Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare - but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
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Your car is *stuffed* full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn't the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.
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But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.
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The car manufacturers got *so* desperate for chips that they started buying up *washing machines* for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:
These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies.
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They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:
What's more, drivers *hate* all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps.
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Quality of new vehicles sold in the United States is declining as factors such as growing use of technology and lower build quality of certain parts are making the models more "problematic", according to automotive consultant J.D. Power.
Digital systems are drivers' most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers' products:
https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power
Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem.
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Back in 2020 when #Massachusetts was having a #RightToRepair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these *unfuckingbelievable* scare ads that basically said, "Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and *kill you*:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms
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But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the #InternetOfShit, there's still not much discussion of *why* the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who've been suckered by #SiliconValley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?
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Nope. Car execs are sophisticated, and they're surfing capitalism's latest - and last - hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.
Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since *The Communist Manifesto*, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html
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But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, *Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism*, #YanisVaroufakis proposes that capitalism has died - but it wasn't replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to *#feudalism*:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279
Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital - the capitalists - organize the economy and take the lion's share of its returns.
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Capitalism is dead. The #1 bestselling economist shows how the owners of big tech have become the world's feudal overlords. ‘What an amazing piece of work this is. Everyone should read it. 100 out of 100’ IRVINE WELSH In his boldest and most far-reaching book yet, world-famous economist Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is dead and a new economic era has begun. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies in the wake of the financial crisis and the pandemic have ended up supercharging big tech's hold over every aspect of the economy. Capitalism's twin pillars - markets and profit - have been replaced with big tech's platforms and rents. Meanwhile, with every click and scroll, we labour like serfs to increase its power. Welcome to technofeudalism. Drawing on stories from Greek Myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men, Varoufakis explains this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power and ultimately what it will take overthrow it. **A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR** ‘An epochal, once-in-a-millennium shift . . . this isn't just new technology. This is the world grappling with an entirely new economic system and therefore political power’ Carole Cadwalladr, Observer ‘With superb storytelling, Varoufakis shows how capitalism has eaten itself alive’ Brett Scott, author of Cloudmoney
But it wasn't always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by #rents, not #markets.
"Rents" are income you get from owning something other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house: not only do you get paid when someone lives there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.
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The first capitalists *hated* rent. They wanted to replace the "passive income" that landowners got from taxing their serfs' harvest with *active* income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted *active* income - and lots of it.
Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The "free market" of #AdamSmith wasn't a market that was free from regulation - it was a market free from *rents*.
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The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist's due:
https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/
Today, we live in a rentier's paradise. People don't aspire to create value - they aspire to capture it.
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In *Survival of the Richest*, Doug @Rushkoff calls this "#GoingMeta": don't provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn
Don't drive a cab, create #Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don't found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber.
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Even better, invest in *derivatives* of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.
This is your brain on the #FourHourWorkWeek, #PassiveIncome mind-virus. In *Techno Feudalism,* Varoufakis deftly describes how the new "#CloudCapital" has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.
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Shopping at #Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores - but each of those stores' owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It's a feudal one:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola
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This is the reason that automakers are willing to #enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they'd reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then "securitizing" the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.
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Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.
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Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when #BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?
https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers
Not to be outdone, #Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car's *accelerator pedal*, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:
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This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car's value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that fakakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.
But it's just for starters. Computers are *malleable*.
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The only computer we know how to make is the #TuringComplete #VonNeumannMachine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:
https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6
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Cory Doctorow
yuvipanda