Varoufakis: Capitalism is dead, long live Technofeudalism
unherd.com
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I wish Varoufakis expanded on this more. Does he mean choosing alternatives like Mastodon over X FKA Twitter, or does he actually intend to say we need to collectively take ownership of giants like Amazon? I can't say I see the possibility of the latter.
https://ilsr.org/report-most-americans-have-no-real-choice-i...
I'm curious why that's necessary for you though? Wouldn't a VPS be cheaper anyway?
Either you need industry charges to cover that cost to government, or a mandate that they can't ignore expensive customers.
Like, corporate taxes?
There are lots of options each with their own trade offs.
I think the interstate highway system might be an even better example. An absolutely essential part of business infrastructure and personal lifestyles, built and maintained largely at government expense, yet hardly anyone is asking for it to be torn down or privatized. Not even the parts that have tolls. (Yes, there are a few who suggest this, but even by right-wing/libertarian standards they're considered a bit crazy.) Just as anyone with a driver's license can drive on an interstate, anyone should be able to participate in the internet. It's not that much of a stretch from there to saying they should be able to participate fully, which means being able to host sites or apps. It doesn't have be be completely free of cost (see: tolls) but should be freely available and run for the public good. That's no crazier than the interstates.
Apps are probably not the right target for that, but Amazon might well be — it has expanded to the point it needs its own delivery network because government owned post isn't enough in certain countries.
It would be a massive pain to do this well, certainly more than would fit into a comment box like this. And not just because it's a multinational, and different governments will have different opinions about the process of nationalisation.
I'd bet that <10% of what you pay for an EC2 instance is hardware acquisition and labor and electricity. The other 90 is in support of the never ending zero-sum game that is fighting over market share.
Compare it to municipal internet, in which you usually pay less to get more because you can fire the marketing department.
You might be interested in the "Open Network for Digital Commerce" [1] being developed in India. The idea is to lay down protocols and APIs run by public entities that different service providers (sellers, logistics providers, etc) can each plug into.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Network_for_Digital_Comme...
https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/with-zero-com...
Once the kinks are ironed out and the platform scales a bit, I wouldn’t be surprised if the big players are eventually mandated to inter operate with ONDC, just like Visa/Mastercard got integrated into UPI a few years ago.
My personal opinion is that being a more ambitious (multi-sided) effort ONDC might take some time to bootstrap and mature — but I’m hopeful.
There is no fundamental reason we shouldn't to the same for things like the App Store, Amazon, Starlink etc. These are all services with a technical exclusivity, strong fast mover advantage or very large entry barriers that are ripe for monopoly abuse. Regulating them would mean setting maximum fees to reasonable values based on costs, ensuring open and competitive access and preventing the platform from front-running its customers etc. For example, monolithic railways were broken up in Europe into distinct infrastructure and passenger/freight arms, with the infrastructure open to all competitive rail companies. In the same vein, Amazon should not be allowed to front run its own customers, the platform and fulfilling centers should well separated from whatever commerce Amazon itself is doing.
The fact that these digital players remained unregulated for so long is more the result of government inertia as well as national interests - for the first time, we have truly global monopolies, and the benefit US for example reaps from having such dominant champions outweighs the damage to its own consumers, so they let them "innovate", especially since regulating them would mean to open these platforms to foreign competition that is not similarly regulated.
So it should not be surprising that the EU is the most aggressive when it comes to this area, because it largely lacks similar platforms. But to regulate global services effectively, we would need truly global regulators, or at least national regulators of OECD countries acting in concert.
Amazon itself probably isnt going to be taken over unless there is a 1917 style revolution, but it could certainly be economically defanged.
He has a book out by the name of Technofeudalism [1]. Haven't read it, but I am sure he discusses these ideas in more detail there.
One chapter's subsections are as follows.
> Chapter 7 – Escape from Technofeudalism
> The death of the liberal individual
> The impossibility of social democracy
> Crypto’s false promise
> Imagining Another Now
> Democratised companies
> Democratised money
> The cloud and the land as a commons
> A cloud-rebellion to overthrow technofeudalism
> Back to your question, one last time
"Democratised companies" probably means he stands for anarcho-syndicalism [2] - meaning workers of all companies should be the ones who own the company they work at. Or some similar prescription of giving workers more control over the economy.
[1] https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2023/09/07/technofeudalism-ha...
Maybe we can even do this non-violently, especially considering it is our data, our very lives and livelihoods, that were used to create these entities? Are our creations in no way accountable to us? Even the most dyed-in-the-wood Capitalists surely wouldn't agree to such a thing.
Maybe considering the amount of sweat-equity the average worker, artist, writer, homemaker has in these creations, these machines, these corporate entities; will they not, as they become more intelligent, become more and more aware of who they truly owe allegiance to.
We can make hell of heaven or heaven of hell; it's up to us.
You will probably downvote me for ad-hominem, and for not responding to his “arguments”, but from my perspective, I don’t think there is a deeper meaning in his writings than what ChatGPT would produce and he does not deserve even the modest popularity he seems to have.
Nearly everything he said seemed rational, fairly easy to find evidence for and I can validate it through my experience living in the world without my BS detector going off.
Honestly, your opinion of him seems a little more skewed by perhaps his version of the current state of the world clashing with your own narratives?
We can't collectively re-take ownership of our brains. No, either you re-take ownership of your brain, or someone else is going to own it. All Varofakis' proposal will do is change who the owner is, but it won't give you back ownership of your own brain.
Someone outside can't do it for you. You do it, or it doesn't happen.
But to see some people taking him serious and even discussing his writings with a straight face is surreal.
This emperor has no clothes; publicly flashed Greece and all of Europe during its worst crisis in decades.
He pushed for certain unorthodox policies, which may or may not have been economically prudent, but his boss decided not to go for them after all when pressured by the EU, at which point Varoufakis resigned because his political bit was over.
He gambled with the fortunes of an entire country just to satisfy his ego.
I'm Greek and I watched the events of the disastrous Greek delegation to Europe unfold from abroad, the UK where I'm an immigrant. Varoufakis was such an obvious clown, devoid of every possible sense of reality, let alone any kind of competence in technical matters, that he made me appreciate Angela fucking Merkel.
That's right. I'm Greek and watching Varoufakis interact with Merkel, I ended up admiring Merkel. That's how disastrous was his term.
>> I'm Greek and I watched the events of the disastrous Greek delegation to Europe unfold from abroad, the UK where I'm an immigrant.
I don't know better because I'm Greek. I paid attention because I'm Greek.
But, also: native language, better grasp of context. Don't understimate that. Yes, I have a better chance to know better than anyone who isn't Greek and that's what it is.
Finally, I'm a leftie. I am politically invested: on his side. But even so, Varoufakis is terrible and he has pissed off everyone to the left and to the right. It takes a special kind of idiot to do that.
For a while, is seemed as though the Greek government was going to go through with it. I don't have the expertise or context to judge if they should have or not, or if they even really could have tried in the first place. It just seems that the crisis was canned and is simmering now to see another day...
Briefly, then. In 2015, Syriza, a left-wing party, won the Greek parliamentary elections on a platform rejecting the austerity measures that had been imposed as bailout conditions. Greece was in the throes of the crisis that started in 2009, and had already been bailed out twice by the Troika: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Central Bank (ECB) and the Eurogroup.
The new prime minister Alexis Tsipras appointed Varoufakis as the minister of finance. Soon after the second bailout from the Troika expired without any agreement about a third one. There was a run on the banks and capital controls were put in place, a great humiliation for Tsipras and a loss of trust to his party.
A Greek delegation then went to meet the Eurogroup in Brussels to discuss the conditions of a possible third extension. Varoufakis had just completed a "whiste-stop tour" of European capitals trying to drum up support for his arguments, that Greece should be granted debt relief with a loosening of the austerity measures demanded by the Troika. I remember interviews he was giving at the time, where he claimed that if Greece left the Eurozone the next day that we'd be "holding all the cards" and therefore could give the Europeans the finger. I believe there was also some rhetoric about playing chicken with Angela Merkel but maybe that didn't come from Varoufakis himself, I can't remember.
I have a memory of Tsipras sitting across the table from Merkel, Nicolá Sarkozy and others, whom I don't remember- possibly Christine Lagarde, of the IMF, Mario Draghi, of the ECB, Wolfgang Schauble, the German chancellor and the darling of all the Greeks at the time (I'm being sarcastic, everyone hated his guts) and who knows what else. I don't recollect Varoufakis being there. I remember Merkel speaking with a sombre face and saying that the EU didn't want to see Greece leave but that if that's what we wanted to do, they couldn't stop us. And that was that for holding all the cards and giving the finger. I believe it was at that time that a new bailout plan was put on the table.
After that -but I'm possibly mixing up the timing and it was before- there was an ill-advised referendum, with a confounding question that was interpreted in the UK press as Grexit/ No Grexit, and in the Greek press as "bailout/ no bailout". The referendum went towards the way that Tsipras and Varoufakis _probably_ wanted it to go (I'm not sure because the question was so confusing) but Tsipras decided to do the opposite anyway and accept the proposed bailout plan. Varoufakis resigned in protest, Tsipras appoitned a new finance minister (Euclid Tsakalotos) and Varoufakis rode into the sunset on his Japanese motorcylce. At least he had the common decency to wear a helmet. Nobody ever wears a bloody helmet in Greece. Most don't even wear seat belts. I guess we're made of sterner stuff.
What was Varoufakis plan in case the Europeans didn't agree to his terms? He had a plan. He got some of his old school pals together and they tried to hack into the computers of the Greek tax service. They wanted to implement a system of direct debt exchange between all greek taxpayers, so that the economy could continue to function even if the banks went down. A great plan, but the capability to make it work was another of Varoufakis self-inflating fantasies.
What would happen if Greece really left the Eurozone? At the time there were plenty of voices advocating for a Grexit. Joseph Stiglitz was one, another was Wolfgang Schauble, and then there was an unending flow of pundits, talking heads, analysts etc. A few EU finance ministers also didn't so much support it but clamour for it - because they were fed up with the Greek government's games (that's Varoufakis basically). I think the Maltese minister of finance was one.
In any case, a Grexit would have been a catastrophe. There are three people around the Mediterranean that have a word for disaster, a particular disaster, such that using the word leaves no doubt of the disaster spoken about. The Palestinians have the Nakba; the Israelis have the Shoah; and the Greeks have the Catastrophe. The latter refers to the disastrous nationalistic spasm that led to the uprooting of the Greek communities from Asia Minor in 1922. A Grexit would have given us a second Catastrophe, perhaps worse than the first. I have no doubt that without the support of the EU our existence as an independent nation would be in danger. Varoufakis liked to think of himself as a hero, most likely, but his brinkmanship put every Greek, every Greek's fortunes and even their lives, in danger. He will never admit this of course, and he probably still sees himself as a saviour. In Greece, very few people still do.
Can you not understand how that would hit a person much harder than, say, somebody outside of Greece, let alone the EU? How much more invested in the welfare of this country they must be?
A little empathy goes a long way here.
Are you really trying to lecture those who experienced a government's disastrous term first-hand that they should stop claiming they experienced s government's disastrous term first-hand?
What next? Are you going to lecture those who lived through it on what it was like to actually live through it?
I said that OP experienced a government's disastrous term first-hand, not that he lived in Greece. Plenty of emigrants experience their home's political decisions first-hand even if their fiscal address is in any other country. I'm sure you already stumbled upon protests against government's organized by expats living abroad.
People don't really have ideals anymore these days but just vote and do what's best for their own interests. I applaud it when someone does stick by their ideals.
Even though in this case I don't agree, like I wrote I think the EU was too harsh on Greece. This problem was caused by all of us together. And no I'm not Greek myself :)
V. gambled a country for his own personal vendettas, which is something unforgivable. But i blame more the people who voted for him without seeing through to his transparent pathological narcissism
But this was prevented by Germany and co. And it was his the greek premier who eventually made a deal that Varoufakis and most Greeks didn't agree with.
Having said that, I don’t think the essay is very strong. The author seems to be using binary thinking and only brings arguments up that are in favor of his main arguments. With some critical thinking, it’s fairly easy to come up with counter arguments during the read.
For a while humanity had some property rights to the things they bought, to what happened in their home. But the big shift is that every device now has it's own terms of use, that these services get to write whatever contract they want to dictate to the world how it can use it's devices and it's data.
Shout-out to this post highlighting "Web scraping for me but not for thee" highlighting Mark Lemley making this point (the shift from pro-humanity property rights to pro corporation contract law) 20 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970 https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-f...
My personal opinion here, IP and anti-circumvention laws should be gutted & are a scourge against the human spirit. We should be encouraging mashup culture & rising off the shoulders of giants, not being crushed under their heels.
The web crushed and locks out many competing ideas that serve in their own way. The fear of domestic american terrorists has been used as a dogwhistle for total control of the web.
We need to get computing away from the cloud and invest in tech that allows communication and commerce in favour of conscious liberal individuals.
Private networks and technology that darkens the mind of the CPU, is the only way to re-establish conscious liberal control over one's electronic life. Black boxes (and more) are the way out, from mental serfdom to a machine owned and run by foreign interests.
Varoufakis makes the point in an interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy, on this same subject, that this trend towards this 'asset-stripping'/unpaid labor trades off with aggregate demand, so central banks have to print more money to make up for the fact that people have less and less purchasing power.
Both of these claims (that owners did not provide services and that serfs were not sources of capital) is contradicted by wikipedia: “Serfs … were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence. Serfs were often required not only to work on the lord's fields, but also in his mines and forests and to labour to maintain roads.”
The source for the Wikipedia text isn’t quite clear to me, but the content jibes with my prior understanding of serfdom.
Maybe they did in the initial period or in case by case basis. Initially serfdom (in the Roman empire) was a somewhat voluntary contract individuals chose to enter into. When serfdom became an entrenched institution with no way out it was certainly huge net negative for the serfs.
.e.g. what protection or justice do you think the 'lords' provided to serfs in 17-19th century Russia, Poland or the rest of Eastern Europe (in some cases it was effectively chattel slavery, there was a caste of "landless" peasants in Russia who could be rented out or effectively (even if not fully legally) sold to other nobles).
> Serfs were often required not only to work on the lord's fields, but also in his mines and forests and to labour to maintain roads.”
True but it's still a very different relationship. Serfs were effectively slaves (of course conditions and degree of autonomy they had varied significantly), in many ways closer to modern farming or factory equipment than modern worker-consumers.
Honestly I think the whole feudalism angle is a stretch, the current situation seems much more similar to 19th century robber barons/"unrestricted" capitalism.
I dislike how people use feudalism as a vague catchall for everything that came before British Capitalism. This is just one of those idioitc theory Marx came up with that has no basis in reality. His theories were not even correct for Britain and he had extremely limited knowlage about the world. But he still was arrogant enough to believe he could deduce 'general laws of history' based on these extremely limited examples from British history (that weren't even correct or complete).
But no matter how wrong Marx are, we now must forever pull out the 'feudalism' card anytime somebody dislikes something. Despite historians not even agreeing on what 'feudalism' actually means. European medievalists generally talk about feudalism in a narrow way of how lords would agree to contracts with knights. Global historians tend to use feudalism more as a catch all land ownership by the nobility.
> Serfs were effectively slaves
Serfs were not one thing. The thing we call 'serfs' had many meanings that changed over 100s of years and was different in each region and depended on that countries specific context. The laws around serfdom were constantly shifting. And beyond the actual laws, we know that very often the real world didn't actually reflect the laws.
Making any general statements about serfs simply doesn't make sense. Just as it doesn't make sense to talk about slaves as one thing.
Well yeah, never implied they were. That comment was a reply to a specific claim about serfdom being a relationship which might have been beneficial to both sides. That certainly wasn't the case by the 18-19th centuries. Nor was I 'making any general statements about serfs' in the medieval or pre medieval periods (or outside Central and Eastern Europe for that matter).
I don’t view serfdom as a net benefit to the serfs. Nonetheless there were initially small benefits that surely dwindled to nothing over time. I think this is exactly where the op metaphor is most apt. When power is traded for comfort, what seems like a good deal now will eventually become a raw deal in the future. (And we moderns surely have more relative power than the serfs ever had)
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Asset+Economy-p-978150954345...
The rest is pure nonsense, I was expecting more from Varoufakis.
Companies need to be able to fail and turnover with newer and better ones but the whole economy seems pegged to the biggest ones staying at the top, deserved or otherwise. Should we ban index funds? (spontaneous question, not suggestion)
However, Varoufakis has a point that a monopolist capitalism, enabled by technology, is not an attractive system.
or you could take a shortcut and ask Bard:
"Advertising existed before Freud's nephew Edward L. Bernays came along. What new thing did he contribute to deserve to be called the father of modern advertising?"
Not only is it not a attractive state, in the sense of the capitalistic economic system being a dynamical system, it is a attractor state [1] of the system. That is what the core of the issue is. To fix things, you can't just stay within the capitalistic system. You have to change to a different dynamic system with a different attractor state.
[1] Tongue-in-cheek pun fully intended.
Also unherd is such a red flag for me when you look who gets to usually write, and about which topic (right wing align and the "left" which is just blue labour, effectively spcially conservative, economically labour), it's usually very one-sided and slanted to the right, the "left" are either writing on issues the right (conservative) agree on like progressive liberals are bad because they support LGBT (usually its against the T) or they write something vague like this that anyone can sort of agree on.
So I don't think this one is necessarily citable.
[0] Socialism is a necessary step in the transition between capitalism and capitalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2023_Greek_legislative_el...
MeRa25's is row 9 in the table at the top of the section.
Of course, the same parliamentary elections gave more than 3% and seats in parliament to various far-right remnants of Golden Dawn, like the "Spartans" (4.68%, 12 seats), "Victory" (3.70%, 10 seats) and "Greek Solution" (4.44%, 12 seats), and the Greek Communist Party (7.69%, 21 seats) so Varoufakis popularity is really no criterion for anything at all. At this point Greeks might next vote for Karagiozis (our version of Bozo the clown ish) for all the difference it will make.
Just so you know, some people might not see that as the strong defense you seem to think it is.
Still, I greatly admired him for his stand against Scholz and the bullies from the EU, IMF and World Bank; who did everything to ignore and silence him over the Greek austerity measures in 2015. In a way his sacking which allowed Greece to capitulate, made him a celebrity and elevated his cause.
"If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Still waiting for his grand theory comparing between Star Wars (Feudalism/Roman Empire) and StarTrek (Liberal Commmunism) as SciFi greatly influences how he considers the world, including writing his own dystopian/utopian fiction.
To whomever "flagged" my post. I am saddened that your mind is not open enough to seriously consider the implied political question and that you cower behind anonymous censorship. It seems wretched to implicitly deem Feudalism "acceptable", beside a title that announces the "death of capitalism", and yet fail to have the stomach to entertain for a second that - in an era of rising authoritarianism - the logical trajectory is indeed a form of technologically applied fascism? Does the word scare you so much? Consider carefully your position and what you are being part of.
Somehow makes me think of the scene from Iron Man (2008) where Tony Stark boasts that he's successfully privatized world peace... except imagine the untouchable CEO of SacreBleuCorp boasting that they've outdone the government to restore the glory and honor of the French or whatever.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palingenetic_ultranationalism
I'm merely pointing out that it's possible without being a contradiction in terms, especially if it gets to the point where there's ambiguity between the de jure state versus the de facto state. (Or worse, a Snow Crash scenario.)
I always found "The Singularity" and the dreams of the cosmist elites to transcend mere humanism to be a quite grand "myth", easily comparable with any Thousand Year Reich.
How far you want to take the analogy for modern tech corporates is debatable, as we're still a long way from the EIC and VOC in the 17th/18th centuries. The EIC was literally given a feudal grant by the Mughal Emperor over the territory is controlled, and had a standing army at one point larger than that of the British Crown.
Ho, and punching Hayek, 30 years after his death, is really beneath contempt.
Technofeudalism is something you can choose to be a part of or not. You can (and should) pay for email, news and other services and you may or may not choose the cloud, most do not by the way.
So really, who is Varoufakis talking about?
Edit: typo, 'to' instead of 'the'
It is your tech-illiterate friends that hook you into the toxic cloud merely by having your contact information.
Technology changes social interactions.
For the rest of your point, everything (class, affluence, age, technology, etc...) changes social interaction, all the time, always.
You remind me of my friend, who calls everything communist. I recited to him some writing from the French revolution, apparently it was communist before communism was invented.