RE: https://mastodon.social/@iFixit/116040257101330977

«It’s a masterpiece of anti-functional design. To the casual observer, it seems to serve no purpose other than to look “cool”, but when it comes to the nitty gritty of DIY repair, it ensures that a standard toolbox is useless for basic maintenance. In fact, the patent explicitly states this as a function […] to prevent being loosened or tightened…by unauthorized individuals.”

The owner has now become an "unauthorized individual" in rentier capitalism.

#politics #rentierCapitalism

Wheelchairs have paywalls and digital locks now - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yWcXPDJQ7k

#Enshittification #Capitalism #RentierCapitalism #IP #Paywalls #Disabilities

Check out the programme for our Joint International Workshop with the University of Bologna: this year, the subject is "Infrastructures of Rent Extraction".

It will take place in Bologna on 27 November.

ℹ️ https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/en/events/global-infrastructures-2025/

#Histodons #Capitalism #TechnoCapitalism #Technology #GlobalInfraestructures #Infraestructures #Extractivism #GlobalEconomy #TransnationalCorporations #BigTech #LabourHistory #RentierCapitalism #TechnoFeudalism #RentExtraction #Bologna

Doctorow has identified a specific, recurring cycle of decay that plagues digital platforms and has situated it with uncanny clarity within the context of the evolution of capitalism.
#technofeudalism #rentiercapitalism
#enclosurecapitalism

https://www.levyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/wp_1100.pdf

"This paper critically examines the emerging discourse on technofeudalism. While mainstream narratives celebrate technological advancement driven by American tech giants, proponents of the technofeudalism thesis argue that a new ruling class – ‘cloudalists’ – has supplanted traditional capitalists, extracting data and rent in ways reminiscent of feudal relations. However, this discourse fails to account for the ongoing dynamism of capitalist investment and competition. In contrast, this paper advances the concept of rentier capitalism by revisiting Marx’s analysis in Capital, with particular attention to his often-overlooked theory of ground rent in Volume III. Drawing on Marx’s notebooks published for the first time in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), the paper argues that rentier capitalism constitutes the most advanced and contradictory form of contemporary capitalism, which accelerates the destruction of the common and undermines the conditions necessary for working-class solidarity. As the dual crisis of capital accumulation and anti-systemic movements intensifies socio-economic and political instability, the threat of an authoritarian turn towards technofascism becomes increasingly imminent."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23792949.2025.2557911#d1e222

#Marx #TechnoFeudalism #RentierCapitalism #Monopolies #WorkingClass #TechnoFascism

OnlineFirst - "Post-entrepreneurial cities? Runaway housing costs and the humanitarian turn in urban governance" by Marc Doussard:

#housing #incomeinequality #rentiercapitalism #urbanpolitics #Covid19

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0308518X251349103

🗣 We've opened the call for papers for this year's edition of our Joint International Workshop with the University of Bologna, under the subject "Infrastructures of Rent Extraction".

ℹ️ https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/en/events/global-infrastructures-2025/

@histodons
@histodon

#Histodons #Capitalism #TechnoCapitalism #Technology #GlobalInfraestructures #Infraestructures #Extractivism #GlobalEconomy #TransnationalCorporations #BigTech #LabourHistory #RentierCapitalism #TechnoFeudalism #RentExtraction

"The real conflict over what kind of economic and political system the Global Majority will have is just gaining momentum.

Global South countries and others have been driven so deeply into debt that they have been obliged to sell off their public infrastructure to pay its carrying charges. Recovering control of their natural resources and basic infrastructure requires the fiscal right to impose an economic-rent tax on their land, natural resources and monopolies, as well as the legal right to recover environmental cleanup costs caused by foreign oil and mining firms, and to implement financial cleanup costs (i.e., write offs and cancellation) of the foreign debt burden imposed by creditors who have not taken responsibility to ensure that their loans can be paid under existing conditions.

U.S. evangelistic rhetoric describes the imminent political and economic fracture of the world economy as a “Clash of Civilizations” between democracies (i.e., countries that support U.S. policy) and autocracies (i.e., nations acting independently).

It would be more accurate to describe this fracture as a fight by the United States and its European and other Western allies against civilization — assuming civilization entails, as it seems it must, the sovereign right of countries to enact their own laws and tax systems for the benefit of their own populations within an international system that has a common set of basic rules and values.

What Western ideologues call democracy and free markets has turned out to be an aggressive rentier-financial imperialism. And what they call autocracy is a government strong enough to prevent economic polarization between a super-rich rentier class and an impoverished population at large, such as is occurring within the Western oligarchies themselves."

https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/07/17/michael-hudson-global-majority-us-financial-colonialism/

#BRICS #USA #Imperialism #FinancialColonialism #PoliticalEconomy #EconomicSovereignty #Rentism #RentierCapitalism

"The problem is our monopolised food system. Think of it as a vast profit machine shaped like an hourglass, with many food producers at the top, millions of consumers at the bottom, and a few dominant firms – such as giant supermarkets or global food traders – clustered at its narrowing neck, siphoning a cut from the passing traffic"
Nicholas Shaxson, co-founder of the Balanced Economy Project

#FoodGiants #Farming #Agriculture #Food #RentierCapitalism #UKPolitics

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/22/big-supermarkets-strangling-farmers-shoppers-solution-break-them-up?CMP=GTUK_email