Are We Transitioning from Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom? | Hacker News Reader

Are We Transitioning from Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom?

jacobin.com

64 pointsjlpcsl65 comments

I have listened to Bezos pontificate about how he’s leading us to a future where trillions will live in the solar system on space stations and take vacations to earth for a glimpse of the life they could have enjoyed if they were privileged. I don’t want any part in that.

I don't understand. The privileged remain on Earth while the lower classes live in space?

That's pretty much exactly it.

Oye Beltalowda!

If his envisioned space experience is known or planned to be shitty, why would Bezos say so? How would he sell it?

If I work hard enough and get the right opportunities, I might have a chance to transfer off of Deep Space 42 to a space station a little bit closer to Earth so my trips to earth only take a couple years.

Less like "sell", more "shove it down your throats," same as today's exploitation. I'm not sure we need to go to space though.

The word "beltalowda" comes from the sci-di series "the expanse" which is a great watch and explores some of these themes.

Well, it doesn't sound shitty to me if you're part of the group that gets to stay on earth and enjoy the fruits of others' labour.

> Me as I walk through Playa Vista and Disneyland on my annual trip to California from a flyover state.

What did I just (halfway) read? This person is incoherent and rambling, raptured with their own brilliance.

There may be solid points in there, I will never know. I automatically cannot take anyone as serious who writes this way. They do not want to be taken seriously. They want to be congratulated on their keen observations.

You may lack the background reading to understand him, but he is certainly not incoherent.

I do not disagree that I may lack sufficient background for this. It was clearly written for "those in the know," people who already share a common viewpoint and vocabulary, and only differ on minor nuance. A bit like getting a bunch of mechanics to argue about cars.

In this regard, the writing is definitely rambling and incoherent. It's one big mutual academic exercise (I am avoiding the use of a sexual term here).

Most articles written by experts are written for those "in the know." To extend your analogy, I'd much rather read a bunch of mechanics discussing the repairability of various cars than a bunch of lay people sharing anecdotal experiences. If I didn't understand the jargon and their concerns, I'd assume that they'd spent a lot more time thinking about these problems and possess insights that I don't have.

If I didn't have a software background, I'd likely find much of the more interesting articles here to be similarly dense and impenetrable, because expert discussion often assumes a certain level of expertise from the reader.

The fundamental flaw in this argument is that it does not account for every corporation that came before tech.

What about RCA, GE, Westinghouse? What about US Steel, what about Standard Oil, what about AT&T. IBM, Intel have already started to fall. What makes this crop of companies any different than all the ones that has come before them.

Nothing.

The singer sewing machine came out at 125 bucks per unit. The annual salary in America was 500 bucks a year. Now, a sewing machine is 100 bucks and the average salary is what? The cost of a car is still the same as a model T, with more features and safety. Aside from software bloat, and maybe ML how have computers improved in the last decade. Power has gone down but they aren't really doing more.

Did you not read the article? The premise is that the current tech giants are effectively only wanting to set up situations where they can extract rents. This is different from making sewing machines in a competitive market, or even in a monopoly.

I think the argument has problems for other reasons - there's still lots of innovation going on, for example - but I think there is a line to be drawn between current vc preferences and historical capitalist or monopoly behavior.

I did read the article.

Rent only happens when cost is high and supply is constrained. Look at housing. Rent seeking isnt sustainable as compute gets cheaper and cheaper. Access is knowledge, sewing, second hand cars: access is portion of knowledge.

Companies are increasingly using lock-in strategies too keep their users in their own walled gardens. Apple and Google can collect rent from the entire app economy solely for the privilege of being listed in app stores (while at the same time controlling the rules of that economy and being able to advantage their own offerings). Amazon can do the same with the Amazon marketplace.

There is lots of rent seeking going on.

This just dropped covering OLD IBM's "bundling stratigy", great overview from a great channel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXS6lTYSgCw

Again, what is NEW about what google/apple are doing vs what IBM did? Nothing really. And for as much as the HN crowed likes to hint at the word monopoly, they are a duolopy, and this isnt the same thing (by a far margin)... for as much as they might look close from a consumer perspective.

The people can write whatever laws they want. We are also slowly sliding toward innovating with the overall system. Wealth can be redistributed with the flick of a wrist.

umm... a monopoly is literally a rent seeker, that's what a monopoly is good for. If you aren't rent seeking you wasted a ton of time and money on becoming a monopoly for no reason. The only thing new here is that the marxists have found a new way to miss the point.

ATT was broken up by antitrust.

ATT under anti trust scrutiny creates UNIX.

ATT throws unix out the car window, at speed, to any one and every one who will take it because they did NOT want any more heat.

A lot of stuff escaped Bell Labs because of anti trust.

The old att rotary phone is part of the impression of how durable goods can be (that thing was a tank).

The final breakup of att leads to baby bells, and we have seen how that experiment went...

Could we have co-op or regional public utility for internet/cable/phone today? Yes we could, but I dont think we would have gotten to this place with out AT&T's rise and fall.

It and IBM are the examples of squandered dominance of technology.

And Standard Oil

There is no feudalism without violence.

No one is forcing anyone to host stuff in the cloud, no one is forcing anyone to use Gmail, no one is forcing anyone to use iPhone or Android device, use Facebook or Twitter, etc.

Everybody does it because with their personal calculation they figured out they rather suffer some loss in freedom than spend time on alternatives.

There are just some good old fashion monopolies/oligopolies extracting as much value as they can. Without state forcing something (which is possible but currently does not seem to happen), there is no serfdom.

No one is using Apple laptops because they were forced at the gunpoint. They are just preferring longer battery life or whatever excuse over the ownership of their device and software. It's not a cage if the door is open and you're just too lazy to leave.

As a matter of fact FOSS alternatives are better than ever were, and hosting stuff outside of major clouds is also very convenient.

> No one is forcing anyone to host stuff in the cloud, no one is forcing anyone to use Gmail

Contrast with: https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-...

Even someone, with expert skills, decades of experience and the time, energy and willpower to try to do it on their own, can't.

Sure email became terribly centralized to the point of self-hosting being near impossible. Primarily because it's super old. But you can still use Protonmail or Fastmail. And email is less important as a communication platform than it ever was . Nowadays it feels like mostly an ID-verification system.

If things become bad enough - people will just use something else.

I switched to proton mail myself when Gandi.net started demanding money for my mailbox.

The problem with proton mail, that I later discovered after paying, is that they don’t support IMAP…

> no feudalism without violence

Just because it's not physical violence it does not mean it doesn't exist. Violence was a means by the people with power to coerce the ones without. We have that today in the for of: debt, non equitable contracts, lobbying, etc.

Taking on debt or agreeing on contracts is voluntary (unless violence is used).

Lobbying could maybe be considered violence by proxy because state can use violence.

Violence has meaning, and trying to abuse it to put every single thing someone finds "unfair" under the umbrella of violence is ridiculous thing to do, and leads to all that idiots who start violence thinking that someone else's non-violent acts or even thoughts justify it.

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37631727

I don't think this is a good comparison. The core problem we face is overproduction. Vastly more can be produced than can be consumed. When you try to boost the economy by "job creation" and investing more money, you essentially pay people to keep other people busy. It isn't serfdom, they don't serve their lords, who take a share of their work. They work to reduce the available workforce, so that overproduction is avoided, and markets don't crash like they did in 1929.

Overproduction of what? Not of houses. Not of medical services (it takes forever to get an appointment). Yes, maybe there was/is overproduction of software nonsense, but I don't think that's overproduction overall in the economy; rather it's a misallocation.

Of course of houses. Houses are the best example - they can be built for invested money, then bought as an investment, closing the loop. The fact that you can't afford one is secondary, there are thousands of empty houses anywhere, their prices are just kept high by the incoming capital.

USA housing starts is collapsing.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST

It's no wonder why house prices are so high when we are (inadvertently) cutting housing supply.

USA production of houses needs to be twice as much compared to 50 years ago to keep up with population growth... But we've lost housing production in recent years, not gained it. We are moving in the wrong direction.

----------

There's plenty of debate on why housing starts is declining. I don't care too much of the details though, the focus needs to be a concerted effort to reverse the trend and fix our country wide housing problem

Americans all want SFH but we have reached the reasonable limit of house density in most metro areas within commutable distances. That “commute circle” kept expanding from street cars, to car transit, to highway arterials to suburbs and exurbs. But we need another jump in commute speed/distance to open up the next circle of suburbs/exurbs but we haven’t had any such jump since the 70s.

Maybe high speed rail to city centers with ample parking, that was sort of the hyperloop but that was a sham.

I think the best thing for US housing will be FSD — we can designate arterial highways during commute times as FSD only and have them operate at higher speeds like 100 mph — though I know efficiency drops significantly so hopefully we are fully electric by then too.

And the pandemic showed that we don't need to all commute. That remote work, does work.

Remote work mandates for companies would actually help revitalize americana economy, and provide more housing availability. While also reducing housing pressure from cities.

Heck, people living in smaller cities will likely also have better inter-personal relationships and more fulfilling lives.

But these companies that employ people are now anti-remote-work using made-up statistics.

It did look like remote work would help the housing issue and allow people to migrate to second and third size cities, but that is backpedaling now and you need to be able to go to your office which gets us back to the original problem

I suppose that everyone began to realize that it must end sooner or later, especially after Evergrande's collapse.

Nobody's going to live in those houses. What would you want to reverse for what reason?

America is not China.

China built a ton of fake houses all around. America in contrast has too few houses, an influx of immigrants (both legal and illegal), and an entire generation of young 20-to-30s year olds who want a house before they start raising a family.

The houses are clearly needed here in America. Its not like China's Evergrande fake-house bullshit. When my terrible childhood home in the Ghetto is selling for $500,000, I know that there's some bullshit supply/demand issues right now. Okay, the former Ghetto has been gentrified a bit. But thats still causing some knock-on-effects that are preventing new families from moving in right now... No one likes a declining crime-infested area where everyone's leaving / trying to escape from. But the area has over-boomed now and not enough new houses/dense houses have been built, so there's suddenly a housing shortage after 20 years.

Etc. etc. etc. Some areas (Ex: Detroit) have entire neighborhoods of terrible houses that no one wants. But other areas need new houses. The only solution is to consistently build houses as demand comes up.

Never pull the fake bullshit that Evergrande did. But similarly, never stop building houses either. There's a balance here.

The houses aren't fake. They were bought as an investment (it isn't uncommon in China to own several) with no people to live in them. The rest of the world hasn't collapsed yet, but the problem is the same. You can imagine it as Bitcoin: it has no value, but the prices stay high as long as people pour more money in than they pull out.

Maybe that's true in some places, but where I live empty houses are rented/purchased immediately

> The core problem we face is overproduction. Vastly more can be produced than can be consumed.

Varoufakis agrees overproduction is a problem and alludes to it in many places. The Global Minotaur - "Profit can only be envisaged if the level of overall future demand is strong. Unfortunately, the future is unknowable. The only thing business folk know for sure is demand is never strong for long..."

Varoufakis is one of the few that accurately describes the situation we find ourselves in. We'd do well to heed his warnings.

The core derangement of the current zeitgeist is the bravest truth tellers* are the most marginalized people, conflated with fringe conspiracy theorist wingnuts. Perhaps it is a result of "digital hallucinations" filter bubble reality bifurcation such that there is essentially no apparent common context or stable community with which to discover and relate to other people, and secondly, the unreasonable simultaneous apparent widening of digital community participation freedoms, with declines in locality connected in the real world and declines in purchasing power and wealth for most. (A good fraction on HN didn't experience the struggle of the downward leg of the K-shaped recovery, but I imagine some of us did.) Compounded also by a widespread lack of reading books and long-form articles.

* Varoufakis, Chomsky, Hedges, Assange, Snowden ...

EDIT: More examples of "...": Yousafzai, Thunberg, Navalny.

I like Zizek's thoughts on ideology to further explain why things are the way you describe.

My question to Varoufakis is this (and I used to be skeptical of his distinction because of this, but I am less so today). If these systems of power are maintaining themselves through cultural hegemony, as Gramsci has described, what is the cultural hegemony, or ideology, here?

The traditional capitalism has ideology rooted in liberalism and the concept of meritocracy. You are good at what you do, you sell it in the free market, you make money. So how this transformed in the cloud feudalism?

Well Gramscian hegemony requires the participation of the oppressed in their ongoing oppression... so I'd say that Amazon Prime membership qualifies. One obvious parallel with feudal lords would be venerating the super-bosses, the new 'lords of the manor' to keep it feudal, which certainly also seems to be happening. This is of course culturally backward-looking, the appeal of the strongman (in business or politics) should be waning, replaced by efficient tecnhocrats, but when you look around the world... Varoufakis may be on to something.

It is rapidly becoming evident that all direct and indirect income sheet and balance sheet liquid value (including that held indirectly through corporations) over a very large sum, say $30 M USD in income and $300 M in property indexed to inflation, should be taxed heavily and redistributed as monthly prosperity dividends to all citizens to ease the burden of ultra capital concentration due to many factors and causing many corrosive socioeconomic problems leading to third-world like inequities. It would also put money back into the economy due to the higher MPC (due largely to the inelastic nature of non-discretionary expenses) of people who aren't UHNWIs. While this would lead to some customary inflation, it overall would stabilize the purchasing power of individuals and make any UBI scheme moot. Without enacting such a scheme, the long-term conclusion will be a dystopian future with several trillionaires, 10 billion impoverished people living in favelas, and an infinitesimal middle-class confused and unaware that anyone has a problem. Already, there are 2-3 million people sleeping rough in the US (5-6x higher than actual figures because the way they count unhoused people has been debunked as wildly inaccurate and flawed.)

just look at comments here from Apple fanboys and you can see how the culture (everything that Apple does is good) shapes the behaviour (buy more, at inflated prices, accept all of the anticompetitive stuff they do)

> The traditional capitalism has ideology rooted in liberalism and the concept of meritocracy. You are good at what you do, you sell it in the free market, you make money. So how this transformed in the cloud feudalism?

"Move fast and break things." [0]

"Software is eating the world" [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Move_fast_and_break_things_(mo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Industry_influ...

Capitalism is inherently flawed as it relies on infinite growth in a finite world, to put it simply.

Innovation enables growth without raw natural resources. For example, the internet drastically improved productivity (GDP/time) by making communication faster. Also services are intangible, but provide economic value. If someone can now provide services to millions, that’s growth. We are nowhere near the terminal point of growth in my opinion.

I'm not so sure that the internet has improved productivity — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

That it does, but all sources of innovation are fueled by natural resources in some form further down the supply chain from thought to product.

The material world is finite, yes, but capitalism doesn't rely on infinite material growth. Most growth of the economy in United States has been relatively dematerialized.

Services, software, entertainment, education, information... while these aren't 100% free from material constraints, it's not like the economy is growing primarily by digging ever more rocks out of the ground. The majority of the value comes from abstractions.

Ask yourself what will occur when natural resources are no longer feasible to supply at the rate they are now, such as Oil or vital resources to produce electrical components.

Oil gets less relevant with every decade. We're probably within 50 years now of fusion power. Electrical components can be recycled once the economics make it the best option. It's pretty reasonable to think today's limits aren't the limits forever.

To become sustainable the population will have to accept changes to lifestyle which they have not shown any sign of willingness to do so. Rates of e-waste increase faster than the rate of e-recycling. As long as capital and profit remains at the incentive it's at now, there likely will be little change.

Not really.

That isn't true in both ways. The "world" is effectively not finite (we keep learning new ways to more efficiently make use of stuff), and capitalism doesn't rely on infinite growth.

What it costs in resources to maintain the modern lifestyle and civilization, is quite finite. We learn new ways to spend and consume, and innovation in sustainability is not the priority in a Capitalist economy.

I think it is - look at the collapse of coal power in the West, the massive reforestation efforts going on, reintroduction of wildlife, all that stuff. Sure, we keep finding new ways to consume, but I don't wanna live in a stagnant society. I wanna live in a dynamic, changing, improving society.

This is just nonsense

It's also a failed finance minister promoting his latest "God is dead" style polemic. Give him a break. He's just trying to earn a living!

Describing tech platforms as a place where users work for no pay is quite an exaggeration. Apple and Microsoft for example do not conform to this business model. In fact the business models amongst the tech giants are so varied to group them all into “cloud capital” is ridiculously reductionist, and gives grift vibes to just capitalize on the current change in attitudes toward big tech. Honestly this article is so unspecific as to feel that it’s saying nothing. Maybe that’s on purpose to market for the book but I can’t tell. In the end, the pursuit of monopolies currently is the exact same mission that all capitalists have had for generations, he fails to make a distinction in my opinion between then and now. I think the current state of the world can still be described using the rules of a capitalist system, and I fee that competition between the tech giants more fierce now than it has been in the past decade.

I don't know why I read articles from Jacobin when they are posted on hacker news. The decision tree in my head goes something like "Well, it's jacobin, so it's either going to say something that sounds witty while completely missing the point or outright be some really stupid marxist BS... But I respect hacker news these guys aren't going to be tricked by stupid marxist BS or not notice that they have completely missed the point..." and then I read the article and every freaking time, you guys have been tricked by sounding witty while completely missing the point!

No, we are not transitioning to silicon serfdom, it's just the same old BS where a monopolist has built or stumbled upon a competitive mote and is rent seeking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com