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Comment by js8 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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...

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