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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ben 1d ago

@bkuhn I agree: calling it ‘feudalism’ seems to absolve capitalism of blame, to me. It’s the line of thinking that goes ‘but that’s not *real* capitalism’, because ‘real’ capitalism is supposed, for example, to have only perfect free markets and any deviation from that means the blame lies with the deviation and not witb capitalism itself.

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Bradley M. Kühn 1d ago

@benjamineskola

I, for one, am sick of the Invisible Hand of the Market slapping me in the face every day.

#UndoneCS

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Tanguy ⧓ Herrmann

@bkuhn @benjamineskola that's a very nice hand that you have here, or you are very polite.
I see that hand do way more than slap people in their face. I, too, am very tired of the fairytale.