[P]erhaps traditional distinctions between left and right don’t make sense any more. The right, Varoufakis says, “thinks of capitalism as like a natural system, a bit like the atmosphere”. Whereas the left “think of themselves as people created by the universe in order to bring socialism over capitalism. I am telling you: you know what, you missed it. You missed it. Somebody killed capitalism. We have something worse.”
The early internet, he says, has given way to a privatised digital landscape in which gatekeepers “charge rent… The people we think of as capitalists are just a vassal class now. If you’re producing stuff now, you’re done. You’re finished. You cannot become the ruler of the world any more.”
just skimmed the article, it’s really babbling and trying to tell a story and it never gets to the point of actually explaining the differences between capitalism and dead capitalism (technofeudalism), and how in detail one became the other.
I didn’t read the article but I saw a video where he talked about it a while ago.
Iirc basically he was saying things like: as things consolidate and not mesh with other things we’re going to see the return of company towns. And if you want to switch from one thing or another then you have a lot of inertia to overcome. So you essentially have a CEO that gets to control your life in a way that only kings used to be able to do.
And Apple customers were doing this a decade or more ago. They bought into an entire ecosystem, and became APPLE_PEOPLE, for better or worse. And the companies that sell stuff on e.g. itunes are the rent-paying serfs, paying Apple to be vassals and do business. The people with Apple products are maybe a bit more like farm animals…they just get fleeced over and over. They don’t have much input into anything, unless they make a serious break and quit using Apple stuff.
Thanks, that summary gave me that vibe already, you saved me 20 minutes of my time!
But what a title!