Big Tech are the new Soviets

Posted by saubeidl 17 hours ago

Comments

Comment by steve_gh 16 hours ago

The problem with big tech is that it is actively sucking resources and capital out of the world.

For example, if I use Uber, a significant fraction of the fare (let's say 25%) is taken by Uber. That takes it out of the local economy. And because Uber has good tax lawyers, they pay minimal taxes in my country, so it leaves my country's economy completely.

With an old style taxi firm, the boss took a cut - but then he spent most of it in local shops, or his wife bought clothes at a local boutique and a nice haircut - keeping money going round the local economy.

Now, every time you use a cloud service, you take money out of a local economy.And people wonder why we have huge social and economic problems.

Comment by spwa4 15 hours ago

Yes, it used to be common wisdom that you cannot have markets being run by private companies, that if such a situation develops it needs to be nationalized immediately. However, the last thing that happened to was the electricity grid.

Comment by nephihaha 15 hours ago

It is happening again with a few rail networks. We'll see.

Comment by AnimalMuppet 12 hours ago

Let's say, for argument's sake, that Uber takes 25% of the fare. But let's say that the alternative is old-style taxi companies, and they were protected from competition by the medallion system. They were not exactly lean-and-mean companies. What percent did they lose by inefficiency? Less than 25%, or more? And is losing it to inefficiency better than losing it to Uber, or worse?

Note well: I do not have answers for these questions. But I think the questions are interesting.

Comment by piva00 12 hours ago

Define inefficiency, I'd much rather pay for local inefficiency which is still money changing hands in my local economy rather than paying a bit less for my money to be siphoned out of my local economy with increased efficiency.

Losing to Uber means my money is not being used in my economy, it goes away, it pays a few devs/local staff while it's stashed away in other financialised assets that do not help my neighbours (well, perhaps it helps the richest ones).

Comment by spdionis 10 hours ago

What if you get a much better service from Uber?

Most local produce initatives fail because they're not actually better than the global/international variants, especially considered from a price/quality pov.

Comment by JohnTHaller 8 hours ago

Uber is generally more expensive than yellow cabs in NYC these days.

Comment by tpm 14 hours ago

So it's the same as big oil (for oil-poor countries).

Comment by nephihaha 15 hours ago

It's certainly the case with energy. Many people can barely afford their electricity expenses and yet big tech wants to build data centres which will gobble up energy like no one's business. In fact it runs completely counter to the environmental rhetoric.

Comment by Muromec 12 hours ago

Electricity is like 30 euros per month. What are you even talking about?

Comment by nephihaha 9 hours ago

It costs a lot more than that where I live. They keep sending me info on how to save energy. I have a small home and use about as little as I can, and most of my bill consists of tax and standing charges! It is NOT cheap.

Gas is even more expensive. I had to have mine cut off.

Comment by cbruns 11 hours ago

Much more expensive in the US. Especially in areas that use resistive heating in the winter.

Comment by Muromec 10 hours ago

How bad it is exactly? Resistive heating sounds cursed, when the houses are (I guess) not the fancy European newbuild.

I'm looking at something like 1000 kWh on a heat pump a year in a mild weather, where kWh is around 0.30 eurocents. I don't however own the pump, energy company leases it to me, so I pay about 150 a month the whole year (cold months are about 4 GJ, but it totals to 18-ish in a year). Then there is another 10-30 a month for normal in-house electricity consumption.

When I had actual district heating (powered by gas, when the gas was expensive af) and the house was "leakier", I looked at something like 50ish GJ a year and paid close to 350.

Comment by nephihaha 9 hours ago

I live in Scotland. It costs me a lot more than the equivalent of thirty Euros. Nearly double that. I couldn't reduce my electricity bill much more if I tried. I don't watch TV, use my oven and don't heat my home most of the year (I haven't once this winter so far, even though I am cold some of the time.)

Comment by nephihaha 16 hours ago

Yanis Varoufakis is a curious character, endlessly promoted across mainstream media including the BBC. His wife is said to be the basis of Pulp's song "Common People" about a rich girl at St. Martin's College trying to slum it. That's debatable, but her father was one of the biggest industrialists in Greece. Yanis Varoufakis went to a private school in Athens and has taught at Cambridge... Seems like he has a pretty elite background.

Comment by dauertewigkeit 16 hours ago

I don't think that's abnormal. That's the norm for political leaders in western countries. There are very, very, few people that rise to leadership positions from a purely working class background. Even Jeremy Corbyn grew up middle class. It's almost tautological that leaders are going to be above average in some respect and this talent will be recognized early and the way it works in western countries, the elite institutions try to recruit all the talented folk from non-elite backgrounds into their ranks.

I think it's overall a good thing that not all people from elite backgrounds with above average IQ/skills end up being purely upper class aligned.

Comment by lysace 16 hours ago

The inverse of elite isn’t working class background.

Comment by dauertewigkeit 16 hours ago

It approximately is, imho. Wealth follows a power law distribution. People put the dividing line at different points, but it doesn't matter so much. The elite are a tiny fraction. The middle class are also a relatively small faction of the population and for the most part, the middle class tend to be lumped in with the elite, because they tend to be in complementary political factions.

Now I know that in the US, people group everyone with a job in the middle class, but that's just semantics.

Comment by nephihaha 15 hours ago

The middle class in western Europe and the USA does run into the millions according to most definitions.

However, class is also about your origins not just your wallet and YV is in no way a horny-handed son of toil.

Comment by spwa4 15 hours ago

What they mean is that there are plenty of people with organizational skills that come from a working class background, and essentially all of the smartest people in science come from working class, even immigrant backgrounds. Why? Simple: it takes a lot of long, concerted effort, with few results, and people are not very likely to do that if they have it too easy in childhood.

It's birth, not brains or organizational skills that make "leaders" in Europe. Hell, the highest European politician gets criticized for exactly that a great many times. Very lucky to be born where she was born, not much at all in terms of accomplishments, and zero spectacular achievements.

Comment by nephihaha 16 hours ago

Yanis Varoufakis is a rich kid as is his wife, and their relatives. That's my point. He is part of the very thing he claims to be fighting.

You say he is talented. I say he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and has been promoted by some powerful institutions such as mainstream media and elite universities. He did not get up there on his own. He isn't some street kid from Athens who clawed his way up by his own intellect.

By the way, I don't have a big problem with Corbyn as an individual. I think he is personally honest. I do have concerns that a decent man like him (or Bernie Sanders) may be used by individuals who are less honest. That has happened in the British Labour Party many times.

Comment by dauertewigkeit 15 hours ago

I'm not disputing the facts. I'm just pointing out that it's the norm.

I'm not sure what you're implying though. I don't think he is being platformed by current mainstream institutions if that's what you're saying.

Comment by nephihaha 15 hours ago

He is being platformed by them. He was never off the BBC at one point and he writes for broadsheet papers on a frequent basis.

Comment by rTX5CMRXIfFG 16 hours ago

This counts as ad hominem. Attacking the person and saying nothing of the argument.

Comment by nephihaha 15 hours ago

It affects his outlook and analysis of this subject at levels you can't even imagine. Simple as that.

Comment by rTX5CMRXIfFG 15 hours ago

Why wouldn’t I be able to imagine

Comment by nephihaha 15 hours ago

Even if he genuinely supported the working class and struggles against power, he would not be in the World Economic Forum today. He was born into privilege, and now belongs to an organisation which bans proper press coverage... Even though it is where top politicians and business men meet to decide what to do with us. That door opens from the inside. You either pay vast sums to join the WEF or they invite you.

https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/

Comment by master-lincoln 16 hours ago

How is that relevant here? Did anyone claim anything to the contrary?

Comment by nephihaha 16 hours ago

It skews his view of the entire situation in ways he isn't even aware of. In this case, he talks about feudalism, and it's arguable if that's where we're headed at all. Feudalism requires the peasantry to provide something useful to the overlords, which will not be the case when low paid jobs are automated.

Comment by notarobot123 16 hours ago

How dare he use his privilege for any ends other than selfishly defending the rights of the privileged!

Comment by nephihaha 15 hours ago

Well, he is. He has a cooshy number entertaining the chattering classes and educating their offspring.

He has no experience or understanding of poverty from the inside. Like a lot of his ilk, most of his understanding is second hand and theoretical. He wouldn't last five minutes on a factory floor.

Comment by notarobot123 15 hours ago

I'm not advocating for him specifically, but it doesn't seem reasonable that one would need a lived experience of poverty and deprivation to be able to meaningfully understand its causes and effects or to have some inclination to prevent it. Compassion is not a vice nor is making a career of advocating for change.

Comment by nephihaha 9 hours ago

He's never off mainstream media, has his own page on the World Economic Forum website, works for a posh university. He is in the elite and never left it.

If he was compassionate, he would condemn the WEF, instead of enabling it. It is an antidemocratic organisation, is partnered with big business and does not allow free press coverage of its events.

It does seem reasonable that people should have experienced poverty to understand it. The world has been full of people who came from privileged backgrounds who claim to speak for the working class and don't understand them. Maxim Gorky talks about this with Lenin and Lunacharsky.

p.s. Also please don't use that word "change". It is meaningless. Change is something which happens anyway. "Progress" and "improvement" are better.

Comment by _DeadFred_ 8 hours ago

Strong disagree. As someone who has dropped down multiple social classes, I had zero ACTUAL idea about what people were going through, nor about ACTUAL solutions to their problems. But I had lots of solutions to hypothetical problems in my head because I was smart and good hearted.

Having been through the result of implemented hypothetical solutions, they suck. They not only suck, but the suck all of the oxygen up, so that real, better solutions can't replace them.

Comment by hexbin010 16 hours ago

Which parts of the article do you disagree with?

Comment by nephihaha 16 hours ago

I discuss that elsewhere. The feudal tag is inaccurate. The USA is not feudal minded, at least not yet. Europe is far more feudal in its deference to the authorities. (I live in Europe by the way.)

Also you can't have a feudal system when the peasantry have been replaced by machines which is the end game here. Feudalism is parasitic but it still requires goods and services to flow up from below. When your food, defence and goods are all supplied by robots or AI, then that is not the case.

Comment by petre 15 hours ago

> Also you can't have a feudal system when the peasantry have been replaced by machines which is the end game here. Feudalism is parasitic but it still requires goods and services to flow up from below. When your food, defence and goods are all supplied by robots or AI, then that is not the case.

Do machines drive your Uber ride? Deliver your food? No. They assign jobs to gig workers. Those are the serfs. Your goods and services are by people managed by AI.

Yes, I know, FSD is just around the corner rendering truck and taxi drivers obsolete. /s

Comment by nephihaha 9 hours ago

I have boycotted Uber and dodgy food delivery companies from the beginning because of their zero hours contracts... I've never used Uber in my entire life.

Comment by bgwalter 15 hours ago

Yes, the insiders wanted to let him in, but he refused:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/03/yanis-varoufak...

He’s in Washington for a meeting with Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary and Obama confidant. Summers asks him point blank: do you want to be on the inside or the outside? “Outsiders prioritise their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions,” Summers warns.

Comment by nephihaha 15 hours ago

They did let him in. He was never off the BBC at one point.

Also part of the elite WEF. https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/

Comment by gsf_emergency_6 16 hours ago

Marx married into minor mobility and was himself descended from prosperous Jews. Lenin's father was ennobled. Aristocrats turning against capitalism is as old as communism.

Comment by nelox 16 hours ago

Yanis, wasn’t an aristocrat. However, these were all from upper-class or elite backgrounds too: Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Josip Broz Tito.

Comment by nephihaha 16 hours ago

There are tonnes of people like that in Marxism. The irony is that they claim to want to liberate the working class when they were never part of it. Guevara especially came from a wealthy background.

YV was born into a monied family and married into one. He also went to private school as a child. As far as I know he has spent most of his life in an ivory tower.

Comment by master-lincoln 13 hours ago

irony: the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite

> they claim to want to liberate the working class when they were never part of it

that is not irony.

Do you believe only working class people can improve the situation for working class people? That seems counter-intuitive to me, as people outside the working class usually have more time and education to think about changes and advocate for them.

Comment by nephihaha 8 hours ago

Oh it's irony alright. I've encountered many such folk. They claim to mean well but barely know what to deal with a real live proletarian when they encounter one.

What was it the Who once sang, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"? I don't think he has ever been much out of privileged circles.

The way ordinary people's lives can improve is self-advocacy and self-determination. You're not going to find that from Cambridge University where he teaches (one of the snobbiest and class ridden institutions in the UK which often resembles Hogwarts more than a modern university), the World Economic Forum (which prefers closed meetings to public ones and is furtive about its aims), or anything like that.

In this article he is right to voice concern about Big Tech oligarchy. But his analysis is off and he is not aware of what it really means to millions of people.

Comment by saubeidl 15 hours ago

How dare people use their privilege for good instead of for self-enrichment!

Comment by nephihaha 15 hours ago

He is a World Economic Forum stooge, mate. There are only two ways into that. You either pay hundreds of thousands to attend each day, or you get invited from the inside as he did.

The WEF includes the top 100 companies in the world, along with the leaders and opposition leaders of every country. He's part of it.

https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/

Comment by danaris 14 hours ago

I'm with saubeidl—while I, too, am deeply suspicious of anyone who comes from that level of privilege, and I've heard some shady stuff about Varoufakis in the past, you are refusing to present a) any meaningful criticism of his actual arguments, or b) any specific causal link between aspects of his background and reasons to doubt his work.

You just keep pounding on the fact that he is from privilege, but that alone is not enough to be suspicious.

At the very best, you are arguing guilt by association.

Comment by nephihaha 9 hours ago

Guilt by association? Yes, he's associated with the WEF, a group of elite politicians and wealthy tycoons who meet away from the prying eyes of the public to discuss policies, and then tells us he's on our side.

They say you can know someone by the company they keep. The company he keeps are the Cambridge University students (who come disproportionately from private schools), mainstream media pundits and the billionaires of the WEF.

He doesn't just come from privilege... He never really left it.

Comment by danaris 8 hours ago

But one can come from privilege, and choose to use that privilege to, effectively, infiltrate the ranks of the moneyed elite, seeking to make things better for the average person.

Some people have claimed that this is what he is doing. You have provided zero evidence that it is not. You merely keep repeating the same statements about his origins and his affiliation with the WEF.

I am not saying you are wrong. I am saying you have not supported your position in any meaningful way.

What are his words? What are his actions?

Where is the harm?

Where is the evidence?

Comment by saubeidl 15 hours ago

You seem to be on some sort of vendetta against the messenger instead of addressing the message at all.

Comment by nephihaha 9 hours ago

We have heard plenty from this particular messenger. He is/was never off the BBC at some stage. I always ask why someone is pushed on the public so hard, whether it is him or even someone like Jordan Peterson. I have the same basic issue with him as I do with the Guardian... He is completely out of touch with what is happening at ground level because of his current life and his origins.

Comment by rithdmc 16 hours ago

Rose Dugdale springs to mind, also.

Comment by brnt 14 hours ago

The difference between what some call the upper-upper-class and upper-middle-class is bigger than the difference between middle-class and lower-class.

Or, the 1% and the 0.01%.

The superrich are perhaps more alien than most aliens would be to us. (I'm assuming you are not a billionaire).

Comment by ttoinou 16 hours ago

If amazon overcharges sellers of a 40% fee, then why can’t I get the same object elsewhere cheaper?

Obviously if you remove from your mind all market mechanisms, then it doesn’t look like a market anymore

Comment by postexitus 16 hours ago

Amazon enforces a Most Favored Nation (MFN) condition on sellers, basically implying that they cannot sell the same product elsewhere for cheaper. Funny enough - when Amazon pushes their fees higher, it means the prices go up everywhere, that's Amazon inflation.

https://www.proskauer.com/blog/amazons-most-favored-nations-...

Comment by Imustaskforhelp 15 hours ago

so does this go for companies which sell electronics like phone companies etc. or since I think resellers sell it on amazon, maybe we don't have MFN condition?

But like, my question is, Doesn't this cripple every company which sells electronics on amazon or something?

I think amazon tries doing it to say that you would only get the best price here, thus people might buy from amazon which can then increase the sales making retailers believe they need to be on amazon agreeing to MFN policy and then crippling their custom market too I suppose

Are there any loopholes to this? What if I am a seller and then I can have lets say my book be on amazon for 100 bucks as an example and I can create a website where I sell it for 110$

But when someone signs up they can get a voucher for 20$ and then they can apply it for what I am selling which for them becomes 90$

I think amazon's MFN is monopolistic especially for things like books which is what amazon first was created for.

I kinda wish if there was a service where I can buy one time right to publish a book from the authors directly for like the books price and then be able to download it or print it from local competing printing/tech service shops..

Comment by postexitus 11 hours ago

It does cripple them, but only those Amazon can strong arm. There are some companies that refuse to sell on Amazon for this very reason - one example I know is Jellycats. MFN applies at reseller level - not at product level (obviously).

Yes, it is monopolistic - some call it technofeudalism, because Amazon owns the "land" and extract land rent out of it - with questionable service in return.

Comment by a2128 16 hours ago

It's certainly not the case that you can just buy something outside of Amazon and it'll magically be 40% cheaper. For a long time Amazon pursued aggressive strategies to drive out competition and physical stores, leaving Amazon the most convenient or sometimes the only option.

Having built an extremely strong position, they can now increase prices and fees, and leverage power over sellers to stop them from listing lower prices off-Amazon, if they want to also sell on Amazon. See page 42 of https://web.archive.org/oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/... for an example of this

Comment by ttoinou 16 hours ago

So, a competitor could also invest a lot, drive out competition, be the most convenient, build themselves an extremely strong position then reap the rewards ? This strategy can be replicated, thus is subject to market forces

Comment by a2128 14 hours ago

The market today is extremely different to what the market looked like at the time Amazon worked their strategy, it was dominated mainly by physical retailers that may have required a long drive, things were not always stocked, limited choice on what's stocked on shelves. And ordering over a phone from paper catalogs had long delivery times and limited information beyond just a picture and short description. Amazon disrupted the industry by changing all of this and becoming the first major online retailer.

You won't be able to just replicate their strategy, and they've spent ridiculous amounts of money on next-day/same-day delivery infrastructure that nobody's gonna be able to invest that much. But if you do have any ideas on how to disrupt Amazon and be more convenient than them in 2025 let me know :)

Comment by ttoinou 12 hours ago

So they worked a lot to get to the position here and no one else wants to make the same efforts. There's no easy play here

Comment by a2128 10 hours ago

Plenty of people do want to make the efforts and have tried. Physical retailers like Walmart have opened online retail but adoption remains limited. Startups like Jet.com, Quidsi, Fab.com, Rakuten/Buy.com, Woot and many others have tried and failed to take on Amazon, leading to bankruptcy or being sold. The reality is that nobody can take on Amazon due to their slimy tactics but also nobody can realistically provide something to customers that Amazon doesn't already provide. Fees will keep increasing and costs inflating as much as Amazon wants, while customers are none the wiser and sellers can do nothing about it.

Comment by thrance 11 hours ago

You can't realistically compete with a Monopoly like Amazon. They'll buy you out way before you can be an inconvenience to them, or drown you by artificially lowering their price until you go bankrupt if you refuse their deal. And even in the off-chance you somehow replace them, then great. We're back to square one.

Comment by ttoinou 11 hours ago

  We're back to square one.

So, all good, we're not in Big Tech are Soviets.

Comment by danaris 14 hours ago

Sure, "a competitor" with hundreds of billions of dollars and a few decades to burn could, in theory, do that.

But what would be the payoff? Getting to compete head-to-head with Amazon? Amazon, that's a well-established incumbent, with a well-known pattern of ruthless dealings, including leveraging their ties with governments, to protect their monopoly?

No one's going to be able to make a profit doing that.

Comment by ttoinou 12 hours ago

So, the market is good with this solution then. All good. Bit Techs are not Soviets.

(Note that my personal opinion is that Amazon profits / are protected thanks to governments through unfair IP / patents though)

Comment by danaris 8 hours ago

"The market" is not a real entity with desires and opinions.

"The wisdom of the market" only works with an ideal free market, or something close to it.

Such a thing has a number of requirements, such as low/no barriers to entry, perfect information, elasticity of demand, etc.

Those do not exist here. No useful information on how things "should be" can be obtained from the fact that Amazon cannot meaningfully be challenged.

Your position, essentially, boils down to "however things are right now, if they're even remotely stable, that's how things should be, because that's what the market wants." Worship of the status quo.

Comment by nephihaha 16 hours ago

Depends what you are buying. In some cases you can buy it elsewhere and in other cases, Amazon may be the only option left.

Comment by ttoinou 16 hours ago

Chinese stuff you can find it cheaper elsewhere most of the time. For the rest, amazon is still cheaper, faster to deliver and easier to return

Comment by bushbaba 16 hours ago

Yes, but not with the same shipping speed. Often temu/aliexpress requires you to wait week(s).

Comment by nephihaha 16 hours ago

I wasn't thinking of Chinese goods. Their labour laws and prison camps are even more questionable.

Comment by red-iron-pine 12 hours ago

amazon is just a middleman for the chinese goods. your objections apply to a fantastic number of amazon sellers.

Comment by alecco 15 hours ago

I often dislike Varoufakis' weird champagne Marxist with libertarian and nationalism bent. But he is spot on this time: American Big Tech are a vampire squid on the Western economies. They have a good product but they are tyrants. It would be good to break them up and make open fair systems. But the American top 10%, including most of Congress, put most of their savings in their stocks so it will never happen in the current system. Ever.

And now they are going all-in with AI. And I don't believe their official narrative. At all.

Comment by weeeeelp 16 hours ago

https://archive.is/T8VQC

Comment by darkwater 16 hours ago

You can just close the pop-up and read the entire article. At least it worked here.

Comment by dauertewigkeit 16 hours ago

I've been saying this since before Yanis was even a Greek MP. It's just so damn ironic that capitalism and free markets ended up building these huge corporations which are essentially planned economies at nation state scale.

Comment by nephihaha 15 hours ago

Well, he'd know being part of the system. Here is his WEF page. That door opens from the inside.

https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/

Comment by adrian_b 15 hours ago

Yes. As someone who has grown up in a country occupied by communists and who knows how much worse is that than anything that can be imagined by someone without firsthand experience, I can say that the claim which was frequent in Western propaganda that communism is something opposed to capitalism is completely false.

There is a great difference between theoretical communism and practical communism. Theoretical communism was just a bunch of lies without any relationship to the practical communism that was implemented in any of the countries claiming to attempt to realize a communist society.

On the other hand, practical communism has been everywhere something not opposite to capitalism, but something equivalent with the final stage of unregulated capitalism, where the big monopolies have won in every market, leaving no alternatives.

During the last 25 years I have been dismayed to watch every year how the Western societies become more and more alike to the communist societies that they had criticized vigorously a half of century ago.

Comment by petre 15 hours ago

Except everybody in the cabinaet disliked him.

https://www.politico.eu/article/alexis-tapis-yanis-varoufaki...

Comment by thrance 11 hours ago

It's only ironic if you don't understand that all of this is the logical endpoint of any capitalist economy. Accumulation of capital is the name of the game, and capital is power. At some point, the largest actors inevitably become untouchable. There can be no free market, they will always devolve into this plutocracy.

Comment by haunter 15 hours ago

Horseshoe theory strikes again. The end game of captialism and communism is the same authoritarian dictatorship

Comment by derelicta 16 hours ago

The most capitalist thing possibly happening at the heart of a capitalist empire is actually gobbunism guyz

Comment by js8 16 hours ago

Except the Soviet society wasn't very communist. It definitely wasn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...

Comment by nephihaha 16 hours ago

It was founded by Marxists to fulfil Marxist dogma. Either Soviet Marxism was not as predictive of reality as it liked to pretend to be or it compromised itself. Any system which says "my way or the highway", and that it alone is scientific, is inevitably going to lead to lead to oppression in practice whether it's Marxist dogma or the subject of this article.

Yanis Varoufakis himself attended private school and his father in law was one of the biggest industrialists in Greece. I'm sceptical about how much he knows about working class realities.

Comment by defrost 16 hours ago

For the purposes of discussing the article, Yanis's grasp of working class realities is moot; his thesis is that:

  From this perspective, just as the Soviet Union was a feudal-like industrial society pretending to be a workers’ state, the United States today is performing a splendid impersonation of a technofeudal state

Comment by nephihaha 16 hours ago

I don't agree with that interpretation either. The USA is not very feudal at all, yet. I live in a country which is still partly feudal and was even more feudal when I was a child. Ordinary Americans often have a very different attitude to life, less deferent to government than more feudal countries, and more independent minded.

It may well head towards technofeudalism, but I dispute that. With automation, the peasantry become dispensable to the ruling class and that isn't very feudal at all. Feudalism is a system where money and power flows upwards. In feudalism, the lords are dependent on the peasantry for food, goods and troops... Which is not the case when all these are provided by machines.

Comment by saubeidl 16 hours ago

That's a nice parallel to the article, which points out that the biggest fans of capitalism haven't managed to actually create their predicted free markets.

Pure ideology.

Comment by Hikikomori 16 hours ago

And when do something approaching free markets we get things like the Bengal and Irish famines.

Comment by nephihaha 15 hours ago

Bengal's famine occurred because British imperial government (not market forces) shifted food resources away to support the war effort. Ireland's famine occurred within a largely feudal system, and has been followed by massive land reforms within Ireland. It is arguable if either occurred due to "free market forces". For what it's worth, the massive famines in the USSR and PRC didn't take place due to free market forces either.

The problem with the free market vs Marxism argument is that they are both materialist. These systems know the price of things and real value of nothing.

Comment by nephihaha 15 hours ago

I cannot reply to the link in the Irish famine above. Very debatable if most of Ireland was "capitalist" at the time especially outside the cities. It was mostly feudal, with an anglicised (or effectively English) aristocracy and peasantry, operating in basically the same way that they had done in the Middle Ages.

Comment by saubeidl 15 hours ago

At least in the context of the Irish famine, capitalist policies were a key driver: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43910575

Comment by decimalenough 16 hours ago

Funny how no self-proclaimed Communist party has ever achieved anything even approximating communism.

Comment by saubeidl 16 hours ago

It's similar to the mythical "free market" in that way.

Comment by nephihaha 15 hours ago

The free market today (so called) is heavily managed by governments, leading to a kind of centralised control which converges with what Marxism produces in practice. Neither deliver what they promise.

Marxism (and capitalism) sell themselves as ground upwards movements but are in fact top down. They are both based around materialism which leads to a cynical attitude to life and individuals.

Comment by saubeidl 15 hours ago

That is precisely my point, that is the only type of free market to ever exist, because it's an ideological construct.

Comment by nephihaha 9 hours ago

The free market does exist, but not where it is supposed to. The black market sometimes acts as a free market... As do car boot/yard sales... Precisely because it is not interfered with by the authorities all the time. Putting everything online is going to increase government interference.

We are heading to a centralised command economy. Marxists want more of that, not less, but sell it as liberating the working classes.

Comment by derelicta 13 hours ago

Communism is no button you just have to push. It can be described as a society so prosperous that its members do not need to work anymore to live, where classes have been abolished and where the State has disappeared. It needs to be built and engineered. Countries like China and Vietnam are going in this right direction, and they are already more prosperous, more industrious and more democratic than their western adversaries despite starting from basically scratch

Comment by hagbard_c 16 hours ago

Soviet society was communist, don't fall for the real Communism has never been tried ruse. Soviet society was one of the examples of how Communism at a large scale can end up looking, others are e.g. Cambodia under Pol Pot, China under Mao, Cuba under Castro, Venezuela under Maduro, etc. The things these societies have in common is that they were/are repressive, that the Party/ the government claims it was/is working for 'the people' and that there was/is a clear distinction between Party members and the 'common folk' with the former having access to perks not available or allowed to the latter.

Communism at a large scale does not work because it goes against human nature - we're not bees or ants or other similar animals but rather belligerent primates with a cultural predilection for living in families and clans. It is there where Communism can work, at a small enough scale so that leechers and moochers can be put in their place and there is no (need for a) Party. As soon as the size of the Communi(ty) gets so large that any individual can no longer check on all of the others Commun(ism) no longer works since it offers far too many opportunities for less scrupulous individuals to leech of others and for ideologists to rise to power 'in service of the people'.

Comment by darkwater 16 hours ago

> Communism at a large scale does not work because it goes against human nature - we're not bees or ants or other similar animals but rather belligerent primates with a cultural predilection for living in families and clans.

And yet, we don't live as such animals and our collective behavior changed throughout history thanks to our reasoning capabilities taking over the inner "animal".

Comment by derelicta 12 hours ago

Tell that to China, Vietnam! Life's never been this sweet since they applied scientific socialism. It's been so successful there that Westerners are getting angry and they are accusing them of "flooding other markets" or of "overproduction". They caught up in less than 80 years! Imagine what they will be able to do in 50 years :)

Comment by _DeadFred_ 8 hours ago

The most capitalist thing possible/unregulated scenario happened and was called the East India Company.

Comment by demarq 16 hours ago

Hear me out. What if it’s not capitalism as a whole but one specific facet. Debt.

> In the liberal fantasy, spearheaded by Adam Smith, bakers, brewers and butchers laboured within markets so cut-throat that none could make more money than the bare minimum necessary to keep their small, family-owned businesses running.

In a cash only capitalism world that you can’t conspire to have more than you earn. You earn what the market earns.

But debt suspends capitalism long enough for someone to “beat” the market. And when capitalism resumes you have this perverse player operating under exceptional circumstances.

> Joseph Schumpeter … Progress he argued, is impossible in competitive markets. Growth needs monopolies to fuel it. How else can enough profit be earned to pay for expensive research and development

I know this to be false. Almost all the big tech companies consistently FAILED to bring about innovation through research. They instead had to acquire SMALLER companies and teams that had the innovation.

YouTube, Android, Instagram, WhatsApp etc…

And almost every other innovation was gained at the startup stage not the monopoly stage.

Uber, AirBnB etc..

Comment by charcircuit 15 hours ago

I think it's unfair to think that growing a small service or operating system to a billion users doesn't require innovation. The skills and requirements to grow a company from 1 to 1,000, 1,000 to 1,000,000, 1,000,000 to a 1,000,000,000 are going to be different. It makes sense to me that there are companies who specialize in growing companies of a particular size. And innovating around the problems of doing so.

How is youtube's recomendation system, automatic subtitles (including translation), or content id system not innovative? These were key technological improvements required for the service to grow to a massive size.

Comment by demarq 15 hours ago

A lot of that innovation benefits only YouTube . Also these other innovations (recommendation system, translations etc) existed before YouTube.

There are definitely innovations from the big companies but not “key” innovations.

In the article it looks at innovation from a national level. I.e new products and services, and methodology.

The scaling you describe is great but its only impact is within YouTube, and it’s not unique. Every other company of that size has also figured their own way to scale. No one was depending on YouTube for this.

Almost everything can be termed innovation, but we need to be mindful that we are trying to justify the existence of monopolies. Ie “society needs them otherwise we couldn’t figure it out”. With that the threshold for innovation increases quite a bit.

Comment by saubeidl 15 hours ago

When was the last time YouTube did anything innovative? Aren't they just an ossified bureaucracy now?

The Soviets, too, innovated. Sputnik shock and all that. But at some point the structures were just too rigid - just like they have become in Big Tech capitalism.

Comment by nephihaha 15 hours ago

Much of the Soviet space programme was down to the personal brilliance of Sergei Korolev and other such figures, and large dollops of intelligence taken from the Germans and the Americans. Definitely the greatest Soviet achievement, but Korolev died prematurely due to his time in a prison camp and their manufacturing sector often let them down.

YouTube is quite innovative, by the way, just not in the way it should be. Its comments sections change on a frequent basis allowing for ever more complex shadow banning and censorship systems. Its search algorithms also tend to exclude certain channels and big up others.

Comment by sebg 15 hours ago

I’d love to learn more about the Soviet Space programme. Short of asking my favorite LLM, are there any books / articles you’d recommend?

Comment by nephihaha 14 hours ago

I can't remember the titles offhand unfortunately. Bear in mind that a lot of details didn't come out until the 1990s due to Soviet censorship. The BBC did a great documentary on Korolev about thirty years ago when some details came out.

Whatever one thinks of the Soviet political system, they did have some great achievements. Some of the ones that people forget include first probe and first automated rover on the Moon, first space station, first probe on Mars, first rover and picture from Mars (albeit scrambled), also first pictures from the surface of another planet (Venus)

NASA tried to claim recently it had the first sound from another planet (Mars) and airborne probe (helicopter). The Soviets had already transmitted audio from Venus in the 1980s and had a balloon there.

Comment by sebg 6 hours ago

Thanks for the response. Lots of rabbit holes for my kids and I to explore. First up for this weekend is this -> "Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race" found here https://ihavenotv.com/cosmonauts-how-russia-won-the-space-ra....

> Whatever one thinks of the Soviet political system, they did have some great achievements.

So true. Kids and I are slowly working through the Gelfand correspondence course (math) and it's amazing.

Comment by saubeidl 15 hours ago

Do you not think the achievements of YT are down to the personal brilliance of its engineers?

And what you describe is fiddling with knobs at best, not actual new innovative features.

Comment by impossiblefork 15 hours ago

Surely though Schumpeter must have been right when it comes to new industrial projects where the technology is already well-understood, maybe research in universities or similar?

Comment by demarq 15 hours ago

Yes, there are a lot of situations where that is true. And as you say industrial projects, and I assume you specifically mean heavy industries, like building a new type of airliner. I agree.

But when it comes to information technology those situations are far and few in between.

Comment by impossiblefork 13 hours ago

Yes, but I think it also applies to things like transformer-doomscaling, as emphasized by OpenAI, for example.

Comment by nephihaha 15 hours ago

That's not really what Adam Smith proposes in "the Wealth of Nations" by the way.

Despite claims to the contrary, we live in a system where government and big business are coalescing. In fact, they make many decisions together behind closed doors at the World Economic Forum, which Yanis Varoufakis is a member of. (You don't get into Davos unless you are either a) invited from the inside or b) pay vast amounts of money to attend.)

https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/