Technology
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lol Yanis is def making the rounds cuz of his new book. He also talked about this on Adam Conover's podcast, Factually a few weeks ago.
iirc he's saying that we're at the point where some of the richest people have moved from owning the means to actually produce things to providing platforms for exchanging goods for money to happen on, while basically charging rent. He compares it to feudalism in that a company like Amazon or Apple with its app store are feudal lords who come in and collect money off of each transaction made by the "serfs" (people who sell and buy things on these markets), basically in exchange for being allowed to list. And increasingly, its getting harder and harder to do business without dealing with one of these tech giants. I think he mentioned how WeChat is another good example of this in China, where they're involved in like everything
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.
Exactly! I've been saying this for a while that certain market places like amazon and ebay should become more public utility. I think craig's list is the rare example of something actually owned by a person that is not just optimizing for profit. Social media should similarly be federated, which now with e.g. lemmy and mastodon seems much more plausible.
Another example is that the recent payment service directive has finally created instant wire transfers - e.g. I can wire money instantly to a shop without having to wait a few days or needing a payment processor. It's insane that it took 30 years for instant payments. So maybe the 1.5% to 3% tax that paypal sucks out of ecommerce economy can finally end.
So maybe marketplaces could be federated as well and supported by regulations. For example some kind of open standard to exchange price info and order conditions etc. so that different services can use the same network of vendors and the customer can easily move from amazon or ebay to other alternatives without loosing the market network.
So if there is techno-feudalism it definitely can be dismantled politically. Thanks for your comment, and thanks to Varoufakis - this is actually a very valuable insight I believe. I remember like 10 years ago people started talking about the monopolies rising out of the internet and how they should be broken up. But it was clear to me that classic anti-trust measures wouldn't work, because there are network effects that are incredibly valuable. You don't want to split up facebook because 10 separate social media are much less useful. But maybe now we're at a point where we have the arguments (techno-feudalism) and the solutions (federation and regulations like a protocol like activitypub) to suggest actual policy! 🙂