American Big Tech Has Enslaved Us [video]

Serving videos with interspersed ads or selling goods on the internet really are not complex business models. You can hardly call the fact that people choose to use these novel things - when replacements like cable TV and brick and mortar stores are still working just fine - slavery.

The EU really needs to drop their victim mindset about these American software companies and critically examine why their insistence on the grant-model for innovation has resulted in failure after failure in the software space. They’ll try to start a “Silicon X” where literally the only thing in common with Silicon Valley is they try to collocate the jobs they’re creating, which is like the easiest factor to replicate as it will mostly happen naturally if they address the actual other factors like attracting venture capital, letting employees take home a lot of money and switch jobs freely, letting companies hire and fire more freely, actually valuing the software work instead of glorifying nontechnical pencil pushers like project managers…

One thing he says at around 43'00" is that the shift from feudalism to capitalism, i.e., ownership of the means of production, was based on two pillars: profits and markets. However, the author says techno-feudalism's "markets", e.g. Amazon, Alibaba, Uber, are not markets in the classic sense, but "platforms" where trading, buying and selling, takes place outside the marketplace. The techno-feudal lords collect rents. Uber does not own cars. "The landlord does not participate in production." AirBnB, Amazon are other cited examples. As such, profits are replaced by rents and markets are replaced by techno-fiefdoms. His book argues that this is not "capitalism" in the classic sense. It's something else. He admits some of his colleagues would simply call it "rentier capitalism", but he prefers to ditch the term "capitalism". He argues our ancestors could have called capitalism "industrial feudalism" or "capital feudalism". He wants to make the point that this is not capitalism anymore, even though it's based on the triumph of capital.

He says repeatedly that "when everything has to go through" Google, Apple, Facebook, etc., but he never uses the word "intermediary". Were feudal lords intermediaries. In the early days of the internet I recall there was talk of "disintermediation" that would be enabled through the growth of the network and yet today it feels as though the internet itself has become the source of excessive, toxic intermediation. Toxic for one because it comes with absurd levels of surveillance and data collection.

The author sounds like he would be a fun professor to have as a student.

57 minutes! Is there a summary?

It seems incredibly disingenuous for people to keep renaming the current system "not capitalism," when clearly oligopoly is the end game of unconstrained capitalism.

Capitalism was marketed to us all as efficiency and prosperity. And when down on our luck, we were temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

The renaming seems to be an attempt to do a sleight of hand (sleight of word?) so as not to upset all of the people to whom capitalism has been successfully marketed.

Are we all so sensitive that we require misplaced blame to discuss the problems? Are we all so naive that we'll fall for the trick?

Yeah I've been bombarded with this through and alternative Youtube frontend on my TV, because I follow Diem25. TlDr clouds are the new land owners and have replaced capitalism.

He's not wrong but not right either. I'd wager he's about 70% on the right side.

You still and always have the option to not use cloud, even if there ever were no data centers available, you can still pay to be connected to whatever local data exchange for a comparable price to renting a rack, if you didn't know.

But the world is not just computers. You don't need to use cloud services. Example Germany, offline water delivery is still done via phone calls, and the people running those shops don't want it any other way, because they have too many customers and not enough people willing to work for base hourly payments doing physically hard work.

I'm sure more examples can be found.

When it comes to jobs, I'm having a very hard time finding one which doesn't require knowledge about AWS, usually their preferred cloud operator, then comes Azure and lastly GCP, in Germany. GCP usually only if they're completely Google powered.

But he doesn't mean just clouds but also the connected services. The whole deal.

He's not a developer and doesn't know that everything you can do with cloud, you can do without cloud. You don't need serverless, k8s etc. But people get indoctrinated. I was too, 2013 when k8s started being popular, when docker was the great new thing, when Google+ propaganda showcased k8s, I was on board. Then I saw, hey wait a minute. Too complicated for every day use, too expensive for the little guy (me), too time intensive to maintain. That's why it got hyped. To drive business to their cloud.

Yannis and others make the same mistake, they don't value their own but believe someone else can do better than they can, because they actually lack knowledge.

Gaming anecdote, Battlefield 2142. Many servers had the "No fighting commander" rule, because apparently, according to them, "A commander can't fight and command". Well maybe they couldn't, but I could. And I did great and had a lot of fun.

Cloud is similar. There are people who are able and stand on their own and there are people who aren't and need to pay, expensively, for the work of others.

If you can cook you might go to a restaurant occasionally, but most of the time you'll cook yourself. And the meal costs 5€ and not 25€. Of course if you've got it all figured out you might have a lot of money and wouldn't mind inviting a friend and pay 80€ for the meal. Who cares, you make 700€ a day. And that friend will give make you another 200€ per day.

But if you're poor 5€ is a good meal.

Hey it's Sunday so don't take it all too seriously.

He is right, technofeudalism is the future. However, I think this will end up be being seen as a good thing, and history will ultimately look back at the transition as being as obviously good as Monarchy -> Democracy.