Are We Transitioning from Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom?

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.

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

The fundamental flaw in this argument is that it does not account for every corporation that came before tech.<p>What about RCA, GE, Westinghouse? What about US Steel, what about Standard Oil, what about AT&amp;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.<p>Nothing.<p>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&#x27;t really doing more.

There is no feudalism without violence.<p>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.<p>Everybody does it because with their personal calculation they figured out they rather suffer some loss in freedom than spend time on alternatives.<p>There are just some good old fashion monopolies&#x2F;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.<p>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&#x27;s not a cage if the door is open and you&#x27;re just too lazy to leave.<p>As a matter of fact FOSS alternatives are better than ever were, and hosting stuff outside of major clouds is also very convenient.

Earlier discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37631727">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37631727</a>

I don&#x27;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 &quot;job creation&quot; and investing more money, you essentially pay people to keep other people busy. It isn&#x27;t serfdom, they don&#x27;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&#x27;t crash like they did <i>in 1929</i>.

Varoufakis is one of the few that accurately describes the situation we find ourselves in. We&#x27;d do well to heed his warnings.

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?<p>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?

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

This is just nonsense

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&#x27;t know why I read articles from Jacobin when they are posted on hacker news. The decision tree in my head goes something like &quot;Well, it&#x27;s jacobin, so it&#x27;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&#x27;t going to be tricked by stupid marxist BS or not notice that they have completely missed the point...&quot; and then I read the article and every freaking time, you guys have been tricked by sounding witty while completely missing the point!<p>No, we are not transitioning to silicon serfdom, it&#x27;s just the same old BS where a monopolist has built or stumbled upon a competitive mote and is rent seeking.