I found a book through my mum called “Technofeudalism” by Yanis Varoufakis. He talks about how capitalism as we know it is dead and has been mutated into a feudalist system based on cloud space instead of land. I’m reading through it and making notes this will be a good for my main source of research. As it talks about the tech dominance USA and China have over the world.
Chapter 1-2: Capitalisms Inception and Evolution
Some thoughts I’m already having in regards to my project:
- Modern Victorian Era
- “The Victorians believed that firms should be small and powerless, so that competition could perform its magic of keeping entrepreneurs honest”
- What businesses do we have in the UK if we relinquished power from Big Business?
- What technology do we have if we isolated from the world
- Estonia Intranet
- “The Victorians believed that firms should be small and powerless, so that competition could perform its magic of keeping entrepreneurs honest”
- Quaker era of business
- Excess profit given back to its workers and the community
- Monetary value for experiential labour?
- Excess profit given back to its workers and the community
- Capitalism is nursed by people’s passion
- Capitalism pays you for your commodity labour but your value lies in your experiential labour. That’s what they use to sell their commodity
- Example: We have the best school because our teachers care the most. Every school sells the same thing education services but what differs them is the people working there (not just teachers all those involved).
- We have the power in capitalism but are people aware of this power they can exercise? Is this a power we can still exercise in the mutated version of capitalism?
- Capitalism pays you for your commodity labour but your value lies in your experiential labour. That’s what they use to sell their commodity
Chapter 3: Physical to Digital & Cloud Capital
Some thoughts I’m already having in regards to my project:
- Alexa is Don Draper
- Technology’s role in advertising
- Nothing is neutral
- A lot of people have the belief tech is neutral which makes it better than human judgement. However a machine with no sentience is actually more dangerous. It has to be taught what is right or wrong. It can’t make its own judgement on what is right or wrong. As seen with biased systems AI will discriminate and it won’t know it’s discrimination or that discrimination is wrong. Many argue that humans are no different to AI when it comes to generation. Humans just rehash the same stuff over and over. But a human does not need to be told to generate an idea or a thought.
- Little data Big Data
- We exchange what feels like small anonymised data to companies. But when you put all that data together it becomes very specific and identifiable. Features like recommendations, personalised ads, social media feeds, news feeds can then be made super catered to you. Then because your feed of content feels like you and it knows you it can then be manipulated to make you think that what you’re seeing is what you agree with and like.
- ooooo feels very black mirror
- How damaging is it not to see opposing content or things you don’t like
- I also recently switched to web results only for on my google searches, I tried ecosia and duckduckgo but I couldn’t get use to them. It was a huge change I wasn’t expecting. Googling something feels way less overstimulating. I’m looking at multiple sources to find the answer I’m looking for, I’m paying attention to which sources I’m looking at. It’s more akin to a library I feel more relaxed. I did the same with youtube a while back I turned off recommendations so when I go onto youtube I just see a search bar and tabs I’m not slapped in the face with thumbnails.
Chapter 4: Technofeudalism history
- Scooby doo unmasking terms
- I’ve noticed a lot that terms have been dressed up to sound less nefarious lulling us into a false sense of security.
- Subscriptions sound nice, beneficial, equal exchange but what it really is is rent
- Instead of buying your favourite album with a one time purchase you pay over and over again for your favourite album. Suddenly the idea of subscriptions sounds crazy and a poor financial decision. But you could argue that it’s not just the music you pay for. You pay for the being able to discover new music, to hold all the music in one place, to listen to other people’s playlists. But these things aren’t new, you could pay for songs and hold them locally on your phone. Listen to the radio, go to music festivals, talk to other people to hear new music.
- So in summary when you rent music you pay for the same product over and over and you pay for isolating yourself from other people. Then on top of all of that the musicians who paid for the music aren’t even paid as much as they would be if you paid for the song or album once.
- Popular songs go fro £0.99 on iTunes (Once purchased the files are only accessible through an apple computer) and I have liked 1,956 songs on Spotify that would be a £1,936.44 one time purchase I have those files forever on every device I would like them on. I have a premium individual Spotify account that’s £11.99 a month since August 2019 64 months £779.35 that sounds better right? Let’s do the maths in the long term. Bear in mind that this is buying songs individually and not as albums which discounts songs by over 50%. Assuming I live to 70-80 one time purchase would be £15,876 – £19,116, Spotify £7,050.12 – £8,488.92. While on paper it looks like Spotify is cheaper. There’s a lot more value that owning music has vs renting music. Owning music means: more money is given to the artist that made it, music can be passed on to next gens (I have my grandads old vinyls which are worth more now), to discover new music you have to talk to people go to gigs and festivals, reduces overconsumption as we have to consider whether we like the music enough to purchase it we tell children they can’t have everything they want because that’s life but we don’t live by these same rules, censorship because you can’t censor what you own but renting makes censorship. Is there a change in mindset that people don’t consider the social impact their purchases have?
- Subscriptions sound nice, beneficial, equal exchange but what it really is is rent
- I’ve noticed a lot that terms have been dressed up to sound less nefarious lulling us into a false sense of security.
Chapter 5-6: Technofeudalism history, global impact
- Europe is behind
- With no big tech companies Europe doesn’t have the cloud control US and China do. We will forever be begging for their mercy unless this changes. Vassals and serfs in their fiefdoms
- UK is in an even worse position as we are no longer part of the EU so we will have to do this ourselves too.
- Europe needs to admit they’re no longer a developed country. We now fit the definition of a developing country.
- Oligarch investors
- Varoufakis talks about ways out of the dollar debacle we’re in is to default on the dollar debts which results in not having money for essentials or getting another loan from IMF which results pretending to repay by giving over our essentials to US oligarchs posing as investors and fuel and food prices being so high people starve.
- UK has already chosen the second one. Blackrock and Palantir already have NHS contracts, Google and other American companies were given our AI budget, many British companies have been sold to American ones. While both options were bad the first one we would have been able to get back on our feet still. We saw during lockdown people came together to help one another out. We might have had to go back to rationing and maybe even blackouts but we would have been able to eventually sustain ourselves.
- Varoufakis talks about ways out of the dollar debacle we’re in is to default on the dollar debts which results in not having money for essentials or getting another loan from IMF which results pretending to repay by giving over our essentials to US oligarchs posing as investors and fuel and food prices being so high people starve.
Chapter 7: The Solution
- On sale 24/7
- Accounting for experiential labour people now work 24/7. We have no time for ourselves, outside of work we must also maintain our online identity.
- We aren’t weak willed our focus and attention is being taken from us.
- We no longer self possess our identity
- Terms & Conditions
- What is in them? We can’t really deny them we must accept them if we want to continue to use or access a thing. This isn’t a choice.
- Why do algorithms reinforce the worst of us?
- bots released on social media are very quickly turned into machines that spew hate
- bots social media experiment with positive inputs?
- How to kill a God: Technofeudalism
- You can’t price regulate something free or cheap
- How do you break up something digital and global? Amazon Tesla Google
- Actual solutions
- Varoufakis illustrates a fictional global utopia. The solution he does say feel unfinished and outlandish. With political exhaustion it would be near impossible to organise a large scale boycott. Even then if it was done what would happen next?
Whole book
- Pixels to Matter
- An experience that brings the digital ecosystem into the physical world. We’re okay with accepting cookies here and skipping ads there. What would that look like in the real world? If every time you went somewhere you had to choose whether to give your data to third parties
- Accept Cookies
- We are now given the option to decline cookies so why would we ever accept them in first place? What benefit does the user get giving a part of themselves away for free? Especially e-commerce we are already there to purchase something why do they then need to sell our data to third parties? What is the monetary value of our data?