I've actually read this book recently. I thought it was quite interesting, but would be better with less political stuff (most if it is at the end though).<p>My favourite thoughts and takeaways (that are not in the article):<p>We trained the algorithms to predict our desires so well, that they turned on us. Now they effectively train us by informing us or feeding us with what we would or should like. This is the power every marketer would like to have. They ("techno lords") can nudge our feeds however they want and manipulate. We wouldn’t know.<p>Another one is:<p>Technofeudalism has smashed the veil between refuge from markets (usually when you got home, you were home, but now you are on your phone); and one such market is the market of “self-discovery”. You need an identity online today, or you basically don’t exist. But what happens then is: you have to think before you post about “who could read this?” What does that entail? Well, that causes you to curate what you broadcast – so what you broadcast the best version of your identity. You should “be yourself!” – but at the same time noone is themselves. You can see this effect on Instagram quite clearly. Nobody posts their “real” authentic day when they binge series in sweatpants – they post their vacation and food pictures. I'm sure there is some equivalent version of that here on HN!
I live in the UK, where we can only aspire to technofeudalism, being stuck in medievofeudalism, where most of the land is still owned by the feudal aristocracy, i.e. parasites descended from thugs, and most people don't own the land beneath their homes, being effectively serfs to their freeholders.
There's also a recent interview with the same title on the Debunking Economics podcast <a href="https://debunkingeconomics.com/episode/yanos-varoufakis-on-technofeudalism" rel="nofollow">https://debunkingeconomics.com/episode/yanos-varoufakis-on-t...</a>
Unlike the “serfs” tech companies actually pay for in developing countries to do stuff manually training AI, we don’t “toil” in their “fields”. Instead, we choose to frolic in them. It’s a choice, and we have more of it in the developed world. Just like how we still have a choice as to where and how we work. I interact with social media for leisure and not for influence or work. Most people are just in it for bread and circus, even on HN.<p>His argument is terrible and nonsensical. A better analogy for the majority of the population is that tech companies are narco drug pushers and we’re the addicts. That analogy also only works if you ignore the fact that payment is cheap if you’re just paying with attention
The obvious problem with a title like "technofeudalism" is it sounds prejudicial. Something like historical feudalism was troubling because people couldn't just walk away from it. A string of fiefdoms is actually a pretty decent organisational model as long as you don't have to inhabit ones that are hostile to your interests.<p>At the technical level it is trivial to set up competitors and it remains the case that nobody needs to use these sites. I don't have a Twitter account, so over the years I have been more or less locked out of using it, in fact. These sites are fine.
I like Varoufakis in general and I find this analogy interesting. However, his answer to this question was not satisfactory in my opinion, as many commercial arrangements including malls, are also based on percentages:<p>Q: A company like Apple might argue that instead of being a fiefdom, maybe the Apple App Store is more like a mall where companies have to rent their stores from whomever owns the building. How is technofeudalism different from the mall dynamic?<p>A: Well, hugely. Say you and I were going into partnership together with a fashion brand. We go to the shopping mall and we hire a shop, the rent is fixed. It is not proportional to our sales. The more money we make, the higher our price-to-rent margin. With the Apple Store, they get 30 percent of all sales. That’s not at all the same thing. That is the equivalent of the ground rent that the feudal lord used to extract from vassal capitalists.
a career politician whose whole MO is by definition power mongering is upset that some other org is wielding power.<p>I’ll take corporate power that is predictable as it’s based on profit over political power that is unpredictable as it’s fed by vanities and human deficiencies any day.
Technofeudalism is just the current incarnation of capitalism , its nature hasnt changed. Both capitalists and politicians have sought to increase their power post-war, and as long as some war doesnt stop them they will keep doing so. When politicians blame billionaires it's because they are taking away 'power space' from them , and the same goes when billionaires accuse politicians. Democracy or free market are not really putting a brake to this process of power concentration and erosion of individual freedoms, because they can be gamed, via addictive products and political manipulation/populism. Unfortunately only wars have historically broken this power-concentration game
> you’re essentially toiling Elon Musk’s estate like a medieval serf. Musk doesn't pay you.<p>Yes he does, he literally changed Twitter to pay people... so why should I keep reading another article from someone who got too old to talk about tech and has some Musk derangement syndrome?<p>HN doesn't pay anyone. Y Combinator is worth $20+ billion? Oh no we are all serfs.
Imagine looking at tech and saying, "this is a problem with tech companies, not a systemic flaw in capitalism itself". The tech companies are bad, but only uniquely bad in that they are efficient at what they do.<p>You think Boeing, General Mills, or ford wouldn't want you to be a dev if they could figure out how to do it?
“To Varoufakis, every time you post on X, formerly Twitter, you’re essentially toiling Elon Musk’s estate like a medieval serf. Musk doesn't pay you. But your free labor pays him, in a sense, by increasing the value of his company.”<p>This sounds disanalogous to me. When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. All at no monetary cost to you. Meanwhile, twitter has the costs of paying for servers and infrastructure and salaries of those required to support the site
Actually, isn’t self-hosting and federation more like feudalism and the Big Tech more like a modern central state.<p>When self-hosting say Mastodon, you have to have a relationship with the hosting provider, the software developer, your users, and any other servers you federate with. This is more reminiscent of the network of relationships that dominated Feudal Europe.<p>Whereas, if you use Twitter, you basically have just a single, more comprehensive relationship to Twitter, which is closer to the central state model, where there is a central authority that subsumes and manages these relationships.<p>Also, in a feudal system, if you got robbed/assaulted there would be a very complicated means of trying to hold people responsible as there would be multiple domains and authorities involved. Similarly, fighting spam in a federated model is also complicated. Ina nation-state model, it’s much easier to at least try to impose a uniform standard of justice. Similarly, “Big Tech” can deal with spam much easier than federation.<p>Also, Apple’s App Store fees do not indicate feudalism. People in the modern world also pay various taxes to governments, even though we don’t have a feudal system.<p>So I think federation is more like feudalism and Big Tech is more analogous to the modern central government.
"Take the Apple Store. You are producing an app, Apple can withhold 30 percent of your profits [through a commission fee]. That's a rent."<p>Funny because I remember the days before Apple Store where telecom companies did you a favor if you sold them your game for $100 to put on their phones. Telefonica got crazy and offered $200 to the winner of a phone game competition in an engineering University.<p>I have also worked with retailers that expect to get over 50% of the profit of anything you sell on their stores.<p>I also have maintained my blogs, email and webpages on my own servers, something that you can do today with no problem, cheaper than ever. For Vanufakis, it looks like people are forced at gunpoint to use X.<p>Mr Vanufakis believe that countries have the right to ask for money, spend it and never give it back, with no consequences. But of course the world does not work this way. In the real world, you don't pay your debts, they send you a hitman, specially if you expect paying back nothing.