But a more substantive answer is that there is only some truth to this, and I think it’s not really about tech. For example, consider this paragraph from the article:
> Varoufakis just published his seventeenth book, called “Technofeudalism.” Capitalism, he argues, has been replaced by a new economic system that’s more dangerous than anything Marx could have conjured. The big tech companies—Meta, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet—control our attention and mediate our transactions, he says, turning humans into digital serfs incessantly posting, scrolling, and buying on their platforms. Rather than chasing profits that derive from labor, the tech overlords, whom he calls “cloudalists,” extract “rents.”
I agree that the biggest companies have too much power over us, the economy, and politics. But this is true of all big companies that get to a certain size. This is really about rebuilding our antitrust laws and enforcement for a new world. It’s about lobbying. It’s about requiring standards and protocols. And a lot of other things. But the ‘feudalism’ part feels like it’s an emotional label, and the ‘techno’ part feels too narrow when we could highlight similar problems in other industries too.
Can't help that the US today has the worst of both worlds: high labor costs AND high rates of absentee ownership (using the less emotional Veblen term)[1]
Most of the required things that you mention have, in turn, hard AND conflicting emotional prereqs (from the actual political operators, not HN commenters)
I quite like his (maybe unintended) implication that technofeudalism ultimately comes from the capitalists wanting to outflank the pesky Labor hivemind using automation/mindless consumption
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism
[1] usually diagnosed these days as "shareholder supremacy", but I was thinking that the proclivity towards Abilene paradoxes & their ilk should not be all blamed on actual shareholders, but on the general post-Puritan idea of owning stuff (copyright, etc) without the accompanying emotional burdens
