by cribbles on 5/7/22, 11:47 AM with 153 comments
by lumost on 5/7/22, 3:39 PM
Seemingly the only times we haven't had feudal societies coincided with extreme disruption of the economic system such as occurred during the industrial revolution, the expansion of agricultural land in North America, or the rise of corporations in the 1600-1700s.
When economic growth falls to zero the economy becomes zero-sum. Why wouldn't individuals secure sinecures in the form of monopolies or mega corporations ownership?
by topynate on 5/7/22, 2:23 PM
Did he? It's absolutely nowhere on google or DDG except in Morozov's article. Yarvin's blog archives are all indexed.
"3 The ideas behind Feudl are described on Yarvin’s blog, Unqualified Reservations. Essentially, Google was not too feudal but too ‘woke’—too democratic."
Yeah, I call BS. Back in 2010 the word 'woke' (as an adjective) was practically unknown outside of AAVE and had no negative connotation.
by dopylitty on 5/7/22, 2:53 PM
That being said I think I understood enough to like to see more analysis of how the companies that depend on data extraction (Google,Facebook) themselves depend on actually productive companies. They are obligate parasites.
Google (for example) collects user data so it can sell targeted ads to companies that want to sell products to the users whose data was collected by Google. In the absence of these productive companies Google’s data is worthless. And similarly Google’s profit is directly tied to those upstream companies exploitation of their labor.
It seems like most analyses stop at the step where Google is making money from data and don’t really get into how that data is only valuable in the context of consumer goods, which are often produced by classically extractive or exploitative companies. The article’s “userism“ can’t exist in a vacuum.
That is also separate from companies that produce digital products for consumption and then profit off the “rent” of the intellectual property rights to those products.
by photochemsyn on 5/7/22, 3:18 PM
For example, one characteristic of a society divided into aristocrats and serfs (and lacking anything like the 'American middle class' of the 1960s) is a segregated educational system, with fundamentally different approaches for the posh vs. the proles. The various attacks on public schooling (like the effort to remove higher mathematics from public schools in California) and the elimination of state subsidies for higher education are certainly a step in that direction.
Another feature of this article is the lumping of all things 'capitalist' together, ignoring the very real distinction between commericial and investment capitalism, colloquially described as "Main Street" vs "Wall Street". Notably the latter is characterized by extreme concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a 'central committee' of Wall Street financiers; the former version of capitalism certainly has a much more distributed character in terms of wealth, power, land ownership etc.
Finally, this really is a 20th century argument that misses a fundamental characteristic of the 21st century: resource limitations. Regional water scarcity due to ongoing fossil-fueled global warming is a reality in many parts of the world, and this is more fundamental than ideological wrangling about societal structures. The resulting impacts on food production are physical and ecological in nature, not ideological - although the consequences could lead to things like the French Revolution, or the rise of authoritarian power to ensure food distribution (basically, that's China writ large).
I think the real split is going to be more about authoritarianism vs. libertarianism, and the libertarian track record on avoiding things like mass famine and consequent societal destabilization is perhaps not the best.
by Animats on 5/7/22, 6:44 PM
That's a property of feudalism, but societies with those properties are not necessarily feudal.
Feudalism is rule by local armed strongmen. The lower classes get protection from other strongmen in exchange for a cut of their resources. The strongmen can be warlords, drug cartels, military, or cops. Feudalism tends to result in clashes between local strongmen, and, often, consolidation when someone wins. That's how nations are usually created.
Economic oppression is common in feudal societies, but not limited to it. Capitalism offers more efficient ways to achieve economic oppression.
The paper goes off into classical Marxist analysis. The trouble with Marx as a guide is that he wrote in an era of direct labor. Output was a result of the routine efforts of the proletariat. Wealth was the result of taking a cut of those efforts. The inputs from labor exceeded those of capital.
Today, you look at a balance sheet, and "cost of goods sold", which includes direct labor, is often a minor item. Marketing and G&A often exceed cost of goods sold. This turns the assumptions of Marxism upside down. In many industries, a majority of corporate expenditure is devoted to battling competition and changing things, rather than just making the product. This breaks not just Marxism but much of classical economics.
It's what drives industries towards monopoly today. It's not about having the biggest, most productive steel mill. It's about establishing market dominance so you don't have to compete on price. Or on wages.
Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" notes "Avoid competition as much as possible." That's the key idea here.
This is not feudalism. It's oligopoly. In some ways it's worse. In a feudal culture, the strongmen have some obligation to provide protection for their peasants. Oligopolists have no such obligation.
by rgrieselhuber on 5/7/22, 12:53 PM
From the article:
"Some sixty years ago, Habermas did pioneering work in this field in The Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). On his—not undisputed—account, the early-bourgeois public sphere could be seen in London’s coffee houses, important locales for the development of emancipatory discourse. Tamed by capitalists, its imperatives were then tied to those of the culture industry and its advertising complex. As a result, pre-modern, private power structures and hierarchies reemerged in what he termed the ‘re-feudalization of the public sphere’, indicating the zigzag dynamics of modernity. While Habermas eventually distanced himself from the concept of ‘refeudalization’, preferring ‘colonization of the lifeworld’ instead, some in Germany have recently recovered it."
The acceptance of individual consciousness represented by the emergence of the bourgeois class as it manifested in the 19th and 20th centuries was quickly coopted, in particular, after WWII by the Cold War dialectic.
In order to prove you weren't a Communist, you had to be the most Capitalistic, which made it very easy to hide the difference between the Main Street capitalism of small and medium businesses and multinational, monopolistic, crony-Capitalism. The results of that one confusion are readily apparent in the political dialogue of our times.
by SpicyLemonZest on 5/7/22, 2:39 PM
by tlholaday on 5/7/22, 5:40 PM
by robertlagrant on 5/7/22, 2:40 PM
by bsedlm on 5/7/22, 7:44 PM
I would frame this using "government by men" speaking words at each other in contrast with "government by laws" i.e. men writing legally between them... i.e. orality vs literacy
This is important because of the relation between literacy and computability
> Bosses may have had a role under Fordism, but modern cognitive workers need them no more
in summary your boss was a man, then it became a written document (laws), and now it's become a computer run algorithm
> Techno-féodalisme argues that the rise of intangibles, usually concentrated at the most profitable points of the global value chain, led to the emergence of four new types of rent
two of them are more difficult to understand (I paraphrase):
innovation rents, which refers to valuable data sets that are the exclusive property of these firms
the technological capabilities to make this non-exclusive is here
and intangibles-differential rents refers to the ability of firms inside a single value chain to scale up their operations
If I understand correctly, this is possible because internet infrastructure is already non-exclusive
At the root of the issue, pretending that "intangibles"" are commodities and thus to enforce that they are treated as exclusive physical artifacts (merchandise) is to waste the potential of the internet (or, more cynically, to make a play to capture it privately)
This issue is even more complicated due to the distinction (or lack of) between "exploiting" and "harvesting" (with the assumption that one harvests what one has sown) digital assets; specifically "co-created" (i.e. aggregated) data of the like that gives facebook and google such a strong position in the "competitive market".
Why should "big tech" be allowed to keep their vast data troves private?
On one hand, there's no real technological limitation to the exclusivity of their intangible data-troves.
On the other hand, there's something to notice about how such exclusive concentration of data/knowledge generates a great amount of social and political power.
IMO, this is the strongest reason behind the drive to keep intangibles as exclusive; the power generated by their exclusivity and the use of such power to capture (privatize) energy and resources.
this is why sometimes I think that all of culture (specially contemporary academic culture) is but an elaborate ploy to rationalize away the grim realities of extractive post-imperialistic societies (states)
Finally, I argue my position that it's now crucial to deeply question old historical positions around the nature of property (and ownership); and hence, of markets and society, based on the magnitude of what the computer revolution truly entails. In my mind (biased by me being a millennial), computers are an innovation on the scale of writing (and thus, of law). The only other innovation I can think of in an even larger scale is that of ownership over land (which I consider as civilization itself).
by mberning on 5/7/22, 2:28 PM
by baryphonic on 5/7/22, 5:11 PM
Climate change: The Soviet Union was a horrible polluter, and this was well-documented.[0] When adjusted for GDP, the USSR emitted 1.5x the pollution of the US. It was worse when adjusted per capita. The CCP has also been a horrible polluter, though has made some improvements after adopting market-oriented reforms. Capitalist liberal governments have balked at treating CO2 like a pollutant, but their economies have also done far more to advance technology like electric vehicles or alternative energy than their socialist counterparts.
Inequality: Yep, this one seems like a consequence of capitalism. Though left-wing governments that adopt market reforms see inequality as well. Inequality seems likely correlated with discretionary bureaucracy (particularly "clientelism"), a hallmark of socialist and progressive governance.[1]
Police brutality: Police brutality hasn't increased since 2015.[2] Even police violence (including incidents where officers were clearly justified in using force) is flat.
Deadly pandemic: Pandemics have been deadly throughout the history of civilization, long before the last couple hundred years of capitalism. Capitalism produced the vaccine in record time; many of the excess deaths were associated with central planning.[3] Scientific experts, the would-be rulers under progressivism, had an abysmal record at predictions & decision-making during the pandemic.[4]
None of these is a slam dunk the author thinks it is.
[0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/095937...
[1]https://www.edgs.northwestern.edu/documents/working-papers/h...
[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
[3]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56091682
[4]https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/18/pandemic-social-science...
by platz on 5/7/22, 3:29 PM
> Ultimately, though, the popularity of feudal-speak is a testament to intellectual weakness, rather than media savviness. It is as if the left’s theoretical framework can no longer make sense of capitalism without mobilizing the moral language of corruption and perversion.
* downvoters - im sorry you dont like what the authors have to say.