this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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I recommend everyone read Techno-Feudalism by Yanis Varoufakis for a really solid Marxist analysis of the Internet. He described much better than I could how the Internet went from a free and open commons to a tool of oppression, and speculates how the Internet may one day become a tool for liberation.
I like his math, but don't like his thesis about it being a regression to feudalism.
Not much about the employer-employee relationship is changing, and big tech engaging in rent-seeking on other businesses doesn't change the primary relationship people have with labor.
If most people performed their labor via a system akin to Uber or Doordash, then I'd be more inclined to agree.
The phenomena seems closer to finance capital supplanting industrial capital as the hegemonic form of power. Technology and information systems may have begun supplanting finance capital as the next stage of evolution of that process.
Otherwise, I think his analysis is solid.
I agree, I haven't read the book but it seems like a vulgar conception and strikes me as a bit lib because he's basically refusing to say the problem is capitalism and saying it's a secret new thing instead which is just a distraction
My thoughts on it too. But thats probably why he still gets booked for interviews and shit
IIRC he started this line of inquiry ~5 years ago when "Gigification of the Economy" was a point of discourse going around and I think in that context it would have been reasonable to go there, but otherwise I agree there's hairs to be split about the specific social relations and relations to production that make it hard to view it as regression as you noted.
Same as any other means of production. Mass media is what started the really revolutions of the proletarian era, the Internet is still young.