucial for the success of capitalism?
It’s entirely integral to the proper functioning of the system. What you’re describing is that not being followed, which is exactly the point I’m making.
> Which capitalist theorists say that competition isn’t crucial for the success of capitalism?
>
> It’s entirely integral to the proper functioning of the system. What you’re describing is that not being followed, which is exactly the point I’m making.
Well, what's good for the system is not necessarily the optimal state for any given individual actors in the system. I'm sure that you'd agree that from a profit perspective, monopolistic market dominance would be the ideal state, since you wouldn't have competitors to force prices down. Or would you argue that these kinds of companies want competition and that they wouldn't choose total market dominance if given the chance?
This, meanwhile, would not be good for the system as a whole, which is why you get competition and also things like anti-trust laws to make sure that this kind of thing doesn't happen, or that even if a natural monopoly, things are still functional.
“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.
> Twitter (and other platforms like it) self-impose those costs on themselves in order to maintain the feudalist structure.
No they don't. The site would not exist if they did not "self impose" those costs. By simple analogy, which self-imposed costs were paid by feudal lords?
> 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.
It shows that people prefer Twitter to Mastodon. It does not show anything about why they prefer one to the other. Your reason may be a factor, but there is no prima facie evidence that it is the dispositive factor. There is quite a lot of evidence that other factors are substantially more relevant.
> By simple analogy, which self-imposed costs were paid by feudal lords?
Mantaining lords and knights, letting go of a parcel of their land so that they could accommodate enough serfs and their families (as in comparison to, say, slave quarters used in the Americas).
and running their manor, in a day to day sense in many cases. the point was to maintain a military and agricultural base, and they had sizable obligations to their bosses, up to and including dying in battle.
Not necessarily :) I wouldn't even notice if one or the other is shut down.
Then, you underrate the "homeing" feeling, the whole posts, the followers, your digital "brand" and all the work invested - you don't have to learn a new platform (it's peculiarities), you don't have to start from zero. So your motivation not to leave X/Twitter is quite high.
It's a wishful thinking by you. I don't know where and why it originates. But, being a rational human being, I wouldn't switch. Let alone the reach you get with X/Twitter compared to mastodon. Even the smallest blog shows X/Twitter embeddings. Where is that from mastodon? ... It would be an unwise decision to switch. Sorry.
Yes, you're absolutely right here. It's the way of money all of us following. May it be the payment processor goes rogue, or the platform itself. Or a competitor emerges (like tiktok did suddenly, like Facebook did suddenly at their start..)
it's a very easy equation:
Time = money.
No matter if it's the right hand or the left hand of the equation, but one of the sides must be bigger than the other And the quotient have at best to go towards the positive infinity if you consider how much money/work you invested and how much time you spend on it .. (ROI)
So, big, mass migration actually never happened once. It rather happened slowly and over time. Consumers switching to platforms which have what they actually want and that are easy to use (time investment). If you want Facebook/meta to go down the river, then you need something that gives the consumers what Facebook doesn't give them. If you want Google to go down the river, then you need to offer some better experience. Like bing chat / Copilot. If I think about that, I didn't use Google search in the last 4-5 months. Because I can formulate what I actually want and if I need more in depth knowledge, I still use Copilot as a starting point for my things. It's a total different approach to search.
So, mass migration happens, yes. But not because some says "it's bad.. omg, musk is the CEO" or "oh no, they put the API behind a paywall" - idealistic thinking stops there, where someone must invest time/work to get where he/she/it already is. And that's what lures the consumers into a closed, walled system - in the end they get exactly what they want.
That's why f.e. mastodon is still somewhere .. let me say, behind the fence..
It's all economic thinking and processes ruling "who and how many go to"
Just take the influencers. They can't even earn money on alternatives. Why should they migrate?
But that would also be a problem for the useful content created by such. The most of the influencers can go and get a job, YES!! GO EARN YOUR MONEY WITH ACTUAL WORK!".
But a few creators are really entertaining and master knowledge transfer. I would miss something, if there's no "technical influencers" anymore (= the silicone valley superstars haha)
According to Apptopia analysis, X/Twitter is estimated to have around 121 million daily active users, significantly lower compared to company announcements.
Elon of course says that it's around 300M and all-time-high was 550M in 2023. (Whatever that means.)
The experience for users is just much much better if everybody is on the same platform. And the platform operator has to deal with spam, abuse, and compliance issues. Federated platforms haven't even attempted to seriously deal with this. Twitter has thousands of people working on this stuff and open source can't replicate that. You need many lawyers just to respond to overbearing governments demanding immediate censorship.
It's not some feudalist "rage bait" conspiracy that keeps people on twitter. Federated software just sucks in comparison. Twitter, despite all its flaws, is the only game in town.
How much does the electricity cost to run the servers? How much for the maintenance of those computers running the software? How about rental fees for the space they are kept in, air conditioning, sewer, taxes? Nah… doesn't exist. It's self-imposed feudalism.
The issue is not giving you the option by making Twitter interoperable with an open protocol.
Imagine if the web was like that instead of being an open network where if you follow a few protocols you can access it through any protocol-compliant software (aka: a browser) giving you the option to self-host or pay some service to host it for you, if it was a single service operated by a Big Tech that closes off this web based on their whims, locking out competing browsers, impossible to access outside of their provided clients, etc.
It's self-imposed feudalism, Twitter created a feud, API access has been curtailed, you have to access it through their provided means.
Open protocols is what made the web as powerful as it is, the closing of parts of it is a disgrace.
This is complete none-sense masquerading as deep philosophy.
Sites have costs (employees, infrastructures, offices, development) and this requires free access coupled with advertisement or closed access and payment of some sort like a subscription.
How could such a site survive if it has to freely give access to all it's content to other sites without anything in return.
What would be the incentive for users to stay on the paying version?
> How could such a site survive if it has to freely give access to all it's content to other sites without anything in return. What would be the incentive for users to stay on the paying version?
Provide services on top of the protocol? Adjacent to it? Niceties that don't break interoperability of data? Ads that are relevant to the core group using your version of the site for the protocol? I'm sure business people would find many ways to monetise just like they have monetised an open protocol called "web".
> This complete none-sense masquerading as deep philosophy.
Don't start with this bullshit, it just makes the discussion become inflammatory, fuck off with that, please.
> Provide services on top of the protocol? Adjacent to it?
You can't, because those features would then not be available on said open protocol making these features another "serfdom".
Or you'd have to add them to the protocol negating the differentiating factor.
Niceties that don't break interoperability of data?
> Ads that are relevant to the core group using your version of the site for the protocol?
Wait until you hear how Twitter, Facebook and Youtube get monetised.
> I'm sure business people would find many ways to monetise just like they have monetised an open protocol called "web".
This is wishful thinking and does not form a coherent end-to-end strategy.
> Don't start with this bullshit, it just makes the discussion become inflammatory, fuck off with that, please.
Lets not start calling all businesses "technofeudalism" then.
For someone as left leaning as Yanis he seems to enjoy all the "niceties" of capitalism just fine. I'll wait for his books to be open source. I'm sure this will happen any day now.
> Lets not start calling all businesses "technofeudalism" then.
I didn't, and it's clear what kind of business are defined as technofeudalists in the book which you haven't read. I recommend reading the book before having opinions about the subject, not headlines. It's clear you are having a knee-jerk reaction to something you didn't have intellectual curiosity to learn about.
> For someone as left leaning as Yanis he seems to enjoy all the "niceties" of capitalism just fine. I'll wait for his books to be open source. I'm sure this will happen any day now.
As usual comes the variation of the comment "leftists with iPhones" to shutdown discussion. This is a thought-terminating cliche, and a tired one at it. Don't use it, it just displays a lack of arguments.
> As usual comes the variation of the comment "leftists with iPhones" to shutdown discussion. This is a thought-terminating cliche, and a tired one at it. Don't use it, it just displays a lack of arguments.
I always thought porn made the Internet successfully penetrating almost each part of life.
You're right about the open protocols. But this are more important for the background services and architecture. In fact, no one is interested in selfhosting or things like that. Everyone just want to use and to consume. But someone has to build. And that one wants to eat and feed.
So in an utopian open web where everything can be imagined like you wrote, there wouldn't be any Facebook. Any Instagram. No tiktok. No Amazon. And actually there would be anything that is used by millions of millions now. Who would be capable to build and to finance the whole? A few OSS programmers? They're busy with other projects...
X/Twitter can curtail what ever they want. If you want to be part of it, play after the rules. No one forces you.
If it's really so bad, then new players will emerge and do things differently - it was always like that and will always be like that. Thats, btw, is the true reason what made the web powerfull: actors who do things differently. They come, they go..
(One correction though.. protocols describe a "same language" that different systems speak so they "understand" each other. What X/Twitter curtailed was their API. Application programming Interface. The difference is here that access to a system and software has been granted instead of speaking"same language". Why should it be free? They have costs by others using the API.. )
> You're right about the open protocols. But this are more important for the background services and architecture. In fact, no one is interested in selfhosting or things like that. Everyone just want to use and to consume. But someone has to build. And that one wants to eat and feed.
I will have to repeat myself: you don't need to self-host if you prefer another company providing you the service based on an open protocol, exactly like the web does, you could pay Twitter (via your attention, clicking on ads, whatever) and have that interact with other Feeds through a common protocol, whomever wants to self-host could do it, whomever wouldn't could use a Twitter-like platform.
> X/Twitter can curtail what ever they want. If you want to be part of it, play after the rules. No one forces you. If it's really so bad, then new players will emerge and do things differently - it was always like that and will always be like that. Thats, btw, is the true reason what made the web powerfull: actors who do things differently. They come, they go..
This falls apart when an entity gets large enough to completely feudalise a part of the web, that's the whole point of "Technofeudalism" (I question if you ever read the book since you do not understand this core principle). Amazon got so large that nowadays if you want to sell goods as a company in the web in some countries you cannot avoid also participating in their marketplace, so many customers use it for their purchases that if you stay away you are on the back foot against your competitors who are willing to sell through Amazon.
When Facebook dominates local groups for organising local activities (hobbies, student-parent groups, neighbourhood communications, etc.) there's no other option to jump to because the network effects locked in people, even if you dislike the platform you can't force all of the other dozens to hundreds of people using such groups to move over to a different one, the friction from network effects is too great. Instead if there was an open protocol that Facebook also implemented for the groups feature there wouldn't be any friction on just moving over to a different player if the Facebook experience didn't work well for you anymore.
> (One correction though.. protocols describe a "same language" that different systems speak so they "understand" each other. What X/Twitter curtailed was their API. Application programming Interface. The difference is here that access to a system and software has been granted instead of speaking"same language". Why should it be free? They have costs by others using the API.. )
That's not my point, I know what APIs and protocols are. The API example was just for illustrating the power that a closed platform has against all their users, be the users end-users or developers relying on the platform. No need for corrections, it just sounds very patronising trying to "correct" me while you completely missed the point I made...
After going around this thread of comments it feels like I'm discussing with people that have never experienced the web pre-2010s, you are so used to have massive services provided in the web being closed off by a few players that you think this is the only way they could exist. That was not how the web worked at all, there were visions for protocols springing to help those activities happening on the web to be interoperable between different platforms, to allow the movement of people between different services if one didn't work well anymore. These were killed by Big Tech fencing off their feuds, it was done on purpose to vacuum as much data as possible since data was the new gold rush after Google emerged in the 2000s.
And I see time and time again people in this thread ignoring how massive network effects are, thinking that "a new service will emerge and do things differently and just because they are better people will choose it", absolutely ignoring network effects and the friction of moving platforms when you can't take or port your data away to a new one. That's not how reality works, it's wishful thinking that a better service will inevitably attract enough people to move into them, if that happens it's also a very slow process, slower the larger the network is, as a corporation of course you need to care that in 10 years your users might migrate to a different platform if you fuck up but as an individual I don't have many 10 years slices in my life to wait for a shit product to die while I'm forced to use it due to its network effects.
Lastly to add to the last paragraph, you are also not considering that Big Tech just straight up acquires whatever appears that could be a potential competitor, most times to either kill the competition or to absorb it into their machines.
I've used the web since round about 1995 already. Altavista emerged at that time as yahoos competitor. fireball was their competitor. If you know the the difference, then you know what Google did. I used Google since the very beginning. I used usenety I know IRC and each of the messengers msn, AOL, QQ.. I did peer to peer streaming, sharing and DC++ .. ah.. i started with Windows for workgroups 3.11 and DOS6+, I used Linux, tried BSD.
It was my hobby at that time I was 15. I had to discover the computer and system without much books or Internet. My father worked with HPUX. And, I thinkingy I'm a true digital native if you want to have a calling name. Don't judge me here.
I'm a rational man. I know what f.e Google did for the Internet. But it's completely going by your definition of technofeudalism. Just am example for you to think of.
If you don't realize why and whats happened, what lead to it, then please talk further about open protocols and open APIs.
It's just a left orientated thinking you show here. Same as varoufakis, a leftist who is against the capital. Always arguing that's bad, the other bad - but happily living in a world, consuming and having a good good life. Build up by the so wrongful capitalist. ... Lol
I'm out. Please go and get a economic understanding and thinking. Each part of your life has been built around that and you now say "it's bad". Typical survivor bias behavior (go look it up ...) bye
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.
Your contribution is not the storage of your tweets. You can delete them one by one or with API but it won't make any difference at this point. And you need to repost it somewhere. You have contributed to keep the platform relevant. So no you can't take them anywhere else.
You seem to think this situation is very different from what publishers have done for at least hundreds of years. For at least hundreds of years, publishers have published many, many books each year, only a few of which become bestsellers. The publishers have wielded a lot influence over what books become popular (e.g., by telling booksellers to place them in good spots in stores, by getting reviewers to review them).
Unlike a traditional publisher, however, to whom an author sells the exclusive right to publish a work, you have the right to take your tweets and publish them elsewhere. There are many examples of authors who have adapted their Twitter posts into blog articles or books, and published them on other platforms, or even in print.
As for the contextual value of your tweets, if the tweets form one half of a conversation with a real person whose tweets you cannot use elsewhere, then they can be recast in the form of a dialogue with a fictional person, something which has been done since the days of Socrates.
> 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.
But I get no protection from these tech overlords, they can close me down at anytime or give my data away to third party or the government without my knowledge.
The analogy is that you get to use their platform to build your 'brand'.
Of course other important aspect is that even if you are free to move to a different platform - in contrast to serfs, who in general had to ask for permission to move - you can't move your followers. So in that sense every second of effort put into a twitter profile is improvement to the land that you can't take with you. And, as we know, while brands are important users are lazy and stick to platforms much more than to brands. (While, again of course, there's usually a very devoted core community around content creators, but that's not true at all of most brands, and especially not true of regular users who just want to have some Reddit or forum-discussion-like experience.)
they also tended to live in poverty and die horribly. this occasionally led them to rise up and kill their lords; the medieval social contract was constantly in flux. but make no mistake it led to absolutism.
"serfs were peasants who were bound to the land they worked on and were under the authority of the landowners or lords"
Last time I checked Twitter (the supposed lord) doesn't have the power to make you (the supposed serf) post on Twitter.
That is, I would say, a crucial distinction that makes the serf comparison ultra ridiculous.
Then again if Varoufakis said that the relationship between Twitter and its users is based on mutual benefit but Twitter gets more benefit, then it wouldn't make you as angry as saying that they people are serfs of techno-feudalists.
> 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.
If, instead of selling a product, when one gets regular huge investments from second/third world regimes, which are in reality to pay for salaries 19K+ regional language moderators and censors, 500 programmers for censorship and related algos, but only 500 people to run the actual "freemium" product is not exactly "profitable" either...
It went public in 2013 but seems like it only managed to turn an annual profit in 2018 and 2019, with 2020 and 2021 both back in the red before first half 2022 in the black.
So, after going public, it lost money in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020, and 2021.
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.
Exvept you actually pay with your time, both by thinking, writing amd following stuff on that platform wheb you could have done something probably more productive, but also with your brain time watching ads.
Not to mention ads will ultimately shape you into buying something, no matter how smart you think you are.
No, it's not. If there's good quality content, scintillating discussions, amazing insights and whatnot on twiXter it will attract more users. If all of that is there but the toxic sludge level in the cesspool is already at the dear users' elbows, then it probably discourage new (and old) users from jumping in.
It might be subjective, but I'm having trouble finding any quality content on media platforms driven by engagement. Most content is engineered to provoke an initial dopamine reaction with a funny face, a shiny product or a curious situation. Even tech articles feel promotional. You rarely get any deep insight about a topic.
Yep. Same experience here. Basically uncurated/unmoderated spaces are shit.
(Mastodon is very fragmented, so YMMV based on instances and who do you follow ... though I'm pretty happy with infosec.exchange , and surprisingly nowadays most quality stuff is on Youtube in the form of long video essays.)
That's because Musk doesn't understand what he bought and lacks the finesse to manage it productively.
And that's a good thing, because if someone as toxic and unhinged as Musk understood how SM really works, it would be a global disaster.
We've already seen what happens with that in the MSM space. So far, SM has only had fragmentary versions of that kind of propaganda monolith - Cambridge Analytica, bot farms, and so on.
Those are all bad enough. But a global platform that existed purely for propaganda and disinformation while pretending not to would be horrific.
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.
Not just quite possible, but it is like that. The reason all the platforms got that big is engagement and engagement can be provoked if you give the people a possibility to take their stand. But for one taking a stand you need something that is big enough for the stand taker to take the stand. It's disagreement. And provoking. The classical tools of Internet trolls. They're a part of the game too.
It's damn near impossible to work as an independent creator of books, music, art, streaming videos of all kinds, and so on, without a social media presence.
Many people do not enjoy SM at all, but the alternative is zero income.
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.
> Feudalism is defined by a few noblemen owning huge swats of land, lending it out in exchange for labor.
Feudalism was much more complicated than that.
Again, it was closer to federation where there were a bunch of reciprocal and overlapping relationships between multiple people. A feudal lord might just be someone who owned a castle on a hill. Again, the situation is much closer to federation.
Yeah, I agree that comparison with feudalism is flawed in that sense. I guess Yanis is using the term in its stereotypical form, evoking the image of a dictatorial lord wielding all the power.
"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.
So how is it opposite? He tried to renegotiate because he considered there should be "less consequences".
The problem with default on a loan is that while both parties must bear some responsibility (both the giver and the taker), it will always be the loan taker that will be in a worse situation at the end (has less options, power, etc.).
Anti-government spending apologists keep saying that politicians should run their budget like households...
(Also, I'm not saying you're one of them the way, but you happen to sound like one.)
... Negotiating debt settlements is the very first thing a financial advisor would tell you to do in case you (or an irresponsible family member) has contracted a huge debt. The fact that the lender denies your request doesn't say much about you besides your ability to negotiate. If you're dealing with a loan shark, that says more about them than it says about you.
My point is that "opposite to what happened" has no immediate connection to what he believes.
I find normal that he tried to negotiate a better deal and that his negotiating position was worse because he was the defaulting party.
He can still (or not) honestly believe the responsibility should be more/fully with the lender. I do agree up to some point that the richer entity should bear more responsibility, but I have a feeling his discourse is often very political (trying to mobilize and get people excited) rather than propose some realistic attainable policies.
Yes, his discourse is very political, but he does not come off as a demagogue to me. I personally think that there should be a room in the public discourse for people to come up with unrealistic policies, as realistic ones always require a compromise that benefits those in already in power. It would be very hard to carve out new avenues for social progress otherwise.
> 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]
