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Comment by yamazakiwi | Hacker News Reader

It's difficult to take this seriously.

Cloud Serfs? ...really?

He names these new capitalists Vassal Capitalists and then makes the title of the book What Killed Capitalism.

"I won't take his ideas seriously because of superficial reasons, and I don't have any actual arguments against his thesis, so I must throw mud and hope something sticks."

Because this thesis is stupid

This framing is silly. He says we're Cloud Serfs because we do unpaid work whenever we use our phones... You're not a Serf for using social media or watching videos online, regardless of how much value is extracted by these companies.

You contributed nothing to the dialogue surrounding the topic that you are supposedly defending from mud throwing.

Which is true... Think of it this way, your phone does social media, which doesn't work unless ypu engage. When you engage there, mote people adapts it due to community, more eyeballs for sweet ad money. These medias also grow large and relies on other services to scale and perform those ad workload so they also build or pay someone else for the resources.

In the end what you get is a good feelong in the heart that people liked that one post/photo while they got sweet ad money and someone actually bought a product and someone else made more money.

However that engagement has a cost, you are the acrobat in their circus stage, but you get no pay and while at it you also paid for that over complex device that they also sold(charged you money to give your performance).

Of course, you can nitpick all you want from my bad example, and do a lot of what-aboutism, but the point is clear I hope.

I agree with everthing you said, but again, contextually users aren't doing any "work". That is the distinction I'm trying to draw. You are less like a serf and more like a thief victim, making the writers comparisons quite stretched by definition. We could be discussing these problems straight-forward as you have described them instead of trying to make it sound like skynet has turned us into actual slaves and selling people on 24 news-cycle style dystopia bait.

Many/most economists and historians find it beneficial to understand things not by rigid or otherwise static categories and concepts, but through relations. Feudalism, insofar as it can be defined (and this is hard[1]), is probably best captured as a certain kind of relation between serfs and landlords (or whatever). Focusing on the relations between things is fruitful for analysis and research as well as being resistant to changes or transpositions in the terms in question.

It would be much harder to say that there is this one selfsame phenomena called "work" and we have done it throughout all of history. Or that we are definitely not "working" as we generate another's capital by getting brainwashed and depressed by social media. Or that the peasants living off their lord "went to work" everyday.

1. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-f-word-feudalism-1788836

You are right, it is easier to write utilizing few relations instead of trying to manipulate static categories and concepts that don't bend to your will. To me this is a signal of quality but I could see benefits to writing this way, such as, if your goal was to get more people talking about the issue proposed. There are also potential downsides to writing this way, especially if you actually care about solving these problems and are at the mercy of governmental and capatilistic systems vs selling a book (Not saying that's what this economist is doing).

I agree that the definition of "work" has changed over time and I'm not trying to be pedantic so let's get to the point, does it matter if it's considered work or not? The real issue most people would agree with is the bad guys are extracting tons of value through the actions of their users. Should those users be paid? The answer is: it depends.

In our current system we would create an organization that can generate money by holding the tech companies responsible to pay users when it is deemed to do so. Unfortunately I don't see the money amounting to very much unless laws change drastically since even class-action lawsuits for leaked data provide very little. I'm guessing that measuring "phone work" would amount to micro-cents regardless of value directly generated.

Explain how we are not cloud serfs?

Serfs work, it is not work to read blogs or watch videos.

My bank account balance begs to differ..

Your bank account begs to differ that reading blogs and watching videos isn't work? In what way might I ask?

But it is if you are viewing advertisements. That is the argument that Yanis makes in the book anyway, heavily simplified and removed of a lot of context.

The point is that you can't choose what you read or watch. We still can somewhat - we can install adblock and decide what media to consume. But instead of a "capitalist" effort to simply try to to invest in better "content", you could make the case that cloud companies are simply holding content hostage and demanding more of your attention, money, and time. Even at the expense of civil rights like privacy. It is stuff that gets talked about every day on Hackernews. It isn't that far fetched that antagonistic serfdom is basically the type of relationship large tech conglomerates treat their users. Dark UI patterns. EULAs.

I would agree that it doesn't make sense on it's face, but only in the context of a comprehensive macroeconomic analysis. That's what the good deal of the book is about.

Most times you are getting something else of value in return when viewing advertisements. free services, etc

What we're doing is more capitalistic so I'm uninterested in drawing parallels with feudalism personally, I guess fan-fiction economics are not for me.

But if this deal follows a Capitalist system, if we have greater supply of "valuable" content, than the price should go down and we should view less ads over time. Instead the opposite is happening.

That's kind of the greater goal of the book - contextualizing our interactions with cloud companies within a larger macroeconomic picture. It is a compelling enough topic to consider. I don't really think it is fair to call it fan-fiction. It could be right or wrong, but it is a book about a macroeconomic theory that seeks to explain observable behaviors.

>But if this deal follows a Capitalist system, if we have greater supply of "valuable" content, than the price should go down and we should view less ads over time.

The prices are not going due to an economic change of form. It's happening because capitalism facilitates it. I think the writer is using an old view of capitalism and ascribing developments in modern capitalism to something brand new.

We can't stop the markets and tell them they're not being good old boy pure capitalists when they are doing exactly what capitalism promotes, albeit secretly. If a system develops differently than anticipated due to how it's used, it doesn't make it not the original design. You can repurpose the design, and make people view it differently, but the design remains static and people will react to the system appropriately based on the conditions allowed and not the conditions predicted or requested.

The need for a new definition arises solely from the person attempting to persuade you to accept it, better so if it confirms bias, uses half-truths to explain, and catchy language like Technofeudalism.

I guess it has provoked my thought, maybe I will read it.

You missed a crucial point. Meta, X, reddit and other digital spaces that have user produced content make money off that content. It certainly is work to create tweets, posts, and comments, and videos on TikTok. This is free labor that these social media systems make money off of.

Agreed it's a stretch at best. But to sell books you need something loud to make it through the noise.

That's a good point, and I think the topics, when not compared to feudalism are worth talking about.

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