Crypto, the left, and techno-feudalism
metacpc.org
metacpc.org
Approval voting is the best simple-next-step reform.
Volunteer for town planning commission or whatever advisory group has an open spot in your town or county.
Run for board seat on town council. Easier is to apply for seat on local credit union board of directors.
Show up and be friendly and learn. Keep your world-changing ideas to yourself for a couple years while you learn.
"When ‘Bitcoin maximalists’, as you call them, wax lyrical about the inability to print money (and celebrate this inability as Bitcoin’s feature, rather than its bug), they are being terribly unoriginal – banal, I dare say. Capitalism nearly died in 1929, and tens of millions did die in the war that ensued, because of this toxic fallacy that underpinned the Gold Standard then and Bitcoin now. Which fallacy? The fallacy of composition, as John Maynard Keynes called it.
Its essence is a tendency to extrapolate from the personal realm to the macroeconomic one. To say that if something is good for me – if a practice is sound at the level of my family, business, etc. – it must also be good for the state, government, humanity at large"
""We seem to have forgotten how Marx and Engels had the nous and the ability, on the one hand, to admire and celebrate the technological and scientific wonders of their era and, on the other hand, grasp that these potentially liberating technologies were bound to enslave the many if they became instrumentalised by the very few. The two Germans believed in the emancipatory potential of the steam engine and of electromagnetism. But, they never believed that society would be liberated by the steam engine and/or electromagnetism. Liberation required a political movement that first overthrows the bourgeoisie and only then presses these magnificent technologies into the service of the many. This seems to me an excellent way of approaching today’s potentially liberating technologies, including blockchain"
I've seen the Fed and Congress have a gun to their heads, and now the Wall Street gang, and the Tech Bros have the world held hostage. One can only hope that this hostage negotiation ends better than it did last time in 1929.
"During the 20th century, and up to this day, workers in large capitalist oligopolistic firms (like General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, or General Motors) received approximately 80% of the company’s income. Big Tech’s workers do not even collect 1% of their employer’s revenues. This is because paid labour performs only a fraction of the work that Big Tech benefits from. Who performs the bulk of the work? Most of the rest of us! For the first time in history, almost everyone produces for free (often enthusiastically), adding to Big Tech’s capital stock (that is what it means to upload stuff on Facebook or move around while linked to Google Maps). And, moreover, this capital takes a new, far more powerful form"
What am I supposed to make of the rest of the argument when it’s predicated on a number that is probably off by 50x?
They said WORKERS not EMPLOYEES
Sure, Google puts a lot of its revenue to its EMPLOYEES. But most of the WORK is done by the rest of the public giving Google all the content and data via the way the products utilize the searching and driving around and so on.
The claim is not what's internal to Google's business accounting. The claim is that they have externalized almost all the work to the unpaid users of the systems who actually produce the value overall.
(the quote is a tad confusing because they said "employer's revenues", that seems like an error in speaking/writing; the next part makes it clear what they are aiming to say)
> paid labour performs only a fraction of the work that Big Tech benefits from
From that perspective the quote above is a lie: workers receive service in exchange for data they generate. It is in his own Google Maps example.
What if everyone gave their data to Open Street Map instead?
But sure, there's a point about users that generate the value in these tech platforms do also get value from the services. Whether the value is worth the cost is another matter. What's clear is that users don't have much say in the arrangement. The corporations have the organized power, the users are divided and disorganized. There's no users' union.
Any Google Maps user can switch to Open Street Map on a whim unlike feudalism peasants. Arguably, the current best economic theory basically says that because exchange takes place assuming users are rational enough, the exchanged value is identical.
One would need a stronger argument than calling it "work for free" here, when it is obviously not free.
> Arguably, the current best economic theory basically says that because exchange takes place assuming users are rational enough, the exchanged value is identical.
I'll take that argument. If that's the best economic theory, it just validates my assertion that the field of economics is mostly a farce.
That "theory" is nothing but a say-so assertion that doesn't even try to look for evidence. It's unfalsifiable BS.
Some platforms provide great value. But the world is full of cases of middle-men and gatekeepers that have worked their way into that position and are little more than extractive. They might as well not exist. The reason people choose to go through them is for the value they get from the end exchange, not because they prefer to go through the middle-man. It all depends on the particular cases. The phenomenon of rent-seeking middle-men is not some myth.
The whole discussion here is about the idea of power dynamics. It isn't about the boring waste-of-time topic of just attributing "value" conceptually. If you enjoy playing Mozart's music on the piano, that has "value" to you, but "extraction" is a poor metaphor, and there's no power dynamics at play, it's just life.
The only thing interesting in this topic is the question of concentrated power and who has power to control decisions about how things are set up in society. Google has set up an arrangement where they are extremely profitable and a relatively small number of people get to decide how their platforms work, and the divided users only have the choice to take-it-or-leave-it (and network effects push them into it, schools and businesses and others use the systems, you better also, and the mere fact of all the value captured there makes it hard for competition to arise).
This is a question of organizing, collective action etc. The executives at Google can make decisions and they have a whole organizational system to carry out their will. There's no organized power for the users. The label "techno-feudalism" doesn't argue that value doesn't exist or that the serfs are literal slaves.
Perhaps they are being tricked into this, but that is a separate problem, which article does not address.
It's always surprising to me that so few people seem to notice that tech platforms, where a lot of human activity is organized on now, to a large extent have completely left behind market mechanisms, instead relying on algorithmic prediction and planning, and replacing profit generation with financialization by either the state or a sort of aristocracy.
I think this is directly visible in the different generations of tech companies. Whereas Apple and Microsoft started out as companies that relied on selling units of products at a surplus for profit and had to pay labour expenses in the form of wages to a large base of salaried employees, the modern VC funded generation of platform firms does no such thing, rather you have VC investors finance the activity of platforms who don't generate profits at times for decades, and derive value directly from the experience of their users outside of any exchange of money, and the value is largely being generated by an unpaid base of workers who are not even in any employment relationship.
Varoufakis assumes the current world system will continue to apply but on the scale of human history the current world system is a novelty and there is no reason to expect it to be stable in the long term.
True, the current system needs to create money at a whim so it doesn't want to bitcoin to flourish. It also needs to print money so it can't exist if bitcoin flourishes.
> I consider blockchain, and Ethereum-style mechanisms, as technologies that will prove extremely useful once private property in the means of production ends. But, on their own, these technologies will not liberate us from the extractive power of the few.
The fact that people participate in global location networks, rely on other parties for their security and so on, is contingent; it might change (I'm ever the optimist).
It's perfectly possible to simply not participate in techno-serfdom. Unless you're professionally dependent on TwitFace.
This "relevant" and "competitors" business seems to be about email marketing. There is no entitlement to use other people's mailservers and networks for your own private purposes.
This thread sounds like something from NANAE, around 2000AD.