this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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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] 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (11 children)

I read a similar article a few weeks ago, and I think your concise summary is better than the article linked in this post.

I think 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.

I'm not sure the solution has to be revolutionary or super complex. I'd think that large countries and groups of countries (e.g. USA, the EU) could implement their own mega marketplaces, leaching off much less money and avoiding the sort of corrupt BS that Amazon etc do to keep prices artificially high, and these governments could also stop allowing the mega platforms to do business in their region. Big countries want to facilitate an economy, and if private industry is proving to be too broken with their current approach, governments could step in to create more functional marketplaces that still work nicely in the internet age and don't have horrible middlemen crap dragging everything down.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Federate Amazon! Imagine a kind of protocol / standard to exchange prices, descriptions, images, sale conditions, guarantees etc similar to activity pub. then you could use the same network of vendors as amazon.

But it probably needs more regulations because amazon is so huge and powerful to destroy competitors.

Maybe also federate / split up fulfillment warehouses.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

We do need to give them the Ma Bell treatment.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

We need the equivalent of keeping the phone lines and phone numbers compatible though. So that all the vendors that are on amazon can use a commonly shared internet protocol to also sell on other platforms, otherwise the network effects are lost and make splitting them up and true competition impossible.

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