Mastodawn

❤ … I've been waiting for 20 years to see a talk that starts with a slide entitled “Socio-economic model of the YouTube platform” that has a DAG where all arrows feed to a node that says “surveillance capitalism” & “Google generates billions of revenue per year”.
In Big Tech if you aren't the customer, you're the product.
https://www.undonecs.org/2026/abstracts/UndoneCS26_abstract_38.pdf

Took me 30 hours to get here,but I'm so glad I came to UndoneCS!

#UndoneCS #Google #YouTube #capitalism #surveillance #FOSS #OpenSource #FreeSoftware

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Bradley M. Kühn 1d ago

A questioner suggests talking of “techno-feudalism” instead of “surveillance capitalism”.

History doesn't repeat itself but often rhymes, & what's happening now certainly rhymes with “feudalism”.

I worry though that calling it “feudalism” downplays that unbridled capitalism may ultimately turn out to be more insidious and oppressive.

I often say that 300+ years from now, I expect all humanity will look back at capitalism the way we look at feudalism today.

#UndoneCS #FOSS #OpenSource

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ptvirgo

@bkuhn If they were referencing the literature, it's not an analogy. There is a specific effort, more akin to project 2025 and the heritage foundation than the word play here.

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Bradley M. Kühn 1d ago

@ptvirgo the questioner was a curios grad student. I do not think politics were afoot & I have keen spidy-sense for them. It was an innocent, friendly question.