Episode 206 - Transcript

So we’ve been talking a lot lately… about some of the problems we’re dealing with in the modern world. 

The ways that different philosophers are diagnosing what they think the problems are. The ways they think we could be moving beyond them. 

And one of the CULPRITS of all these problems, a NAME that KEEPS coming up in these conversations…is our good old friend, Dr. Benjamin J. CAPITALISM. 

These philosophers.. just CAN’T seem to get that name out of their mouth. They CAN’T STOP bringing UP the fact…that the PROBLEMS we’re dealing with…MIGHT have SOMETHING to do with the economic, political and religious organization of people’s lives… that we OFTEN just politely call Capitalism, as complex of a thing as that’s proven to BE sometimes. 

Seems like it may be something MORE than that at OTHER times. 

But ONE perspective that hasn’t been COVERED yet…that seems VERY necessary to be  MENTIONED as part of these conversations…what if we aren’t even LIVING in a Capitalist system anymore? And what if we’re FOCUSED on the wrong things BECAUSE of that?

Or as it was PUT by the philosopher/economist Yanis Varoufakis recently…we KNOW things have CHANGED when it comes to technology and the economy in the last couple decades…but what if things have transformed SO MUCH…that if you look AROUND you and you pay attention to the way politics and the economy is actually STRUCTURED…Capitalism is dead, it’s BEEN dead…and what is ACTUALLY going on…is we’ve entered into a BRAND NEW AGE, that’s structured ENTIRELY DIFFERENT than before…an age of what he calls Technofeudalism. 

I mean if that were TRUE…then again it just needs to be said: SEEMS like something that’s necessary to TALK about here. We KNOW the world is always changing into something new… we know it NEVER stays COMPLETELY still in terms of dialectics. And we KNOW that there’s no GUARANTEES out there that the world is going to stay the same thing long enough for us to SOLVE the problems being CREATED by it before it evolves into something ELSE. 

So in THAT sense it’s ENTIRELY POSSIBLE… for you to live MOST of your LIFE RAILING against the EVILS of something like monopoly capitalism…only to get to the END of your life and REALIZE, wow…I’ve been chasing a ghost this entire time. See if these philosophers are talking about how to make things better…then it’s CRUCIAL… that we have a REAL understanding of what the problem IS that we’re DEALING with.

And what if instead of CAPITALISM…what if we’re actually living in something that MORE closely resembles the power structures of the FEUDAL system of the middle ages?

Well FIRST reaction you might EXPECT to all that could be NO. That’s OBVIOUSLY not true. And my evidence to SUPPORT that… is to just look all around me– at all the capitalism. Look at the trade agreements we have. Look at the stock exchange. Look at the EXPANSION of people starting their own little small businesses. For the love of god look at the DATING world: no matter WHERE you look around you…you see at least the LOGIC of capitalism embedded into it. How could we be possibly LIVING in a world that ISN’T capitalist?  

But Yanis Varoufakis would say hold on a minute. CONSIDER what it would’ve been like for someone at the end of the FEUDAL system… when CAPITALISM was replacing IT. 

For example: imagine getting in a time machine and going back to the year 1776, say in the city of London. You’d step out of that time machine…and you would SEE the evidence of FEUDALISM…all around you. You’d see feudalism in the house of lords, house of commons, in the government. You’d see peasants still working the land, you’d see aristocrats still being all Aristocratic like they do. 

And YET he says…what WE KNOW about the state of the world in 1776, the year Adam Smith publishes the Wealth of Nations…is that Feudalism…had already DIED. It would take YEARS for the transition to be fully COMPLETE, slowly at first, but then ever more QUICKLY over the years, but for ANYBODY that KNEW the future or could SEE it COMING because they were paying ATTENTION. Feudalism was already dead. Here is Yanis Varoufakis saying something very similar: that Capitalism…is already dead. 

And to nail down exactly what he means it’s IMPORTANT to understand what distinguished capitalism from feudalism in the FIRST place. During FEUDALISM…power PRIMARILY lied in the hands of the people that own the LAND. 

Meaning IN the feudal system: LORDS were the HIGHEST level of power, they controlled GIANT pieces of land…VASSALS were the sort of mid level management of the setup, that were granted CONTROL over portions of that land in exchange for military service should the Lords ever need it, and the SERFS were the peasants who WORKED the land, in exchange for personal security from the VASSALS and a home to LIVE in. The WHOLE THING worked TOGETHER Point is though: POWER in this sort of setup, AGAIN, LIES in the hands of those that control the LAND. 

But when CAPITALISM comes along…the power… SHIFTS, because of the CHANGING economic structure… into the hands of the people that OWN the means of production now. The people with the PROPERTY. The people that own the MACHINERY that OTHER people can OPERATE to produce for them surplus value. In other words: to be someone controlling the means of production…is NOW what makes you a member of the ruling class in this new capitalist world. 

ONE LAST important thing to note here that we HAVE to remember about capitalism, that distinguishes it from the feudal system…Yanis Varoufakis says ALONG with this CHANGE in terms of how you hold the most power: there are TWO MAIN characteristics of capitalism…that are ALWAYS in CAPITALISM. Those are: MARKETS on the one hand. And PROFITS on the other. No matter WHAT kind of capitalist society you LIVE in…Markets and Profits are going to be two PILLARS that MAKE the entire setup possible.

But he says to CONTRAST that reality… with the TYPE of situation we’re ACTUALLY living in today: one example the he likes to use to show all the differences here…is to CONSIDER what happens whenever you BUY something off of Amazon. 

Because as HE says when you ENTER Amazon.com…you are EXITING capitalism. You are entering INTO a NEW sort of place, where markets…no longer exist.

Sure, Amazon may LOOK like a market on the surface, but what it REALLY is is a digital platform, where an algorithm is CONNECTING buyers and sellers. And there’s a BIG DIFFERENCE there between those two things. 

The FIRST indicator that this isn’t an actual market should be…that there’s ONE GUY, that essentially owns ALL of it. Some guy named Jeff, Yanis says. Jeff Bezos. 

See in TRADITIONAL capitalism… markets… are about people coming together, in a competitive environment, engaging in VOLUNTARY exchanges, for the sake of mutual benefit. THOSE are the conditions that are necessary… for a MARKET to perform the functions of a MARKET. 

But that’s NOT ACTUALLY what Amazon.com IS or even ASPIRES to be in THEORY. This guy Jeff, Yanis says… doesn’t MANUFACTURE all the stuff he sells on his website. He doesn’t have any INTEREST in making all the products that get sold like a traditional capitalist: HIS goal…is to use his algorithm he’s developed…to CONNECT sellers, to buyers… and then to take a FEE for USING his algorithm… as payment. Sometimes up to 40% depending on how targeted the algorithm was in connecting the customer to the business.

So CONSIDER what sort of situation that creates: When YOU go to Amazon and you type in binoculars or electric bicycle into the search bar. YOU…get DIFFERENT results than I do. And I get different results than my neighbor next door, who gets different results than your GRANDMA does…Jeff Bezos determines the RESULTS of what comes up on your grandma’s screen, and quite frankly hasn’t that woman been through enough already, just having you to deal with? 

In all seriousness think of what this means: We have ONE GUY, that essentially, NOT ONLY determines WHO is allowed to BUY or SELL stuff on his platform. But ALSO: what you can even SEE… as the OPTIONS… for you to buy. 

Meaning if for WHATEVER REASON it DOESN’T benefit him or Amazon for you to see a particular product…you just WON’T SEE it. 

But that’s…NOT a market… Yanis says. That’s BYPASSING markets. What that LOOKS like he says: is more of a SOVIET style economic setup… where buyers and sellers can’t even TALK to each other and coordinate transactions.

MORE than that: it would be ONE thing if this ALGORITHM was rigging things in the favor of the sellers against the buyers. THAT would at least be an old fashioned, garden variety MONOPOLY that we’ve seen time and time again. It would be QUAINT. 

No, THIS setup…DOESN’T even rig things in favor of the SELLERS. And it CERTAINLY is not selecting, to make sure that you got the best pair of binoculars or the best electric bike you possibly COULD…NO, the algorithm HERE is selecting… for what MAXIMIZES that FEE…that JEFF, skims off the TOP of every transaction. 

That’s…the BUSINESS MODEL…of Amazon. And as Yanis says: the level of exploitation there…BOGGLES the mind. Just cracks me up the way he says that. 

Because to PUT this another way: Amazon is charging RENT… to the sellers on its website to be able to USE their digital platform and algorithm. And to extend this to the METAPHOR of how the power structure of the feudal system worked: 

Amazon OWNS the digital platform and algorithm that acts as the LAND…SELLERS, COME to the land owner, and act as VASSALS used to in the middle ages, by paying a RENTAL FEE to the LANDOWNERS to be able to do business. And then WE…the VAST MAJORITY of people…BECOME the unpaid laborers that make the whole system POSSIBLE…we are the SERFS or the PEASANTS. Because with every time we USE one of these BIG TECH SERVICES for free…with every google search, with every email you send, with every picture you post on instagram, with JUST your PHONE sitting in your POCKET constantly connected to google maps…YOU and YOUR DATA BECOME…the UNPAID SERF that TRAINS the algorithms, that then further train you, so that YOU can further train them to be able to PERFECTLY predict and manufacture…every desire you could possibly have. The FEES that sellers PAY to USE the software that allows them to reach buyers…becomes the equivalent of GROUND rent that vassals paid to the lords during the middle ages…only NOW for yanis varoufakis…he doesn’t call this GROUND rent…he calls it CLOUD rent. 

Now this is OBVIOUSLY NOT… a TRADITIONAL capitalist setup: it’s changed in VERY significant WAYS. And at the risk of this seeming like we’re picking on Amazon here it’s IMPORTANT to point out: this is the SAME GENERAL STRATEGY that SO MANY OTHER big tech companies use as well. UBER…fundamentally creates NOTHING, really. They own software and an ALGORITHM…that they RENT OUT to the SELLERS (the people driving) to be able to find the buyers (the people that need rides). 

INSTAGRAM as ANOTHER example…fundamentally creates NOTHING, really. PEOPLE create the content…THEY upload their photos and vidoes, for FREE. INSTAGRAM is just the algorithm that promotes YOUR STUFF…and then finds ways to make it more addictive for people to stay on the app.

And you’ll see this same setup ALL OVER big tech Yanis says. 

The GENERAL idea is this: that in TECHNOFEUDALISM…to OWN the means of production anymore…is NOT the way you seize the most power in the world. Because as HE says: EVEN the people that OWN the means of production in our NEW world…are often BEHOLDEN to the people that own the means of behavioral modification. And THAT… is the NEW form of power that DEFINES technofeudalism. To BE part of the NEW ruling class of CLOUD CAPITALISTS…is to OWN the MEANS of behavior modification, so that you can then ENDLESSLY charge RENT, and SKIM FEES off of the top of the people that actually PRODUCE things in the world. And the reality is: that with each day that passes…a greater and greater percentage of commerce and the resources in the world around us are under the CONTROL…of this new CLASS that’s emerged, of Cloud Capitalists. 

So, just to clarify: those TWO PILLARS of capitalism that were markets and profits...are gone now. MARKETS in this new world have been replaced by digital platforms. And PROFITS and innovation have been replaced by RENTAL FEES and the MASS printing of MONEY at the level of the central banks.

Which…makes this a pretty good time in the episode to talk about some IMPORTANT pieces of why Yanis thinks all this happened in the FIRST place. First of all…Yanis…is the former minister of finance for the country of Greece. He was PARTICULARLY involved in the negotiations in the years following the 2008 financial crisis, so THAT is the world he’s operating in for the sake of context. 

And as someone HIGH UP in the discussions that are going ON at the time…he says he was in the white house talking to President Obama one day…which…TOTAL name drop by the way, I mean we GET it Yanis, you KNOW the president…anyway he says Obama at the time RAN on this PLATFORM of hope and change and how in 2008 we’re in a WORST financial disaster since the great depression, as Obama says LARGELY due to the neoliberal economic policy that GOT us into the situation in the first place, and OBAMA said that he was going to CHANGE the policy and CREATE an economy that worked more to the benefit of the working class. 

Now to Yanis Varoufakis…Barack Obama did NOTHING of the sort. To Yanis 2008 will be looked BACK on as a PIVOTAL moment in modern history… where the right confluence of events went down where there was enough frustration among the people to actually lead to REAL political changes…in fact Yanis has an entire book he wrote in 2020 called Another Now… where it’s an alternative TIMELINE of the recent past where in 2008 the world economy actually collapses this time around…and on the other side of it, in the book, society is rebuilt in another way, his book lays out how he would DO it. 

But anyway: to him…THESE WERE the STAKES of the events of 2008…this could’ve been a time when EVERYTHING CHANGES…but instead he says he was having a conversation with Obama AROUND 2008…and he was essentially APOLOGIZING to Yanis he was saying hey look, I HAD to save the banks. The banks are like the ARTERIES of the economy…you let the BANKS fail and the ENTIRE SYSTEM goes down WITH it. To which Yanis said he thought yeah, you NEED to save the banks for sure…but that DOESN’T mean you have to save the bankers too. 

Because what HAPPENED AFTER 2008, is we got a combination of two things Yanis says: we got AUSTERITY measures for the PUBLIC…that’s you and me. Combined with the GREATEST LIQUIDITY event in the HISTORY OF CAPITALISM…for the people at the head of industry.

In more everyday terms what this MEANS…is that the PEOPLE trying to SURVIVE back in 2008 got to just tighten their belts, cut back on their spending, live off of savings if they had any, and just sit around and pray for the economy to recover soon. It was a JOYOUS time to be had by all of us. 

But then the central BANKS…got to just PRINT MONEY. Which, people say PRINT MONEY…but more accurately, what they mean is they got to just digitally credit their accounts with TRILLIONS of dollars. About $35 TRILLION DOLLARS in total, Yanis says. 

Now that money…is SUPPOSED to go on and do great things: you make it AVAILABLE for people…it’s supposed to create a situation where banks are capable of giving MORE loans at LOWER INTEREST RATES to hopefully stimulate investments and save the economy. 

But the REALITY of the situation as most of us KNOW…is that it was mostly BIG CORPORATIONS that were able to access that money. It was called quantitative EASING…at the time. We’re going to EASE the negative impact the decline is having on the economy…by printing ASTRONOMICAL quantities of money. Again if the GOAL to pull an economy out of a recession is to stimulate investment…then by MAKING all this money AVAILABLE the HOPE is that these big companies will use it to INVEST in products or services that get the economy MOVING again.

But in REALITY what happens Yanis says…is that companies GET this MASSIVE injection of capital…and most of them DIDN’T actually invest it in new products or services. And I mean can you blame them? If you’re General Motors why would you invest billions of dollars into five new CARS that you want to develop…when the reality of the public at the time is that nobody has any money to buy a new car anyway? 

So what these companies REALLY did is they took out these loans… and they went to the financial markets. They bought back their stock, they bought BONDS, they bought FINANCIAL assets… that aren’t really INVESTING in any physical goods for the future. ALL OF THEM DID THIS, Yanis says. Except for ONE industry in particular. The TECH industry. 

Did you know that 9 out of every 10 dollars spent to develop Facebook or Meta into the company it eventually became…was TAKEN from this central bank printed money? Yeah, he says that’s not specific to just Facebook either…there’s MANY giant tech companies that you would know the names of with VERY SIMILAR STORIES to THAT one. 

And you can imagine how it happened. Our economy is on the verge of collapse. Big tech is one of the most PROMISING industries we HAVE, we’re already LIVING in an age of neoliberal deregulation…why would the government use THIS…as an opportunity… to GET IN THE WAY of the companies that people think are maybe capable of saving us. No, in true neoliberal fashion… the governments became essentially an EMPLOYEE of the tech industry, working for their GROWTH. So the tech industry USES this position…to spend the money they get and invest it into PHYSICAL assets…they invest in server farms, they invest it in fiber optics, digital infrastructure, they invest in the production of the resources that would eventually lead to what we NOW know as technofeudalism. 

So as Yanis Varoufakis says the WAY it’s LIKELY the history books are gonna be written…is that CAPITALISM…eventually became the thing that KILLED Capitalism. Because NEOLIBERAL deregulation combined with the BIGGEST liquidity event in the HISTORY of the world…CREATED the CONDITIONS…for a veritable FEUDAL system to EMERGE from WITHIN it. 

Now KNOWING this…it’s IMPORTANT we understand some of the CHANGES that go on in the ECONOMY when something like this HAPPENS. Remember: markets and profits…NO LONGER perform the same functions as they used to during the age of monopoly capitalism.

Markets, as we’ve seen, have been replaced by digital platforms. And PROFITS…are NO LONGER the ENGINE that DRIVES the economic model forward…profits are NO LONGER the SIGNAL for an INVESTOR… that it’s a good time for them to be INVESTING in a particular company. In fact in SOME cases… it’s the OPPOSITE now to Yanis…because the entire LOGIC of INVESTING has been RECONFIGURED around the MONEY that’s being regularly printed by these central banks. He gives an example of this happening in the REAL world: 

He says on the 12th of August 2020…9 o clock in the morning… the news comes out in london that the national income of britain, the GDP had fallen by more than 20%. Now that had never happened before in the history of capitalism; british GDP falling by 20%. Now based on the logic of the capitalism we USED to live under…the result of this SHOULD be PANDEMONIUM in the streets, at the VERY least a good solid conniption fit or panic by investors everywhere. But THEN he says: about 15 or 16 minutes later after this news was announced…the london stock exchange…goes UP by 3%. 

Now as HE says: “There can be NO explanation of that…. along the lines of capitalism.” Something ELSE…had to be going on, and HERE’S what it WAS to him. Since 2008…CAPITALISM has been KEPT ALIVE…by an IV drip, of central bank money. And Companies for DECADES at this point… have gotten USED to the fact that when DIFFICULT economic moments come around…the central banks are going to reliably PANIC…and then they’re gonna start printing more money. 

So if you’re an INVESTOR the logic makes perfect sense. WHEN the GDP goes DOWN…THAT becomes a good time for you to BUY. Because you KNOW the central banks are going to be printing more money and artificially propping up the economy. 

This is just ONE of the fundamental ways the economy CHANGES when we FIND ourselves in a technofeudal setup. ANOTHER big change that occurs…is that remember how we talked about before that in technofeudalism, more and more of a percentage of the economy is going to be made up of those RENTAL fees as opposed to real products or services being provided to people.

Well WHEN that HAPPENS, Yanis says…think of what it’s DOING. Less and LESS of the ECONOMY…is made UP of money CIRCULATING as people engage in mutually beneficial transactions, in other words: there’s an economic ENERGY, that would NORMALLY BE there, contributing to the health of the economy, that is no longer there in technofeudalism. It’s all tied up in RENTAL fees. 

And there’s MULTIPLE things that blossom OUT of this as a RESULT of that: the PEOPLE on the ground level feel a deterioration of the strength of the economy, despite the GDP continuing to stay the same or go up. Governments…become more fiscally stressed trying to compensate for it. Central banks need to CONSTANTLY keep printing money to try to keep capitalism alive on this IV drip, but then they find themselves NOT ABLE to print money fast enough. 

In fact EVERYTHING… about the way the economy is set up is more fragile…when people have 1. more precarious forms of employment, working for what are essentially algorithm RENTAL companies…and 2. less access to purchasing what Yanis calls “durables”...things like houses that allow for people to plan for future events in their lives. 

The WHOLE THING LEADS for him…to a deterioration in the living standards of the average person…where there ISN’T an easy explanation anymore to people for why this is all happening under the logic of the capitalism they’re used to. No, it would take an understanding of this TECHNOFEUDAL setup… that’s ACTUALLY dominating the macroeconomics of people’s lives. 

And this FAILURE in education…what THAT LEADS to then in the average PERSON he thinks…is something quite understandable but undeniably HORRIBLE. It leads to people desperately seeking an explanation… for why their lives are not going very well financially…and instead of blaming the DECADES of FAILED policy from the liberal, democratic establishment, which YANIS thinks is the ACTUAL culprit here…people INSTEAD sometimes start to blame groups of people from WITHIN a society. For Yanis Varoufakis: literal DECADES of discontent from failed policy…eventually FOSTERS in people things like xenophobia, racism, sexism, or anything ELSE that seems to be an INTERNAL explanation for all the problems in a society.

 DECADES of discontent with ZERO accountability…creates literal Nazis to Yanis Varoufakis. 

And THIS IS the explanatory LINK…to the rise of populism on BOTH sides of the political spectrum in recent years ALL OVER the world. Yanis has an interesting point he makes about populist candidates…in GENERAL.

He says there’s this assumption…that there’s some kind of ETERNAL CONFLICT, or a WAR that’s going on between the bad ESTABLISHMENT candidates on the ONE hand…and the POPULIST candidates on the other. THAT’S the ASSUMPTION people make. 

But he says that’s NOT ACTUALLY THE CASE…if you pay close attention. In reality he says…the populist and the establishment candidates… always NEED each other. Because OBVIOUSLY the populist candidate would have no need to even EXIST if it wasn’t for the establishment being BAD and not serving people’s needs in the FIRST place. 

So the populist NEEDS the establishment for SURE…but as Yanis says: what’s ALSO true…is that the BAD ESTABLISHMENT candidates…ALWAYS NEED the POPULISTS. Because otherwise he says…who could they ever POSSIBLY stand a chance of WINNING an ELECTION against…if NOT the joke of a POPULIST candidate that a lot of people are already terrified of? So, again, in REALITY Yanis says: it’s NOT that these two are at WAR with each other…the establishment and the populist…actually end up HELPING each other and allowing each other to stick around longer than they OTHERWISE would.

Now lets start talking about some solutions to all this in the eyes of Yanis Varoufakis. Because one thing that I think might instantly come up in people’s minds after hearing something like TECHNOFEUDALISM…is that man I THOUGHT thing were bad before…but congratulations, you’ve actually managed to make things even WORSE than they were, Yanis. Congratulations.

In fact: technofeudalism has become a bit of a feather in the cap of a lot of the more thoughtful brands of conspiracy theorists out there, and for UNDERSTANDABLE reasons. WHO would EVER want to GO BACK to a POWER structure that’s IMPORTED from the middle ages? To be TOLD you’re living under the thumb of ROYALTY…it just SOUNDS like a pretty bad thing to HEAR when you think you’re living in a democracy. 

But see, ONE important DIFFERENCE when it comes to the relationship between the citizens and the people in power today…IS that possibility… for democratic participation. And in many ways the fact that we’re not ACTUALLY IN the feudal system…ends up changing a LOT about our options moving forward. What I’m saying is that: in a weird way…there’s a HOPEFULNESS you can start to FEEL…when you finally have an ACCURATE understanding of the problem that you’re trying to solve. 

So the FIRST thing that needs to be said then when we’re talking about possible solutions here…is that Yanis is NOT saying that in RESPONSE to technofeudalism…that we should be GETTING AWAY from all this technology and telling people not to USE it. 

He makes it VERY clear that he is bringing ZERO negativity to ANY of the PEOPLE out there that are taking ADVANTAGE of these digital platforms and algorithms. He says in terms of us IDENTIFYING what the real problems are…how can I get mad at someone for being ADDICTED to the machine…I am addicted to it he says. 

These services are INCREDIBLE. OF COURSE we want to find a way to make these things possible. And JUST because they’re creating problems right now at the beginning of all this DOESN’T mean we should be getting RID of them. 

He compares it to when capitalism overtook FEUDALISM again. He says imagine if back then, when people saw the problems that might come up with capitalism…imagine if Adam Smith at that point said welp…shut ‘em down! Let’s all stop using MACHINES, because there’s some potential PROBLEMS we’re gonna have to work out. It’s like no. Let’s CONTEND with these problems, AS human beings do… and lets try to find a way to make these things actually WORK for people…something that DOESN’T necessarily just fall into place NATURALLY. 

Now, it NEEDS to be said: Yanis CERTAINLY has PLENTY of ideas for how to restructure society that would land him more in the camp of POST-CAPITALISM, along the lines of what we were talking about with Mark Fisher. For the SAKE of clarity: he DOES think eventually we NEED to move beyond capitalism…or else, quite frankly, we’re going to DIE as he says. 

But since we’re talking about ways to move forward from WITHIN the current system as it STANDS: ONE idea he has to help break up the CONTROL that these tech companies have on our behavior, this digital SERFDOM…is to place a BAN…on the FREE versions of these SERVICES FROM big tech companies.

And that may sound like a STRANGE thing when you first hear it: like why would anybody ever want to pay money for something instead of getting it for free? Well mostly to Yanis because: it’s already NOT FREE to you. It just doesn’t cost you any MONEY right now.

What he’s SAYING here is something that MOST people already know full well: that whenever you use a FREE search engine or FREE email or facebook, instagram, tiktok, maps…ALL of these things are not ACTUALLY free…you pay for these services… in data. 

THIS IS… THE BUSINESS MODEL, of MANY big TECH company. This has become a HALLMARK of our TIMES that people WILLINGLY participate in and then act UPSET when they are made aware that its going on: tech based businesses TRADE their FREE services for important information about you. 

And having TALKED about it on this podcast before: KNOWING what we know about the possibility, some would say the REALITY of us LIVING in a digital panopticon…Yanis says we CAN NOT LET this…CONTINUE to BE STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE. It CAN NOT be the NORM, to Yanis Varoufakis…that companies can make their service available for free, attract as MANY people as possible, HARVEST DATA from those people, and then use it against them to have a tyrannical level of manipulation over people’s behavior.

But of COURSE the COMPANIES will say BACK to all this hey, GET all that…but this also isn’t just a CHARITY, though. I didn’t stay up all night coding for months on end and make this algorithm just because I love connecting people to their next pair of binoculars. It’s not a labor of LOVE of mine. We can’t just offer the best search engine in the world for FREE…and the WAY we make it work is we gotta take a little bit of your DATA and then THAT becomes the way that we make money! 

So HERE’S Yanis’s point: one possible way OUT of that he thinks…is to ban the ability for companies to have FREE services…and make the NEW standard operating procedure for companies… to move to a model more based around microtransactions. Where INSTEAD, maybe USING something like a search engine would cost someone a couple cents per search…but then there’d BE no justification for companies to harvest the DATA that allows them to control the means of behavior modification that leads to Technofeudalism. 

Now an obvious OBJECTION to this could be, well what about the people that can’t AFFORD a few cents every time they search for something. Do they just NOT get to use the internet? What about the people that are in a place in life where they have $6.78 cents in their bank account until they get paid tomorrow…and they are literally calling online banking to check their balance to make sure they’re gonna be able to afford the bag of chips they’re getting for lunch. I mean this is not an unheard of situation for people not making much and alot of us have been in a place like that before. 

Well in THOSE sorts of cases Yanis thinks…something like Social Security services should be able to step up for people where they could apply and get assistance for this access to information: the OVERALL THINKING BEING…that as a society: we LIVE in the world right now, we can LOOK AROUND US…we’ve lived long enough to SEE the COST of companies having this tyrannical level of control over people’s behavior and data…and if we’re JUST weighing options: a small amount of people getting government assistance to be able to access this stuff… is just a BETTER alternative than what we have right now. 

ANOTHER thing to CONSIDER here… about the general ways that Yanis Varoufakis is thinking about these relationships between technology, and the PEOPLE in a given society…is that he thinks these technological INVENTIONS, LIKE the smartphone or server farms, or really WHATEVER it is…ALL of these are inventions that HE thinks are standing on the shoulders of giants. And that’s a key REFRAMING of what technology even IS to human beings… that at least needs to be mentioned here as part of this conversation.

You know, Steve Jobs when he’s in charge of the team that invented the IPhone at Apple…he did not…you know, RENOUNCE his life in human society, move out into the woods, build a yurt, live in it, eating squirrels and then start working on his blueprints for making the iPhone. No, ASIDE from obviously all the rest of the people on his team…to Yanis: he and ALL of us, inherit upon birth, a HUGE amount of work and science that has been DONE before we were even born. 

Breakthroughs in chemistry, in physics, in engineering…the kinds of breakthroughs that someone who invents a new piece of technology RELIES on HEAVILY to be able to invent it…but the KEY POINT to REMEMBER here… is that MANY of these BREAKTHROUGHS… are the result of government subsidized research. 

So to put it in another way to make Yanis’s point: YOUR tax dollars are being spent to subsidize this research…then people USE the results of that research to invent a new technology, they patent it, they build a company around it, and then a digital panopticon is the potential result of that whole process. 

Or as Yanis says: “Every invention is collectively produced, and then privately appropriated.”

And WITHOUT turning this into some black and white thing where Yanis is saying that we shouldn’t allow for people to be rewarded for inventing great stuff: can we AT LEAST EXPLORE the terrain of this conversation…where we CONSIDER…are there technologies or inventions…that are just not SAFE for people to be able to patent and build a company around in the FIRST place. Should people be able to invent something, patent the technology, and then literally control people’s lives and THINKING with it?

The example Yanis likes to use here in these conversations is the invention of Wi-Fi. True story if you don’t already know it’s interesting: Wifi was ORIGINALLY created by people working for a government funded organization called CSIRO in the country of Australia. TAX dollars are what created wifi. 

And the STORY goes that when people in Australia  originally came up with Wifi they said to everyone AY, hold on to your budgie smugglas we got wi-fi for you now. That’s actually why they PICKED the name WIFI…it sounds so GOOD in an Australian accent. POINT IS: when they CAME UP with wifi, they MADE that technology available for people and RELEASED it into the commons. 

Wifi in other words is public domain. There was no COMPANY that they built around it. If a company OWNED WIFI, Yanis says…they’d be one of the biggest companies in the world. But they DIDN’T.

So there’s a LARGER conversation that we need to be HAVING, maybe more of a philosophical conversation than ANYTHING to do with patent law or something…and it’s a conversation about technologies that become SUCH A ubiquitous part of life, or tech that HAS the ability to control such FUNDAMENTAL COMPONENTS of people’s lives…that we ask: is this something that ACTUALLY needs to be collectively OWNED, or at the VERY least much more heavily regulated than it currently is. 

I mean for the SAME reason people think it’s problematic for someone to own the ROADS that people drive on or the WATER that people drink…is it ALSO potentially problematic for people to own the means of MODIFYING people’s BEHAVIOR? Like should the Wright Brothers get 10 cents every time a plane takes off from an airport? Some people would say NO, and that that kind of thing belongs to the commons.

Yanis gives OTHER recommendations for what we can do within the current system. One of the ones he’s talked about before is the possibility of us changing the structure of corporate law altogether. Now again: this would NOT be something… that is calling for the end of capitalism…but INSTEAD something that wants to RETHINK what it is to BE a company within a capitalist framework.

And like a lot of OTHER theories that have come out in this area what it’s going to center around… is NOT the inequality of INCOME necessarily, that’s obviously a common area that people focus on when talking about problems in the world…but INSTEAD what this focuses on…is the inequality of ownership. 

It’s actually an idea HEAVILY explored by another economist named Louis Kelso, just he did it in different ways, but the OVERALL, INTERESTING point that they’re making is: DOES capitalism actually WORK REALLY WELL…as long as the benefits of OWNERSHIP… are properly distributed? Do people need to FEEL like they own a PIECE of the world that they’re a part of? 

And this goes for the ownership of private property, ownership of the means of production, even the ownership of publicly controlled resources…like DOES it make sense, when someone is BORN into a wealthy country…that they would OWN A PIECE of the ASSETS of that country that they’re contributing to everyday?

And as you can IMAGINE this is something that pretty EASILY extends for philosophers into CORPORATE law as well and the way we require COMPANIES to treat their employees. 

And there have been DOZENS of strategies that have been suggested for how something like this would be structured…but to Yanis Varoufakis…maybe ONE way something like this could look in practice…is in the same way a library card works that a STUDENT is given when they enter into a university. Where UPON ENTERING…students have a CARD that cannot be sold, it cannot be bought, but it GIVES them certain PRIVILEGES and ACCESS that is ONLY available to people that are a part of the school. 

Well, COULD this work more or less in the same way…where EMPLOYEES are given something like a library card where they can VOTE for things like the direction of the company moving forward. And it wouldn’t be some kind of FORCED EQUALITY across the board, Yanis says, because employees could always vote to give MORE VOTES…to the people that CREATE the stuff that makes the company valuable. It WOULDN’T be forced EQUALITY he says but what it WOULD do he thinks: is if this was written into corporate law…is it would END labor markets and share markets in one fell swoop. 

People would NO LONGER FEEL like the only LEVERAGE they have as part of a company is to threaten to rent their labor out to ANOTHER company that they have no control over either. 

Anyway…that whole discussion could be an entire EPISODE if it was something people wanted to hear about. As usual just find a way to let me know whether that’s something you find interesting. 

The LARGER point here today though, is one about technofeudalism. And just something that’s important to close with here: NONE of these strategies we just talked about are meant to be some sort of panacea. The point is to consider that IF Yanis Varoufakis is correct here in his analysis of the big changes to the economic structure we’re living in…IF we are LIVING in Technofeudalism…then THESE sorts of questions…are MORE along the lines of the ones we should be thinking about if we want to find a way to move forward. Because whether it’s something at the level of MACROECONOMIC policy, or even just something in your personal life: it’s possible to spend WAY TOO MANY YEARS of the limited time we have here looking for answers in all the wrong places…because ultimately you’re asking all the wrong questions. Philosophy…to me is one of the best ways to know whether you’re asking the right questions or not. So I hope you enjoyed this safari of intellectual joy today. Hope you have a good rest of your week. As always: Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.