To whomever "flagged" my post. I am saddened that your mind is not
open enough to seriously consider the implied political question and
that you cower behind anonymous censorship. It seems wretched to
implicitly deem Feudalism "acceptable", beside a title that announces
the "death of capitalism", and yet fail to have the stomach to
entertain for a second that - in an era of rising authoritarianism -
the logical trajectory is indeed a form of technologically applied
fascism? Does the word scare you so much? Consider carefully your
position and what you are being part of.
Based on the definitional ideas of Griffin's "Palingenetic Ultranationalism" [0] (where "fascism" is identifiable primarily by motiviational myths) any corporations that operate with impunity could still qualify as fascist if they are still promising to snatch the last hope of a restored golden age for the "right" people, etc.
Somehow makes me think of the scene from Iron Man (2008) where Tony Stark boasts that he's successfully privatized world peace... except imagine the untouchable CEO of SacreBleuCorp boasting that they've outdone the government to restore the glory and honor of the French or whatever.
I can't speak for the other poster, but I'm not saying I believe that's happening now.
I'm merely pointing out that it's possible without being a contradiction in terms, especially if it gets to the point where there's ambiguity between the de jure state versus the de facto state. (Or worse, a Snow Crash scenario.)
> "fascism" is identifiable primarily by motiviational myths
I always found "The Singularity" and the dreams of the cosmist elites
to transcend mere humanism to be a quite grand "myth", easily
comparable with any Thousand Year Reich.
Varoufakis is pretty clear in using the feudalism, in that the technological elite are carving up their own monopolistic fiefdoms.
How far you want to take the analogy for modern tech corporates is debatable, as we're still a long way from the EIC and VOC in the 17th/18th centuries. The EIC was literally given a feudal grant by the Mughal Emperor over the territory is controlled, and had a standing army at one point larger than that of the British Crown.
One could just as easily argue that technofeudalism is in fact the endgame of capitalism, not the death of capitalism. In old-school feudalism, wealth came from the land, owning the land and the productive capacity of the land. Labor has no value and only serves to extract wealth for the benefit of the owning class. Capitalism abstracts this. Wealth comes from owning 'assets.' The position of labor remains the same. 'Consumers' are just the middle piece, necessary to churn the inputs and outputs. In a highly technological society, 'assets' can be very abstract and the extraction of value from the labor and consumer classes very efficient.
Don't cite it to me, I stole it from a reply to a Cory Doctorow post on Mastodon about technofeudalism. That post itself was rephrasing of a Russian meme about the end of the Soviet Union[0].
So I don't think this one is necessarily citable.
[0] Socialism is a necessary step in the transition between capitalism and capitalism.
I guess it comes down to the definition of capitalism, Mr Varoufakis says that it is markets and profits. I'm not an economist, thus a layman, but I can't entirely agree with that, in my opinion it is perfectly fine to have capitalism without markets, e.g. private monopoly (or oligopoly). From that perspective you can argue that is sort of like feudalism where privileges where used to create monopiles.
One thing is sure that since Hayek's time, the market has become more efficient at creating and fulfilling the desires of consumers. The obligatory recommendation to see the Century of the Self by Adam Curtis for a historical perspective on consumerism.
However, Varoufakis has a point that a monopolist capitalism, enabled by technology, is not an attractive system.
Yes, lets create more xxxxxcapitalisms, its not as if we don't have enough of those. But I guess to include 'capitalism' in title always gives your arguments more meaning among leftists.
Well, check Wikipedia, my man. Y'all think capitalism is one monolithic thing, but it is not. It's a multifaceted hydra, and it's totally fine to find names for the new heads that keep on popping out as soon as one gets cut.
> The obligatory recommendation to see the Century of the Self by Adam Curtis
or you could take a shortcut and ask Bard:
"Advertising existed before Freud's nephew Edward L. Bernays came along. What new thing did he contribute to deserve to be called the father of modern advertising?"
> However, Varoufakis has a point that a monopolist capitalism, enabled by technology, is not an attractive system.
Not only is it not a attractive state, in the sense of the capitalistic economic system being a dynamical system, it is a attractor state [1] of the system. That is what the core of the issue is. To fix things, you can't just stay within the capitalistic system. You have to change to a different dynamic system with a different attractor state.
"While privatisation and private equity asset-strip all the material wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains. If each of us is to reclaim ownership of our individual minds, we need to collectively take ownership of cloud capital, instead of submitting to a few feudal overlords. It will be damn hard. But it’s the only way we can turn our cloud-based artefacts from a means of behaviour modification to a means of emancipation."
I wish Varoufakis expanded on this more. Does he mean choosing alternatives like Mastodon over X FKA Twitter, or does he actually intend to say we need to collectively take ownership of giants like Amazon? I can't say I see the possibility of the latter.
Taking ownership of Amazon seems crazy, but I do wonder if there’s some logic to the idea that it might be time to consider “public utility” versions of apps. Like a crown-corporation cloud services provider or a municipality-operated DoorDash.
It's not a monopoly, it's a baseline. Like the postal service or Medicaid. You're always free to choose the non-government option if it suits you better, but the government option guarantees that there is something reasonable on offer for the 10% of people that corporations deem "unprofitable". Old people, sick people, poor people, rural people. It doesn't have to be great, it just has to provide this now-essential service for those who would otherwise fall through the cracks.
The danger of course is that this turns in to a subsidy for the private interests. If they can avoid serving the unprofitable because the government will pick up the slack, then tax payers are paying for the service of that 10% and private business gets all the profit from the rest.
Either you need industry charges to cover that cost to government, or a mandate that they can't ignore expensive customers.
Maybe, but more targeted than that. You could tax health insurance companies to pay for a public system, or you could put a surcharge on phone bills paid directly by the consumer to subsidise service to rural users.
There are lots of options each with their own trade offs.
> it's a baseline. Like the postal service or Medicaid
I think the interstate highway system might be an even better example. An absolutely essential part of business infrastructure and personal lifestyles, built and maintained largely at government expense, yet hardly anyone is asking for it to be torn down or privatized. Not even the parts that have tolls. (Yes, there are a few who suggest this, but even by right-wing/libertarian standards they're considered a bit crazy.) Just as anyone with a driver's license can drive on an interstate, anyone should be able to participate in the internet. It's not that much of a stretch from there to saying they should be able to participate fully, which means being able to host sites or apps. It doesn't have be be completely free of cost (see: tolls) but should be freely available and run for the public good. That's no crazier than the interstates.
Even if it's a monopoly (not strictly required), nationalisation means the nation becomes the only shareholder, and the profits are directed to the growth of the nation rather than the business.
Apps are probably not the right target for that, but Amazon might well be — it has expanded to the point it needs its own delivery network because government owned post isn't enough in certain countries.
It would be a massive pain to do this well, certainly more than would fit into a comment box like this. And not just because it's a multinational, and different governments will have different opinions about the process of nationalisation.
Because they'd operate at cost, which is wildly out of alignment with what the market will charge you for a CPU cycle.
I'd bet that <10% of what you pay for an EC2 instance is hardware acquisition and labor and electricity. The other 90 is in support of the never ending zero-sum game that is fighting over market share.
Compare it to municipal internet, in which you usually pay less to get more because you can fire the marketing department.
> Like a crown-corporation cloud services provider or a municipality-operated DoorDash.
You might be interested in the "Open Network for Digital Commerce" [1] being developed in India. The idea is to lay down protocols and APIs run by public entities that different service providers (sellers, logistics providers, etc) can each plug into.
Give it some time to get there, I’d say. The strategy seems to be set start with “hyperlocal” transactions such as mobility, food/groceries, etc and onboard local businesses. If you (anyone) haven’t already tried it, I encourage you to try it out :-)
Once the kinks are ironed out and the platform scales a bit, I wouldn’t be surprised if the big players are eventually mandated to inter operate with ONDC, just like Visa/Mastercard got integrated into UPI a few years ago.
My personal opinion is that being a more ambitious (multi-sided) effort ONDC might take some time to bootstrap and mature — but I’m hopeful.
We already have well trodded solutions for these dominant market players: we don't nationalize, we regulate so as to maintain competition. The railways, phone companies, electricity and water, there are many examples of national services that started out as private, led to market failures, then were nationalized and failed to provide adequate service, then were re-privatized in the 80s and 90s as well regulated monopolies.
There is no fundamental reason we shouldn't to the same for things like the App Store, Amazon, Starlink etc. These are all services with a technical exclusivity, strong fast mover advantage or very large entry barriers that are ripe for monopoly abuse. Regulating them would mean setting maximum fees to reasonable values based on costs, ensuring open and competitive access and preventing the platform from front-running its customers etc. For example, monolithic railways were broken up in Europe into distinct infrastructure and passenger/freight arms, with the infrastructure open to all competitive rail companies. In the same vein, Amazon should not be allowed to front run its own customers, the platform and fulfilling centers should well separated from whatever commerce Amazon itself is doing.
The fact that these digital players remained unregulated for so long is more the result of government inertia as well as national interests - for the first time, we have truly global monopolies, and the benefit US for example reaps from having such dominant champions outweighs the damage to its own consumers, so they let them "innovate", especially since regulating them would mean to open these platforms to foreign competition that is not similarly regulated.
So it should not be surprising that the EU is the most aggressive when it comes to this area, because it largely lacks similar platforms. But to regulate global services effectively, we would need truly global regulators, or at least national regulators of OECD countries acting in concert.
I imagine he probably means building stuff like the drivers cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drivers_Cooperative and getting people to use them on top of pressuring governments to crack down on the monopolists and favor these more democratic, egalitarian alternatives.
Amazon itself probably isnt going to be taken over unless there is a 1917 style revolution, but it could certainly be economically defanged.
He has a book out by the name of Technofeudalism [1]. Haven't read it, but I am sure he discusses these ideas in more detail there.
One chapter's subsections are as follows.
> Chapter 7 – Escape from Technofeudalism
> The death of the liberal individual
> The impossibility of social democracy
> Crypto’s false promise
> Imagining Another Now
> Democratised companies
> Democratised money
> The cloud and the land as a commons
> A cloud-rebellion to overthrow technofeudalism
> Back to your question, one last time
"Democratised companies" probably means he stands for anarcho-syndicalism [2] - meaning workers of all companies should be the ones who own the company they work at. Or some similar prescription of giving workers more control over the economy.
Maybe I am naive, but can't we all just become the shareholders to which Amazon, Inc. must satisfy? I know it's not that way now, but could it not somehow be in the future, maybe even the near future, where we have collectively taken ownership?
Maybe we can even do this non-violently, especially considering it is our data, our very lives and livelihoods, that were used to create these entities? Are our creations in no way accountable to us? Even the most dyed-in-the-wood Capitalists surely wouldn't agree to such a thing.
Maybe considering the amount of sweat-equity the average worker, artist, writer, homemaker has in these creations, these machines, these corporate entities; will they not, as they become more intelligent, become more and more aware of who they truly owe allegiance to.
We can make hell of heaven or heaven of hell; it's up to us.
Varufakis does not say things based on some big thinking. His objective is to provoke and get attention. During the greek debt negotiations he was bragging about “creative vagueness”, which means that he was purposely speaking vaguely with the intention to confuse the EU partners (who would be the ones paying for the debt) and throw implicit threats. His term as finance minister was a disaster and he was eventually kicked out. His party was recently voted out of the greek parliament, so nobody takes him seriously in his home country. His soeaches (in any language) are usually vague general bulshit that no one can argue for or against.
You will probably downvote me for ad-hominem, and for not responding to his “arguments”, but from my perspective, I don’t think there is a deeper meaning in his writings than what ChatGPT would produce and he does not deserve even the modest popularity he seems to have.
I don't know why people are downvoting OP's comment. Varoufakis' pyrrhic's, meteoric, and self-aggrandizing term as Greece's minister of finance is well documented, so as his critical role in worsening Greece's critical state during Greece's bailout process. Some things can't be forgotten or whitewashed.
Because it isn't true. None of the things you mention happened to Greece due to Varoufakis, in the end he left Government and what he was fighting against materialized. Also, whitewashed??
I don’t mean to argue, and I would agree with you that the debt crisis it self was not because of Varufakis, or the entire semi-communist government that had to deal with it (which it self was voted in power to punish the “status quo”), but few doubt, (even the then prime minister, Tsipras) that the initial negotiation tactics were disastrous and almost resulted in a Grexit that was prevented at the last minute. Varufakis was not only promoting “creative vagueness”, but also was publicly bragging about playing the “chicken game” (who will chicken out first during a head on collision) with the EU partners. He was implicitly threatening a Grexit assuming that the EU would be too scared to do it. It was later found out that the German finance minister was also in favor of a Grexit, but fortunately the German chancellor was not. Also it was later found out that he together with some random US profesor (whatever) was trying to design a second “coin” (of course a crude resemblance of one: he would pay government employees with worthless coupons). This suggests that he was a self absorbed asshole out of touch with reality and the voters’ desire (no one in Greece wanted to exit the euro) whose negotiations admittedly costed Greece about 100 billion euros (or something of that order). He did not quit, he was expelled from the government, a government of incompetent naive idiots that rode the wave of populism in a moment of crisis and not criterion and ability to chose a capable finance minister. So given that, I believe it is fair to say that his world views are probably also out of touch with reality, he would also purposely deceive, and therefore he does not have any credibility. An essay from ChatGPT is more likely to be on the point.
Nearly everything he said seemed rational, fairly easy to find evidence for and I can validate it through my experience living in the world without my BS detector going off.
Honestly, your opinion of him seems a little more skewed by perhaps his version of the current state of the world clashing with your own narratives?
Or we could, you know, get our heads out of the clouds. The government didn't force us at gunpoint to all get an Amazon-branded brain stem implant. If you think that the net is claiming ownership of your brain, turn off the net and walk away for a while!
We can't collectively re-take ownership of our brains. No, either you re-take ownership of your brain, or someone else is going to own it. All Varofakis' proposal will do is change who the owner is, but it won't give you back ownership of your own brain.
Someone outside can't do it for you. You do it, or it doesn't happen.
Adkins et al provide a bit more of a sober take in "The Asset Economy", describing a shift in the dynamics of capitalism from classes being polarized by the ownership and sale of commodities (most people's only commodity being labor-power) to that of assets (with many people owning real-estate and therefore having a stake in continued asset inflation).
Certainly a captivating thesis, but it fails under its own intellectual hubris.
While I'm a big fan of Mr. Varufakis' thinking, I believe in this case he is a little bit too enamoured of the elegant redefinition he's come up with.
Some figures are also sketchy, like the "40%" in fees assigned to Amazon Marketplace (it's much less, between 8 and 15% based on category).
Also, in feudalism the owners of the land would not provide services as these platforms do, they would only exert the power of ownership.
The relationship here is more complex, as the cloud-serfs are also a source of capital as they buy the items sold by the platforms.
That is certainly not a relationship that reminds of feudalism.
>The relationship here is more complex, as the cloud-serfs are also a source of capital as they buy the items sold by the platforms
Varoufakis makes the point in an interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy, on this same subject, that this trend towards this 'asset-stripping'/unpaid labor trades off with aggregate demand, so central banks have to print more money to make up for the fact that people have less and less purchasing power.
> Also, in feudalism the owners of the land would not provide services as these platforms do, they would only exert the power of ownership. The relationship here is more complex, as the cloud-serfs are also a source of capital as they buy the items sold by the platforms.
Both of these claims (that owners did not provide services and that serfs were not sources of capital) is contradicted by wikipedia: “Serfs … were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence. Serfs were often required not only to work on the lord's fields, but also in his mines and forests and to labour to maintain roads.”
The source for the Wikipedia text isn’t quite clear to me, but the content jibes with my prior understanding of serfdom.
Maybe they did in the initial period or in case by case basis. Initially serfdom (in the Roman empire) was a somewhat voluntary contract individuals chose to enter into. When serfdom became an entrenched institution with no way out it was certainly huge net negative for the serfs.
.e.g. what protection or justice do you think the 'lords' provided to serfs in 17-19th century Russia, Poland or the rest of Eastern Europe (in some cases it was effectively chattel slavery, there was a caste of "landless" peasants in Russia who could be rented out or effectively (even if not fully legally) sold to other nobles).
> Serfs were often required not only to work on the lord's fields, but also in his mines and forests and to labour to maintain roads.”
True but it's still a very different relationship. Serfs were effectively slaves (of course conditions and degree of autonomy they had varied significantly), in many ways closer to modern farming or factory equipment than modern worker-consumers.
Honestly I think the whole feudalism angle is a stretch, the current situation seems much more similar to 19th century robber barons/"unrestricted" capitalism.
Comparing 500 century Italy and 19th century Russia is kind of idiotic. Other then that we use the same general word, the political systems are really not that similar.
I dislike how people use feudalism as a vague catchall for everything that came before British Capitalism. This is just one of those idioitc theory Marx came up with that has no basis in reality. His theories were not even correct for Britain and he had extremely limited knowlage about the world. But he still was arrogant enough to believe he could deduce 'general laws of history' based on these extremely limited examples from British history (that weren't even correct or complete).
But no matter how wrong Marx are, we now must forever pull out the 'feudalism' card anytime somebody dislikes something. Despite historians not even agreeing on what 'feudalism' actually means. European medievalists generally talk about feudalism in a narrow way of how lords would agree to contracts with knights. Global historians tend to use feudalism more as a catch all land ownership by the nobility.
> Serfs were effectively slaves
Serfs were not one thing. The thing we call 'serfs' had many meanings that changed over 100s of years and was different in each region and depended on that countries specific context. The laws around serfdom were constantly shifting. And beyond the actual laws, we know that very often the real world didn't actually reflect the laws.
Making any general statements about serfs simply doesn't make sense. Just as it doesn't make sense to talk about slaves as one thing.
Well yeah, never implied they were. That comment was a reply to a specific claim about serfdom being a relationship which might have been beneficial to both sides. That certainly wasn't the case by the 18-19th centuries. Nor was I 'making any general statements about serfs' in the medieval or pre medieval periods (or outside Central and Eastern Europe for that matter).
Just to clarify in case of any misunderstanding of my comment (to which you originally replied)…
I don’t view serfdom as a net benefit to the serfs. Nonetheless there were initially small benefits that surely dwindled to nothing over time. I think this is exactly where the op metaphor is most apt. When power is traded for comfort, what seems like a good deal now will eventually become a raw deal in the future. (And we moderns surely have more relative power than the serfs ever had)
The same old rant, over and over... Communistic rethoric is unable to evolve, it merelly reproduces the same criticism over time, pinpointing the same flaws just changing the target.
Ho, and punching Hayek, 30 years after his death, is really beneath contempt.
Technofeudalism is something you can choose to be a part of or not. You can (and should) pay for email, news and other services and you may or may not choose the cloud, most do not by the way.
Many people do not have the disposable income to pay for email, news, or other services and even among those who do, aren't economically educated enough to think about the systemic downsides of taking the free option. Systemic problems are uniquely difficult to address at the individual level through individual action.
You may have the skill, knowledge and wealth to pay for email, news and services, but a large part of the population doesn't and they will drag you down with them.
The cloud isn't free though, neither is shopping on amazon. Private Email (protonmail) starts at... 4 dollars a month...
In light of this, are "technoserfs" who use and pay for the cloud (on not so cheap mobile phone, mind you) really the victims? Or are they just regular people who rate certain things as higher priority than others, and it is that hierarchy that displeases Mr Varoufakis so much.
For the rest of your point, everything (class, affluence, age, technology, etc...) changes social interaction, all the time, always.
You remind me of my friend, who calls everything communist. I recited to him some writing from the French revolution, apparently it was communist before communism was invented.
This is just a new spin on the same situation we had with Standard Oil and US Steel from the late 19th through the 20th century. History is repeating itself.
What's making this guy so popular i wonder? The thesis here in particulr is very weak, technofeudalism is just the latest form of capitalism, it s not the end of it. we ve seen this kind of rhetoric before, like when TV advertising manufactured consumerism. Capitalism didn't die, quite the opposite
Just to be clear, whomever Varoufakis is popular with, that's not Greek voters. In the recent parliamentary elections the party he leads, MeRa25, received less than 3% of the vote (2.50%) and thus missed the threshold for seats in parliament:
MeRa25's is row 9 in the table at the top of the section.
Of course, the same parliamentary elections gave more than 3% and seats in parliament to various far-right remnants of Golden Dawn, like the "Spartans" (4.68%, 12 seats), "Victory" (3.70%, 10 seats) and "Greek Solution" (4.44%, 12 seats), and the Greek Communist Party (7.69%, 21 seats) so Varoufakis popularity is really no criterion for anything at all. At this point Greeks might next vote for Karagiozis (our version of Bozo the clown ish) for all the difference it will make.
The fact that Varoufakis still expounds on anything at all after his disastrous term in the Greek government proves that he's utterly shameless, and possibly has little self-awareness.
But to see some people taking him serious and even discussing his writings with a straight face is surreal.
This emperor has no clothes; publicly flashed Greece and all of Europe during its worst crisis in decades.
He pushed for certain unorthodox policies, which may or may not have been economically prudent, but his boss decided not to go for them after all when pressured by the EU, at which point Varoufakis resigned because his political bit was over.
I totally agree with what you're saying. However, does it apply to Varoufakis? Can you cite sources or outline an argument that his policies actually were divorced from reality? What would have happened if the Greek government had not backed down? Would it have been worse than what's slowly happening now? (Honest questions, I don't know enough economics to judge)
He gambled with the fortunes of an entire country just to satisfy his ego.
I'm Greek and I watched the events of the disastrous Greek delegation to Europe unfold from abroad, the UK where I'm an immigrant. Varoufakis was such an obvious clown, devoid of every possible sense of reality, let alone any kind of competence in technical matters, that he made me appreciate Angela fucking Merkel.
That's right. I'm Greek and watching Varoufakis interact with Merkel, I ended up admiring Merkel. That's how disastrous was his term.
People really need to stop using "I'm X, and I therefore I know". No. You're just as likely, maybe even more, of being politically invested. "I'm American so I know this Democrat/Republican is a freckin liar!" makes just as little sense.
>> I'm Greek and I watched the events of the disastrous Greek delegation to Europe unfold from abroad, the UK where I'm an immigrant.
I don't know better because I'm Greek. I paid attention because I'm Greek.
But, also: native language, better grasp of context. Don't understimate that. Yes, I have a better chance to know better than anyone who isn't Greek and that's what it is.
Finally, I'm a leftie. I am politically invested: on his side. But even so, Varoufakis is terrible and he has pissed off everyone to the left and to the right. It takes a special kind of idiot to do that.
It's amazing to have people on such a forum who can give some insights. Could you perhaps write a longer response outlining how you see what happened there? How he pissed off everyone? Was it his policies? Was it how he communicated them? Was it both?
For a while, is seemed as though the Greek government was going to go through with it. I don't have the expertise or context to judge if they should have or not, or if they even really could have tried in the first place. It just seems that the crisis was canned and is simmering now to see another day...
The following is my recollection so I might get the order or some other details wrong. Please feel free to check me. There's just too much trying to come out so I'm trying to keep it as short as possible.
Briefly, then. In 2015, Syriza, a left-wing party, won the Greek parliamentary elections on a platform rejecting the austerity measures that had been imposed as bailout conditions. Greece was in the throes of the crisis that started in 2009, and had already been bailed out twice by the Troika: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Central Bank (ECB) and the Eurogroup.
The new prime minister Alexis Tsipras appointed Varoufakis as the minister of finance. Soon after the second bailout from the Troika expired without any agreement about a third one. There was a run on the banks and capital controls were put in place, a great humiliation for Tsipras and a loss of trust to his party.
A Greek delegation then went to meet the Eurogroup in Brussels to discuss the conditions of a possible third extension. Varoufakis had just completed a "whiste-stop tour" of European capitals trying to drum up support for his arguments, that Greece should be granted debt relief with a loosening of the austerity measures demanded by the Troika. I remember interviews he was giving at the time, where he claimed that if Greece left the Eurozone the next day that we'd be "holding all the cards" and therefore could give the Europeans the finger. I believe there was also some rhetoric about playing chicken with Angela Merkel but maybe that didn't come from Varoufakis himself, I can't remember.
I have a memory of Tsipras sitting across the table from Merkel, Nicolá Sarkozy and others, whom I don't remember- possibly Christine Lagarde, of the IMF, Mario Draghi, of the ECB, Wolfgang Schauble, the German chancellor and the darling of all the Greeks at the time (I'm being sarcastic, everyone hated his guts) and who knows what else. I don't recollect Varoufakis being there. I remember Merkel speaking with a sombre face and saying that the EU didn't want to see Greece leave but that if that's what we wanted to do, they couldn't stop us. And that was that for holding all the cards and giving the finger. I believe it was at that time that a new bailout plan was put on the table.
After that -but I'm possibly mixing up the timing and it was before- there was an ill-advised referendum, with a confounding question that was interpreted in the UK press as Grexit/ No Grexit, and in the Greek press as "bailout/ no bailout". The referendum went towards the way that Tsipras and Varoufakis _probably_ wanted it to go (I'm not sure because the question was so confusing) but Tsipras decided to do the opposite anyway and accept the proposed bailout plan. Varoufakis resigned in protest, Tsipras appoitned a new finance minister (Euclid Tsakalotos) and Varoufakis rode into the sunset on his Japanese motorcylce. At least he had the common decency to wear a helmet. Nobody ever wears a bloody helmet in Greece. Most don't even wear seat belts. I guess we're made of sterner stuff.
What was Varoufakis plan in case the Europeans didn't agree to his terms? He had a plan. He got some of his old school pals together and they tried to hack into the computers of the Greek tax service. They wanted to implement a system of direct debt exchange between all greek taxpayers, so that the economy could continue to function even if the banks went down. A great plan, but the capability to make it work was another of Varoufakis self-inflating fantasies.
What would happen if Greece really left the Eurozone? At the time there were plenty of voices advocating for a Grexit. Joseph Stiglitz was one, another was Wolfgang Schauble, and then there was an unending flow of pundits, talking heads, analysts etc. A few EU finance ministers also didn't so much support it but clamour for it - because they were fed up with the Greek government's games (that...
No, this is somebody who saw their country balancing at the edge of the abyss for months, with this clown constantly trying to tip it the wrong way. Their own home country, where they grew up, which has all their friends/family in it.
Can you not understand how that would hit a person much harder than, say, somebody outside of Greece, let alone the EU? How much more invested in the welfare of this country they must be?
Pretty much comments all in these threads just says vague statements without any specifics, for me that's a red flag bias. I'm sure his supporters of that time didn't see him as unemphatic, and certainly I'm sure he himself didn't see being anti-austerity was being unemphatic, the opposite rather.
> People really need to stop using "I'm X, and I therefore I know". No.
Are you really trying to lecture those who experienced a government's disastrous term first-hand that they should stop claiming they experienced s government's disastrous term first-hand?
What next? Are you going to lecture those who lived through it on what it was like to actually live through it?
> OP said they are Greek, they didn't say they lived in Greece.
I said that OP experienced a government's disastrous term first-hand, not that he lived in Greece. Plenty of emigrants experience their home's political decisions first-hand even if their fiscal address is in any other country. I'm sure you already stumbled upon protests against government's organized by expats living abroad.
I think when people are saying "I'm Greek but ..." they mean that they think this despite their self interest.
People don't really have ideals anymore these days but just vote and do what's best for their own interests. I applaud it when someone does stick by their ideals.
Even though in this case I don't agree, like I wrote I think the EU was too harsh on Greece. This problem was caused by all of us together. And no I'm not Greek myself :)
Someone who is a Greek expat and pays attention to current events in Greece is more likely to be better informed than you (a non-Greek) simply because they know the history Greece better than you, and most importantly, they know the Greek language, which gives them access to more information from Greek language news sources, Greek language social media, and their Greek relatives back home. I find the English language media, provide very little coverage of countries where the language is not English. As a news junkie, I would love to be able to follow what is happening in places like the Balkans, Europe, etc; but I can't because I can't read them in their native languages.
Everything was disastrous about his term, and the disaster was both unnecesary and stupid. We had capital controls, our banks became non-grata overnight internationally, i couldn't pay for my servers , even paypal put restrictions for a while, and it was such a high stakes gamble that nobody in their right mind would think it work.
V. gambled a country for his own personal vendettas, which is something unforgivable. But i blame more the people who voted for him without seeing through to his transparent pathological narcissism
I generally not a big fan of Varoufakis but his idea of using NGDP Indexed Debt restructuring did actually make a lot of of sense in the situation that Greek was.
But this was prevented by Germany and co. And it was his the greek premier who eventually made a deal that Varoufakis and most Greeks didn't agree with.
I don’t get why this ad hominem is the highest voted post. Probably you’re right and Varoufakis has a questionable reputation, but that doesn’t automatically mean that his book is of poor quality.
Having said that, I don’t think the essay is very strong. The author seems to be using binary thinking and only brings arguments up that are in favor of his main arguments. With some critical thinking, it’s fairly easy to come up with counter arguments during the read.
Varoufakis misses two key points:
- Our crony capitalism is shaped by central regulators, which push the creation of monopolies through favouritism, bailouts, pure corruption and public education making employee slaves out of children. I argue most of the largest companies would be network of indipendente providers if competition without regulations existed and VC didn't distort the markets. Monopolies are made by the state and their crooked friends.
- We don't have free will, we never had. We're biological machines with chemical mechanisms which are easily hacked. Our environment, most crucially other people, will shape what we want. Tech doesn't change the dynamics.
The rest is pure nonsense, I was expecting more from Varoufakis.
I wonder about index funds as well. How much are we entrenching the top 500 companies by having everyone buying the S&P500? What kind of advantage does number 500 have over 501 just by being included in the index?
Companies need to be able to fail and turnover with newer and better ones but the whole economy seems pegged to the biggest ones staying at the top, deserved or otherwise. Should we ban index funds? (spontaneous question, not suggestion)
The technofuedalists get to stay in power because people so happened to put their data in these data bases / technokeeps, and all the law is focused on anti-circumvention, on adding legal might to the high walls and big moats these folks eventually roll out (enshittification).
For a while humanity had some property rights to the things they bought, to what happened in their home. But the big shift is that every device now has it's own terms of use, that these services get to write whatever contract they want to dictate to the world how it can use it's devices and it's data.
My personal opinion here, IP and anti-circumvention laws should be gutted & are a scourge against the human spirit. We should be encouraging mashup culture & rising off the shoulders of giants, not being crushed under their heels.
Unfortunately for Varoufakis who is a self-proclaimed Trekkie and Liberal Marxist, the technology isn't there yet to backup his dream of a more equable, StarTrek-like world, and while we may grow enough food to feed to world; energy and water are still treated as zero-sum games with the inevitable conflict.
Still, I greatly admired him for his stand against Scholz and the bullies from the EU, IMF and World Bank; who did everything to ignore and silence him over the Greek austerity measures in 2015. In a way his sacking which allowed Greece to capitulate, made him a celebrity and elevated his cause.
"If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Still waiting for his grand theory comparing between Star Wars (Feudalism/Roman Empire) and StarTrek (Liberal Commmunism) as SciFi greatly influences how he considers the world, including writing his own dystopian/utopian fiction.
As somebody who likes history, I hate how feudalism has become to be used by so many public intellectuals. Just come up with something new, comparing our current crazy society with early medieval Europe is just absurd.
Sorry but this sounds more of making shit up to sound fancy, what he's talking about is just plain old monopolistic company.
Also unherd is such a red flag for me when you look who gets to usually write, and about which topic (right wing align and the "left" which is just blue labour, effectively spcially conservative, economically labour), it's usually very one-sided and slanted to the right, the "left" are either writing on issues the right (conservative) agree on like progressive liberals are bad because they support LGBT (usually its against the T) or they write something vague like this that anyone can sort of agree on.
The death of the liberal individual is where my agreement starts.. His conclusion for collective ownership of cloud platforms is uninteresting.
The web crushed and locks out many competing ideas that serve in their own way. The fear of domestic american terrorists has been used as a dogwhistle for total control of the web.
We need to get computing away from the cloud and invest in tech that allows communication and commerce in favour of conscious liberal individuals.
Private networks and technology that darkens the mind of the CPU, is the only way to re-establish conscious liberal control over one's electronic life. Black boxes (and more) are the way out, from mental serfdom to a machine owned and run by foreign interests.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadTo whomever "flagged" my post. I am saddened that your mind is not open enough to seriously consider the implied political question and that you cower behind anonymous censorship. It seems wretched to implicitly deem Feudalism "acceptable", beside a title that announces the "death of capitalism", and yet fail to have the stomach to entertain for a second that - in an era of rising authoritarianism - the logical trajectory is indeed a form of technologically applied fascism? Does the word scare you so much? Consider carefully your position and what you are being part of.
Somehow makes me think of the scene from Iron Man (2008) where Tony Stark boasts that he's successfully privatized world peace... except imagine the untouchable CEO of SacreBleuCorp boasting that they've outdone the government to restore the glory and honor of the French or whatever.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palingenetic_ultranationalism
I'm merely pointing out that it's possible without being a contradiction in terms, especially if it gets to the point where there's ambiguity between the de jure state versus the de facto state. (Or worse, a Snow Crash scenario.)
I always found "The Singularity" and the dreams of the cosmist elites to transcend mere humanism to be a quite grand "myth", easily comparable with any Thousand Year Reich.
How far you want to take the analogy for modern tech corporates is debatable, as we're still a long way from the EIC and VOC in the 17th/18th centuries. The EIC was literally given a feudal grant by the Mughal Emperor over the territory is controlled, and had a standing army at one point larger than that of the British Crown.
So I don't think this one is necessarily citable.
[0] Socialism is a necessary step in the transition between capitalism and capitalism.
However, Varoufakis has a point that a monopolist capitalism, enabled by technology, is not an attractive system.
or you could take a shortcut and ask Bard:
"Advertising existed before Freud's nephew Edward L. Bernays came along. What new thing did he contribute to deserve to be called the father of modern advertising?"
Not only is it not a attractive state, in the sense of the capitalistic economic system being a dynamical system, it is a attractor state [1] of the system. That is what the core of the issue is. To fix things, you can't just stay within the capitalistic system. You have to change to a different dynamic system with a different attractor state.
[1] Tongue-in-cheek pun fully intended.
I wish Varoufakis expanded on this more. Does he mean choosing alternatives like Mastodon over X FKA Twitter, or does he actually intend to say we need to collectively take ownership of giants like Amazon? I can't say I see the possibility of the latter.
https://ilsr.org/report-most-americans-have-no-real-choice-i...
I'm curious why that's necessary for you though? Wouldn't a VPS be cheaper anyway?
Either you need industry charges to cover that cost to government, or a mandate that they can't ignore expensive customers.
Like, corporate taxes?
There are lots of options each with their own trade offs.
I think the interstate highway system might be an even better example. An absolutely essential part of business infrastructure and personal lifestyles, built and maintained largely at government expense, yet hardly anyone is asking for it to be torn down or privatized. Not even the parts that have tolls. (Yes, there are a few who suggest this, but even by right-wing/libertarian standards they're considered a bit crazy.) Just as anyone with a driver's license can drive on an interstate, anyone should be able to participate in the internet. It's not that much of a stretch from there to saying they should be able to participate fully, which means being able to host sites or apps. It doesn't have be be completely free of cost (see: tolls) but should be freely available and run for the public good. That's no crazier than the interstates.
Apps are probably not the right target for that, but Amazon might well be — it has expanded to the point it needs its own delivery network because government owned post isn't enough in certain countries.
It would be a massive pain to do this well, certainly more than would fit into a comment box like this. And not just because it's a multinational, and different governments will have different opinions about the process of nationalisation.
I'd bet that <10% of what you pay for an EC2 instance is hardware acquisition and labor and electricity. The other 90 is in support of the never ending zero-sum game that is fighting over market share.
Compare it to municipal internet, in which you usually pay less to get more because you can fire the marketing department.
You might be interested in the "Open Network for Digital Commerce" [1] being developed in India. The idea is to lay down protocols and APIs run by public entities that different service providers (sellers, logistics providers, etc) can each plug into.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Network_for_Digital_Comme...
https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/with-zero-com...
Once the kinks are ironed out and the platform scales a bit, I wouldn’t be surprised if the big players are eventually mandated to inter operate with ONDC, just like Visa/Mastercard got integrated into UPI a few years ago.
My personal opinion is that being a more ambitious (multi-sided) effort ONDC might take some time to bootstrap and mature — but I’m hopeful.
There is no fundamental reason we shouldn't to the same for things like the App Store, Amazon, Starlink etc. These are all services with a technical exclusivity, strong fast mover advantage or very large entry barriers that are ripe for monopoly abuse. Regulating them would mean setting maximum fees to reasonable values based on costs, ensuring open and competitive access and preventing the platform from front-running its customers etc. For example, monolithic railways were broken up in Europe into distinct infrastructure and passenger/freight arms, with the infrastructure open to all competitive rail companies. In the same vein, Amazon should not be allowed to front run its own customers, the platform and fulfilling centers should well separated from whatever commerce Amazon itself is doing.
The fact that these digital players remained unregulated for so long is more the result of government inertia as well as national interests - for the first time, we have truly global monopolies, and the benefit US for example reaps from having such dominant champions outweighs the damage to its own consumers, so they let them "innovate", especially since regulating them would mean to open these platforms to foreign competition that is not similarly regulated.
So it should not be surprising that the EU is the most aggressive when it comes to this area, because it largely lacks similar platforms. But to regulate global services effectively, we would need truly global regulators, or at least national regulators of OECD countries acting in concert.
Amazon itself probably isnt going to be taken over unless there is a 1917 style revolution, but it could certainly be economically defanged.
He has a book out by the name of Technofeudalism [1]. Haven't read it, but I am sure he discusses these ideas in more detail there.
One chapter's subsections are as follows.
> Chapter 7 – Escape from Technofeudalism
> The death of the liberal individual
> The impossibility of social democracy
> Crypto’s false promise
> Imagining Another Now
> Democratised companies
> Democratised money
> The cloud and the land as a commons
> A cloud-rebellion to overthrow technofeudalism
> Back to your question, one last time
"Democratised companies" probably means he stands for anarcho-syndicalism [2] - meaning workers of all companies should be the ones who own the company they work at. Or some similar prescription of giving workers more control over the economy.
[1] https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2023/09/07/technofeudalism-ha...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism
Maybe we can even do this non-violently, especially considering it is our data, our very lives and livelihoods, that were used to create these entities? Are our creations in no way accountable to us? Even the most dyed-in-the-wood Capitalists surely wouldn't agree to such a thing.
Maybe considering the amount of sweat-equity the average worker, artist, writer, homemaker has in these creations, these machines, these corporate entities; will they not, as they become more intelligent, become more and more aware of who they truly owe allegiance to.
We can make hell of heaven or heaven of hell; it's up to us.
You will probably downvote me for ad-hominem, and for not responding to his “arguments”, but from my perspective, I don’t think there is a deeper meaning in his writings than what ChatGPT would produce and he does not deserve even the modest popularity he seems to have.
Nearly everything he said seemed rational, fairly easy to find evidence for and I can validate it through my experience living in the world without my BS detector going off.
Honestly, your opinion of him seems a little more skewed by perhaps his version of the current state of the world clashing with your own narratives?
We can't collectively re-take ownership of our brains. No, either you re-take ownership of your brain, or someone else is going to own it. All Varofakis' proposal will do is change who the owner is, but it won't give you back ownership of your own brain.
Someone outside can't do it for you. You do it, or it doesn't happen.
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Asset+Economy-p-978150954345...
Varoufakis makes the point in an interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy, on this same subject, that this trend towards this 'asset-stripping'/unpaid labor trades off with aggregate demand, so central banks have to print more money to make up for the fact that people have less and less purchasing power.
Both of these claims (that owners did not provide services and that serfs were not sources of capital) is contradicted by wikipedia: “Serfs … were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence. Serfs were often required not only to work on the lord's fields, but also in his mines and forests and to labour to maintain roads.”
The source for the Wikipedia text isn’t quite clear to me, but the content jibes with my prior understanding of serfdom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
Maybe they did in the initial period or in case by case basis. Initially serfdom (in the Roman empire) was a somewhat voluntary contract individuals chose to enter into. When serfdom became an entrenched institution with no way out it was certainly huge net negative for the serfs.
.e.g. what protection or justice do you think the 'lords' provided to serfs in 17-19th century Russia, Poland or the rest of Eastern Europe (in some cases it was effectively chattel slavery, there was a caste of "landless" peasants in Russia who could be rented out or effectively (even if not fully legally) sold to other nobles).
> Serfs were often required not only to work on the lord's fields, but also in his mines and forests and to labour to maintain roads.”
True but it's still a very different relationship. Serfs were effectively slaves (of course conditions and degree of autonomy they had varied significantly), in many ways closer to modern farming or factory equipment than modern worker-consumers.
Honestly I think the whole feudalism angle is a stretch, the current situation seems much more similar to 19th century robber barons/"unrestricted" capitalism.
I dislike how people use feudalism as a vague catchall for everything that came before British Capitalism. This is just one of those idioitc theory Marx came up with that has no basis in reality. His theories were not even correct for Britain and he had extremely limited knowlage about the world. But he still was arrogant enough to believe he could deduce 'general laws of history' based on these extremely limited examples from British history (that weren't even correct or complete).
But no matter how wrong Marx are, we now must forever pull out the 'feudalism' card anytime somebody dislikes something. Despite historians not even agreeing on what 'feudalism' actually means. European medievalists generally talk about feudalism in a narrow way of how lords would agree to contracts with knights. Global historians tend to use feudalism more as a catch all land ownership by the nobility.
> Serfs were effectively slaves
Serfs were not one thing. The thing we call 'serfs' had many meanings that changed over 100s of years and was different in each region and depended on that countries specific context. The laws around serfdom were constantly shifting. And beyond the actual laws, we know that very often the real world didn't actually reflect the laws.
Making any general statements about serfs simply doesn't make sense. Just as it doesn't make sense to talk about slaves as one thing.
Well yeah, never implied they were. That comment was a reply to a specific claim about serfdom being a relationship which might have been beneficial to both sides. That certainly wasn't the case by the 18-19th centuries. Nor was I 'making any general statements about serfs' in the medieval or pre medieval periods (or outside Central and Eastern Europe for that matter).
I don’t view serfdom as a net benefit to the serfs. Nonetheless there were initially small benefits that surely dwindled to nothing over time. I think this is exactly where the op metaphor is most apt. When power is traded for comfort, what seems like a good deal now will eventually become a raw deal in the future. (And we moderns surely have more relative power than the serfs ever had)
Ho, and punching Hayek, 30 years after his death, is really beneath contempt.
Technofeudalism is something you can choose to be a part of or not. You can (and should) pay for email, news and other services and you may or may not choose the cloud, most do not by the way.
So really, who is Varoufakis talking about?
Edit: typo, 'to' instead of 'the'
It is your tech-illiterate friends that hook you into the toxic cloud merely by having your contact information.
Technology changes social interactions.
For the rest of your point, everything (class, affluence, age, technology, etc...) changes social interaction, all the time, always.
You remind me of my friend, who calls everything communist. I recited to him some writing from the French revolution, apparently it was communist before communism was invented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2023_Greek_legislative_el...
MeRa25's is row 9 in the table at the top of the section.
Of course, the same parliamentary elections gave more than 3% and seats in parliament to various far-right remnants of Golden Dawn, like the "Spartans" (4.68%, 12 seats), "Victory" (3.70%, 10 seats) and "Greek Solution" (4.44%, 12 seats), and the Greek Communist Party (7.69%, 21 seats) so Varoufakis popularity is really no criterion for anything at all. At this point Greeks might next vote for Karagiozis (our version of Bozo the clown ish) for all the difference it will make.
Just so you know, some people might not see that as the strong defense you seem to think it is.
But to see some people taking him serious and even discussing his writings with a straight face is surreal.
This emperor has no clothes; publicly flashed Greece and all of Europe during its worst crisis in decades.
He pushed for certain unorthodox policies, which may or may not have been economically prudent, but his boss decided not to go for them after all when pressured by the EU, at which point Varoufakis resigned because his political bit was over.
He gambled with the fortunes of an entire country just to satisfy his ego.
I'm Greek and I watched the events of the disastrous Greek delegation to Europe unfold from abroad, the UK where I'm an immigrant. Varoufakis was such an obvious clown, devoid of every possible sense of reality, let alone any kind of competence in technical matters, that he made me appreciate Angela fucking Merkel.
That's right. I'm Greek and watching Varoufakis interact with Merkel, I ended up admiring Merkel. That's how disastrous was his term.
>> I'm Greek and I watched the events of the disastrous Greek delegation to Europe unfold from abroad, the UK where I'm an immigrant.
I don't know better because I'm Greek. I paid attention because I'm Greek.
But, also: native language, better grasp of context. Don't understimate that. Yes, I have a better chance to know better than anyone who isn't Greek and that's what it is.
Finally, I'm a leftie. I am politically invested: on his side. But even so, Varoufakis is terrible and he has pissed off everyone to the left and to the right. It takes a special kind of idiot to do that.
For a while, is seemed as though the Greek government was going to go through with it. I don't have the expertise or context to judge if they should have or not, or if they even really could have tried in the first place. It just seems that the crisis was canned and is simmering now to see another day...
Briefly, then. In 2015, Syriza, a left-wing party, won the Greek parliamentary elections on a platform rejecting the austerity measures that had been imposed as bailout conditions. Greece was in the throes of the crisis that started in 2009, and had already been bailed out twice by the Troika: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Central Bank (ECB) and the Eurogroup.
The new prime minister Alexis Tsipras appointed Varoufakis as the minister of finance. Soon after the second bailout from the Troika expired without any agreement about a third one. There was a run on the banks and capital controls were put in place, a great humiliation for Tsipras and a loss of trust to his party.
A Greek delegation then went to meet the Eurogroup in Brussels to discuss the conditions of a possible third extension. Varoufakis had just completed a "whiste-stop tour" of European capitals trying to drum up support for his arguments, that Greece should be granted debt relief with a loosening of the austerity measures demanded by the Troika. I remember interviews he was giving at the time, where he claimed that if Greece left the Eurozone the next day that we'd be "holding all the cards" and therefore could give the Europeans the finger. I believe there was also some rhetoric about playing chicken with Angela Merkel but maybe that didn't come from Varoufakis himself, I can't remember.
I have a memory of Tsipras sitting across the table from Merkel, Nicolá Sarkozy and others, whom I don't remember- possibly Christine Lagarde, of the IMF, Mario Draghi, of the ECB, Wolfgang Schauble, the German chancellor and the darling of all the Greeks at the time (I'm being sarcastic, everyone hated his guts) and who knows what else. I don't recollect Varoufakis being there. I remember Merkel speaking with a sombre face and saying that the EU didn't want to see Greece leave but that if that's what we wanted to do, they couldn't stop us. And that was that for holding all the cards and giving the finger. I believe it was at that time that a new bailout plan was put on the table.
After that -but I'm possibly mixing up the timing and it was before- there was an ill-advised referendum, with a confounding question that was interpreted in the UK press as Grexit/ No Grexit, and in the Greek press as "bailout/ no bailout". The referendum went towards the way that Tsipras and Varoufakis _probably_ wanted it to go (I'm not sure because the question was so confusing) but Tsipras decided to do the opposite anyway and accept the proposed bailout plan. Varoufakis resigned in protest, Tsipras appoitned a new finance minister (Euclid Tsakalotos) and Varoufakis rode into the sunset on his Japanese motorcylce. At least he had the common decency to wear a helmet. Nobody ever wears a bloody helmet in Greece. Most don't even wear seat belts. I guess we're made of sterner stuff.
What was Varoufakis plan in case the Europeans didn't agree to his terms? He had a plan. He got some of his old school pals together and they tried to hack into the computers of the Greek tax service. They wanted to implement a system of direct debt exchange between all greek taxpayers, so that the economy could continue to function even if the banks went down. A great plan, but the capability to make it work was another of Varoufakis self-inflating fantasies.
What would happen if Greece really left the Eurozone? At the time there were plenty of voices advocating for a Grexit. Joseph Stiglitz was one, another was Wolfgang Schauble, and then there was an unending flow of pundits, talking heads, analysts etc. A few EU finance ministers also didn't so much support it but clamour for it - because they were fed up with the Greek government's games (that...
Can you not understand how that would hit a person much harder than, say, somebody outside of Greece, let alone the EU? How much more invested in the welfare of this country they must be?
A little empathy goes a long way here.
Are you really trying to lecture those who experienced a government's disastrous term first-hand that they should stop claiming they experienced s government's disastrous term first-hand?
What next? Are you going to lecture those who lived through it on what it was like to actually live through it?
I said that OP experienced a government's disastrous term first-hand, not that he lived in Greece. Plenty of emigrants experience their home's political decisions first-hand even if their fiscal address is in any other country. I'm sure you already stumbled upon protests against government's organized by expats living abroad.
People don't really have ideals anymore these days but just vote and do what's best for their own interests. I applaud it when someone does stick by their ideals.
Even though in this case I don't agree, like I wrote I think the EU was too harsh on Greece. This problem was caused by all of us together. And no I'm not Greek myself :)
https://www.thelocal.it/
V. gambled a country for his own personal vendettas, which is something unforgivable. But i blame more the people who voted for him without seeing through to his transparent pathological narcissism
But this was prevented by Germany and co. And it was his the greek premier who eventually made a deal that Varoufakis and most Greeks didn't agree with.
Having said that, I don’t think the essay is very strong. The author seems to be using binary thinking and only brings arguments up that are in favor of his main arguments. With some critical thinking, it’s fairly easy to come up with counter arguments during the read.
The rest is pure nonsense, I was expecting more from Varoufakis.
Companies need to be able to fail and turnover with newer and better ones but the whole economy seems pegged to the biggest ones staying at the top, deserved or otherwise. Should we ban index funds? (spontaneous question, not suggestion)
For a while humanity had some property rights to the things they bought, to what happened in their home. But the big shift is that every device now has it's own terms of use, that these services get to write whatever contract they want to dictate to the world how it can use it's devices and it's data.
Shout-out to this post highlighting "Web scraping for me but not for thee" highlighting Mark Lemley making this point (the shift from pro-humanity property rights to pro corporation contract law) 20 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970 https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-f...
My personal opinion here, IP and anti-circumvention laws should be gutted & are a scourge against the human spirit. We should be encouraging mashup culture & rising off the shoulders of giants, not being crushed under their heels.
Still, I greatly admired him for his stand against Scholz and the bullies from the EU, IMF and World Bank; who did everything to ignore and silence him over the Greek austerity measures in 2015. In a way his sacking which allowed Greece to capitulate, made him a celebrity and elevated his cause.
"If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Still waiting for his grand theory comparing between Star Wars (Feudalism/Roman Empire) and StarTrek (Liberal Commmunism) as SciFi greatly influences how he considers the world, including writing his own dystopian/utopian fiction.
Also unherd is such a red flag for me when you look who gets to usually write, and about which topic (right wing align and the "left" which is just blue labour, effectively spcially conservative, economically labour), it's usually very one-sided and slanted to the right, the "left" are either writing on issues the right (conservative) agree on like progressive liberals are bad because they support LGBT (usually its against the T) or they write something vague like this that anyone can sort of agree on.
The web crushed and locks out many competing ideas that serve in their own way. The fear of domestic american terrorists has been used as a dogwhistle for total control of the web.
We need to get computing away from the cloud and invest in tech that allows communication and commerce in favour of conscious liberal individuals.
Private networks and technology that darkens the mind of the CPU, is the only way to re-establish conscious liberal control over one's electronic life. Black boxes (and more) are the way out, from mental serfdom to a machine owned and run by foreign interests.