Greek economist/flesh presser Yanis Varoufakis “was once briefly Greek finance minister in 2015,” remembers the Conversation. Now his new book asks the query, “What killed capitalism,” with the name’s first phrase offering a solution.
“Techno-feudalism.”
Varoufakis argues that we now not reside in a capitalist society… “Today, capitalist members of the family stay intact, however techno-feudalist relations have begun to overtake them,” writes Varoufakis. Traditional capitalists, he proposes, have turn out to be “vassal capitalists”. They are subordinate and depending on a brand new breed of “lords” — the Big Tech firms — who generate monumental wealth by the use of new virtual platforms. A brand new type of algorithmic capital has developed — what Varoufakis calls “cloud capital” — and it has displaced “capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits”.
Markets were “replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets”. The second you input amazon.com “you exit capitalism” and input one thing that resembles a “feudal fief”: a virtual international belonging to one guy and his set of rules, which determines what merchandise you’ll see and what merchandise you will not see. If you are a supplier, the platform will decide how you’ll promote and which consumers you’ll manner. The phrases by which you engage, percentage information and business are dictated by means of an “algo” that “works for [Jeff Bezos’] bottom line”…
Access to the “digital fief” comes at the price of exorbitant rents. Varoufakis notes that many third-party builders at the Apple retailer, as an example, pay 30% “on all their revenues”, whilst Amazon fees its dealers “35% of revenues”. This, he argues, is sort of a medieval feudal lord sending around the sheriff to gather a big bite of his serfs’ produce as a result of he owns the property and the whole thing inside of it.
There is “no disinterested invisible hand of the market” right here. The Big Tech platforms are exempted from free-market festival.
And within the period in-between, customers are unknowingly coaching their algorithms for them — so “In this interaction, we are all high-tech ‘cloud serfs’… [T]he ‘cloud capital’ we are generating for them all the time increases their capacity to generate yet more wealth, and thus increases their power — something we have only begun to realise.”
Approximately 80% of the source of revenue of conventional capitalist conglomerates pass to salaries and wages, in accordance to Varoufakis, whilst Big Tech’s staff, against this, gather “less than 1% of their firms’ revenues”… For Varoufakis, we are no longer simply residing thru a tech revolution, however a tech-driven financial revolution. He demanding situations us to come to phrases with simply what has came about to our economies — and our societies — within the technology of Big Tech and Big Finance.
Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for sharing the thing.
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