(real title) Yanis Varoufakis Thinks Capitalism Has Been Killed By Technofeudalism, Something He Helped Usher In At Valve

Archive link if you want it: https://archive.md/0WIQW

Sorry if this has already been posted and discussed, it’s an article based on an interview Varoufakis did last year.

Varoufakis was promoting his book about Technofeudalism, so it’s probable that he’s playing up the significance of Valve and Steam’s role in the direction that corporations have gone regarding digital rent-seeking, market capture, etc.

It’s less of a whistle blowing confession and more of an exploration of the mechanisms by which the major online platforms with their defacto monopolies have replaced markets with complex machineries of control and profit extraction. But he shares some interesting insights into his work at Valve too.

The real goal, as Varoufakis identifies it, is to provide the land on which these transactions occur and, like the feudal lords of yore, to effectively give us, the townspeople, no choice in the matter. You either sell your product on Amazon – or share your music on Spotify, or tailor your videos to the ever-shifting whims of YouTube and TikTok – or you may as well take a hike into the internet’s equivalent of the frozen wastes. Companies extract rent, whether in the form of a 30 percent tax on the App Store and Steam or by collecting all your data and selling it to ad providers on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and the like – all while you provide the content that gives these platforms their appeal in the first place.

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The larger superstructure of technofeudalism, Varoufakis believes, is unsustainable. A small handful of companies maintain absolute control over these algorithms while extracting fees that do not even remotely correlate to a need.

[…]

Up until now, you know, steam engines were manufactured by wage labor. Now all the worlds are manufactured by unwaged labor. This is not sustainable, even if this work is voluntarily provided. It’s still work, and it’s skilled work, and when it’s not remunerated, that kid will not have enough money to go to college. That kid will not have enough money to buy stuff from Walmart. That kid will not have enough money to go to the movies. So that affects the rest of the economy."

[…]

“I shall constrain myself to saying that it (Valve) is not as interesting as it was to me [at the time],” he said. “The way it has evolved makes it less interesting, and I feel a certain regret that it had to go that way in the end. Commodification won. There were important values in there that commodification has destroyed, but that’s what commodification does.”