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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).
My favourite thoughts and takeaways (that are not in the article):
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.
Another one is:
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!
> They ("techno lords") can nudge our feeds however they want and manipulate. We wouldn’t know.
But there's a detail here that its hard to answer, or at least for some platforms. Given the complexity of some of these algorithms, do the techno lords have that sort of control of deliberate control, or it's just the uncontrolled optimization for a given outcome?
I'm not saying that reality is better, it might be even worse to know that no one is at the wheel.
> 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?
I think that's a tremendous insight to be put forward, especially because we know this and yet the vast majority of people still act it out. Some time ago I saw an interview with Slavoj Zizek where he went deep into this phenomenon with the example of Santa Claus: Parents know it is a lie, yet they act it out to their children who at some point know it's a lie but still act it out not to disappoint their parents and keep that illusion, and this goes on for generations.
This is the exact same thing as this culture of self-discovery/acceptance, everyone preaches it, but end up boiling everything down to their best moments and highlights. It's a collective lie that everyone plays with, and I don't know if there's a clear purpose to it other than to sustain itself.
One more thing that's said I'd like to underline because it's often overlooked but has tremendous importance is the identity "ownership". If individuals and companies could easily prove who they are (to build trust) through government services, the internet would be a much better place. It's an idea that's almost forgotten but there have been numerous attempts in the past to make this happen, and it could be the building block of a better internet. Big companies would no longer need to be intermediaries for sorting out spam from search results and ranking trust ratings for e-commerce. A micro-payment network could fund small time creators who would also build a name. Things would be better. I'm hopeful that in the next 10 years after LLM garbage takes over the world by storm something like this will emerge.
What do you mean by "political stuff?" (Political economy is Varoufakis' field, as far as I can tell.)
I think this is more applicable to a specific subculture (the mainstream) that it is to everyone. For me who relies mostly on older style forums and image boards, there is no algorithm and identity is reviled. And you'd be surprised at the influence of these boards even today, not just in the english internet but internationally.
Those areas have their own cons, and the mainstream has chosen accessibility over sincerity. But looking at the damage down today, I can't say if that was the right choice to make for them.
It is an inherently political topic. How would politics be excluded from a discussion about feudalism in the modern era?
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.
Do those leaseholds keep up with inflation? I know there's been a scandal about some new builds increasing rents each year, but ours was set 150 years ago at £5/year and never goes up. We don't even know who to pay it to and no ones bothered to collect it. Its too small a figure.
I don't consider myself a serf, if I even had to pay £5/year.
Actually we have both, as this technofeudalism refers to digital capital and not land capital.
There's also a recent interview with the same title on the Debunking Economics podcast https://debunkingeconomics.com/episode/yanos-varoufakis-on-t...
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.
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
Science has very solid evidence on social networks being extremely addictive, and there are growing suspicions that some companies have it like this by design. It might be a choice, yes, but this is not a black-and-white situation.
> for leisure
You mean you're addicted like everyone else. Every platform has highly tuned algorithms designed by some of the smartest engineering and data science teams on the planet, to keep you coming back for more, and doom scrolling for hours on end.
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.
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.
You might not have to use these platforms, but tell a random parent to stop using Facebook and Messenger cold turkey, and they'll tell you that a lot of their kids activities (both school and otherwise) is mainly being coordinated on Facebook. The same with politics and other core societal activities – at least here in Norway.
It was never a good idea to use these services as a core communication infrastructure in the first place, but it happened non the less. It will take considerable effort to turn this around, and we should not blame the average user, but the tech companies using "growth hacking" and other unsavory tactics to lock people into their walled gardens. Also the governments for not taking action and regulating this space earlier.
Your argument is incorrect in regards to many of these social networks.
Wanna be a photographer? You must have an Instagram account.
Want to talk to some government services? You must use WhatsApp.
Want to sell something used? You must have a Facebook account.
Want to read what your politicians have to say? You must have a twitter account.
Want to see the phone number of a restaurant? Gotta go over to Google maps.
Also, no real alternative to YouTube's content.
And so on and so forth.
The argument "just don't use it" is disconnected from reality.
The name doesn't matter that much. In essence, it is centralised wealth extraction on a mass scale. The "rent" extracted is disproportional to the value of the service and their operational costs.
It is not always trivial to switch. There are realistically two companies dominating phone OS, and either one comes with their poisoned pills. More importantly, I think what he is referring to here is the economical subjugation of the rest of society to tech, and to a very few tech players at that. An oligopoly might be better than a monopoly, but not much.
Facebook and co are also hard to walk away from, because even if you never registered, third party websites and other sources still sent data to them that they profiled.
This is the modern equivalent of "if you don't like living in society, go build a cabin in the woods".
> 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.
The problem is, online discourse (especially about politics) has gotten extremely limited over the last decade in where it's taking place - it's either Twitter, Reddit or Facebook. Politics journalists are still primarily going off of what's trending on Twitter, and "generic" journalists copy off of Reddit, and boomers off of Facebook.
The early days of the "modern Internet" era were more accessible - one had blogs, many of them selfhosted, web link rings, newsletters and whatnot - but spam and other rampant abuse (e.g. DDoS attacks, troll campaigns) made participating in discourse outside of the big "walled gardens" so incredibly tedious that barely anyone does that any more, and technologies/platforms like IRC or Usenet failed to keep up with technology progress or kneecapped themselves (remember Freenode?).
Can you really walk away from Facebook and other big tech? You can run away into the mountains just like peasants did. But surviving there ain’t easy, in both cases.
And technical part is the easy thing in setting up a competitor.
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:
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?
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.
Regardless of where you stand on this issue I feel that's a bit of a pointless nit-pick, because he's obviously not referring to those cases where mall rents are based on percentages. He clearly would argue that those would be the same system as the one he is arguing against. It's clear he's talking about the case he sets up to contrast two different models.
I imagine he would argue that such type of malls are a bit like feudal lords, he's otherwise clearly assuming malls have fixed rent.
The missing part, I think, is the monopolistic nature of big tech. In some domains, you can't do business anymore if you're not on one or most of meta's networks. You can't publish an app anymore if you don't pay rent to google or apple. The technoserf has no choice but to voluntarily share profits with his feudal lord.
This is interesting because many Georgists would say that commercial arrangements like malls only exist because land wealth is a leftover from Feudalist societies.
It's not about the percentages. It is about the ownership of the means of this centralized techno-capital, to which we have none. It is about the democratization of that capital, even if we have to nationalize it.
At least there is competition between malls. You can always move to another mall.
a career politician whose whole MO is by definition power mongering is upset that some other org is wielding power.
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
or revolutions. tree of liberty refreshed with the blood of patriots, etc. etc.
i will apply for a grant just to analyze the insanity of the cope arguments in this thread. pure gold
Temporarily embarrassed feudal lords.
This would be a genuinely interesting and fruitful exploration.
At first glance, it looks like awful reading comprehension - but these are people perfectly capable of reading technical topics without difficulty.
You can say, well, these people have a salary that depends on them ignoring their complicity in a vast evil that has been warned about since the 50's; or even since the 80s in popular culture, creating an entire genre replete with subgenres and subcultures.
And that says a lot.
But what role does education play? Nationalism? Media capture?
I sincerely believe this is a crucial question that gets surprisingly little self reflection in the tech community. Where usually we love to pat ourselves on the back about our important role in the modern world, when it comes to our role in maintaining class structures, it's crickets at best and blind fury as standard - to the point where it seems people can't even understand simple sentences.
What do you mean? Coping as in pretending they aren't Technoserfs?
> you’re essentially toiling Elon Musk’s estate like a medieval serf. Musk doesn't pay you.
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?
HN doesn't pay anyone. Y Combinator is worth $20+ billion? Oh no we are all serfs.
You seem confused. It is not your fault, commenters here are focusing too much on the X/Twitter quote from the article, which by the way comes from its introduction and not from the interview proper.
The crux of the matter is not the compensation (or lack thereof) for the content produced, but the fact that, for companies like Amazon or Apple, their main mode of wealth extraction is not wealth but rent. In traditional advertising, for instance, the publisher is not entitled to a cut of your sales. Companies pay a fixed price for the front page ad in a print newspaper. In digital platforms, it is not the case anymore.
The same applies to social media, but on a different manner which I will not cover here. If you are an ordinary consumer of these platforms, you help companies enable their business model, but the dollars are not coming off your pocket.
> HN doesn't pay anyone. Y Combinator is worth $20+ billion? Oh no we are all serfs.
Except HN has nothing to do with Y combinator valuation, we're just the funny monkeys in the circus on the outskirt of the city
stay in your lane hat-man.
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.
You think Boeing, General Mills, or ford wouldn't want you to be a dev if they could figure out how to do it?
What does it have to do with devs? Those are business models devised by business people, some of them devs, some of them not.
The article mentions enshittification. BMW is offering heated seats on a monthly subscription [1]. If an average teams of devs was asked to implement that as a practical joke, they would certainly be able to do it. Some of them can't quite make the jump between that and the fact that companies do expect to make a profit out of it.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription...
The devil is in the details, and nuanced. A broadly capitalistic structure in the right place and time for the right society and with the right regulation, can be good.
A state stricken with, say, ethnic factionalism that, while holding fair elections, oppresses their minorities, has a problem. Is it a problem with the majority race? Is it a problem with the presence and lack of ethnic minorities in this particular state? Is it a problem with democracy in general that it is perhaps not suitable for some states?
Here the author makes the point that broadly speaking, the details of how capitalism used to be organized did not have these feudalistic aspects that aren't good, but they do now.
> Boeing, General Mills, or ford wouldn't want you to be a dev if they could figure out how to do it?
You do in fact agree with the author. He calls this subspecies cloud capitalism. In another time or place, cloud capitalism would be materially impossible, and capitalism of another flavor might still be appropriate.
You disagree with the author in that they are silent on other types of capitalism, but you are considering this to be a flaw with capitalism at large, from what I can tell.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
I have also worked with retailers that expect to get over 50% of the profit of anything you sell on their stores.
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.
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.