Bradley M. Kühn1d ago

❤ … 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

KewlCat13h ago
Show threadBradley M. Kühn

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

Mar 23 at 10:06amWeb
Show threadJonas Høgh1d ago
@bkuhn marxist Greek economist (and briefly minister of finance during the debt crisis) Yanis Varoufakis discusses this in his recent book of the same name https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781529926095 - and also argues that feudalism is actually a better term for the current tech economy than capitalism
Technofeudalism

Capitalism is dead. Welcome to technofeudalism. In his boldest and most far-reaching book, the visionary economist and number-one bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis shows how the owners of big tech became the world's feudal overlords –replacing capitalism with a fundamentally new system that enslaves our minds, defies democracy and rewrite the rules of global power. But as Varoufakis also reveals, technofeudalism contains new opportunities to thwart and overturn it, bringing into focus more clearly than ever the revolution we need to escape our digital prison.

Show threadben1d 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.
Show threadBradley M. Kühn1d ago

@benjamineskola

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

#UndoneCS

Show threadTanguy ⧓ Herrmann15h ago
@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.
Show threadptvirgo1d ago
@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.
Show threadBradley M. Kühn1d 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.
Show threadJohn Colagioia1d ago
@bkuhn If you squint a bit, capitalism is pretty much feudalism without some jerk at the top claiming that his great-great-grandpa had a handshake deal with a deity that entitles him to a piece of everybody's action...