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Are We Transitioning From Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom? (jacobin.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The idea that we are entering an era of techno-feudalism that will be worse than capitalism is chilling and controversial. We asked former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to elucidate this idea, explain how we got here, and map out some alternatives.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Yanis goes a bit overboard with stating that capitalism kinda no longer exists, since it really is about a new group of rich people simply inserting their companies as evil middlemen who leach money off the whole system.

The difference between rents and profits in economics is crucially important tho, and so many people in these threads seem not to get it. one is progressive and at least in theory moves us closer to post scarcity. and the other does the complete opposite. Yanis is right to emphasize that difference. And his proposals are perfectly market based- he wants to use the government to create competition for the current digital rentiers. if you force them to compete again so they might get back to providing added value instead of just being leeches.

People love to harp about Radical Marxist Muslim Obama but he was onto the same thing with his "public option". Just like it is now hard to live without interacting with big tech, it's hard to live without interacting with private health insurance. And in the same way, health insurance can never be a truly free market because the opportunity cost of not buying insurance is well, you know..

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Have you read his book? I'd be curious what he suggests. I've just thought that if you could legislate to make marketplaces use some kind of "activitypub" protocol, you could federate them similar to social media. A protocol and open standard to exchange prices, descriptions, order conditions etc. So people could use alternatives to amazon/ebay and still have access to the large network of vendors. That would break the digital fiefdom. Is that something he discusses?

The new EU payment directive also finally created instant wire transfers, so it's now possible to directly and instantly pay vendors without having to pay a tax to paypal.

Maybe the next thing is going to be delivery services with drones or self driving "micro vans".