You guys ain't ready for Techno-Feudalism

[Raja Porus]

If we do pay attention, it is not hard to see that capital’s mutation into what I call cloud capital has demolished capitalism’s two pillars:
markets and profits. Of course, markets and profits remain ubiquitous – indeed, markets and profits were ubiquitous under feudalism too – they just aren’t running the show any more. What has happened over the last two decades is that profit and markets have been evicted from the epicentre of our economic and social system, pushed out to its margins, and replaced. With what? Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud rent....

As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labour, but they are not in charge as they once were. As we shall see, they have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labour – in addition to the waged labour we perform, when
we get the chance.

Your new lords

 

[swt]

Dnr

Techno? Technoboss? Wow

 

[Raja Porus]

Dnr

Techno? Technoboss? Wow

We will install chips in your brain to make sure you don't post DNR to high quality threads on .org

Rest assured, Project 2025 will take care of trolls like you

Total Techno surveillance, the likes of which you cannot fathom

The Hindu-Zionist lobby sends its regard

 

[noodlelover]

View attachment 3443859


If we do pay attention, it is not hard to see that capital’s mutation into what I call cloud capital has demolished capitalism’s two pillars:
markets and profits. Of course, markets and profits remain ubiquitous – indeed, markets and profits were ubiquitous under feudalism too – they just aren’t running the show any more. What has happened over the last two decades is that profit and markets have been evicted from the epicentre of our economic and social system, pushed out to its margins, and replaced. With what? Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud rent....

As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labour, but they are not in charge as they once were. As we shall see, they have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labour – in addition to the waged labour we perform, when
we get the chance.

Your new lords

View attachment 3443861

It's a fun analogy but completely false.

Land was a limited resource that could be controlled by feudal lords.

Digital spaces are an unlimited resource that any one can create. The barrier for entry only gets lower, with exponentially decreasing cost of compute, and decreasing cost to code these platforms (Ai can probably do it soon, and even without those there are easy libraries that only get easeir).

Those who own the platforms know this and so they have to provide the best services for most of their audience. If a niche of their audience has special needs then niche platforms are created for those needs.

You are not paying "rent seekers" you are paying for specific services, and most of the time you're only paying by watching an add every once and while which is cheap.

 

[NoHoesinOhio]

good thread

 

[NoHoesinOhio]

It's a fun analogy but completely false.

Land was a limited resource that could be controlled by feudal lords.

Digital spaces are an unlimited resource that any one can create. The barrier for entry only gets lower, with exponentially decreasing cost of compute, and decreasing cost to code these platforms (Ai can probably do it soon, and even without those there are easy libraries that only get easeir).

Those who own the platforms know this and so they have to provide the best services for most of their audience. If a niche of their audience has special needs then niche platforms are created for those needs.

You are not paying "rent seekers" you are paying for specific services, and most of the time you're only paying by watching an add every once and while which is cheap.

Digital spaces aren't unconstrained, just take domains for example. There are many platforms which offer the same service as facebook but theyll never be facebook, so I think its blinkered to see cloud capitalism as purely a service- providing avenue.

 

[noodlelover]

Digital spaces aren't unconstrained, just take domains for example. There are many platforms which offer the same service as facebook but theyll never be facebook, so I think its blinkered to see cloud capitalism as purely a service- providing avenue.

In that way it's a little like techno-feudalism, but if people aren't satisfied enough with current social media, they will move to new ones. BlueSky for people that are procensorship for example and Truth Social for people who are anti-censorship. The English language has 500k words. So there are 250000000000 two word combinations. People don't care that much about the name compared to how much they care about the product.

None of these companies have a monopoly, as has been proven by all the new social media companies that pop up catering to a specific human need. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, etc. etc. Instagram is a made up word, so we're not even limited to real words.

The customer really is the one that's mostly in control. This is why censorship of any kind exists. Most people don't want to see nudity, or violence, or stupid conspiracy theories. Provide people what they want, and you'll have a big platform.

Getting the exact balance right, of allowing the right conspiracy theories (because some are true) without being over run by lunatics and people getting the ick and wanting to leave your platform, is a huge challenge to these platforms and they are constantly tweaking things to get it right for our benefit.

They try to balance things with algorithmic suppression, and then fact checkers, and then community notes, and they'll continue innovating for our benefit, to make the largest number of people happy. Because they know that if they don't, then they will get outcompeted in the free market. And to the extent that niche needs exist, niche platforms will continue to exist.