Think of cars, which harvest data, block third-party repair, and force you to buy everything from acceleration to seat-heaters as a subscription:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The cloud is especially prone to rent-seeking, as #YanisVaroufakis writes in his new *Technofeudalism*, where he explains how "#cloudalists" have found ways to lock productive enterprises into using cloud-based resources from which ever-increasing rents can be extracted:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

29/

The postcapitalist, technofeudal world isn't a world without capitalism, then. It's a world where capitalists are subservient to feudalists ("#cloudalists" in Varoufakis's thesis), as are the rest of us the cloud peons, from the social media users and performers who fill the technofuedalists' siloes with "content" to the regular users whose media diet is dictated by the cloudalists' recommendation systems:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

14/

@pluralistic “The higher they climb,...”

#cloudalists