(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.
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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."
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“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.”
Technofeudalism isn’t a thing! It is just an intensification of trends already in capitalism. And no one, Veroufakis, Durand, etc., can accurately describe it as feudalism or diversion from capitalism other than that there is monopolies, more rent seeking, and less secure long term employment with benefits. It all comes from defining capitalism as only the most ideal version of Fordism and since we aren’t in that, it must no longer be capitalism. Even if we don’t have very secure employment with benefits, highly competitive markets focused on commodity production instead of rents, etc. Doesn’t mean we left capitalism for some return of feudalism. Monopolies, rents, and precarious employment can exist in capitalism!
Technofeudalism implies a technoaristocracy with different class interests from the bourgeoisie and a technopeasantry that the technoaristocracy exploits with different class interests from the proletariat. That’s 4 classes with different class interests. Presumably, the technoaristocracy would be people like Gates or Bezos, so where’s the technopeasantry? And this hypothetical technopeasantry having different class interests from the proletariat means they would have to undergo proletarianization in a DotP. Or would it be a DotT where the technopeasant is the revolutionary subject and the proletariat gets technopeasantrizied? See how it all falls apart.
I’m glad you posted your criticism because I had similar thoughts when I first read the piece. It seems like he’s either limited by his liberal perspective or is communicating to a prospective (book buying) audience limited by its liberal understanding of capitalism. He seems to use capitalism to also mean (the Very Real and sacred) free market capitalism.
Perhaps I’m being overly charitable, but my read on it was to let “technofeudalism” refer to the object of what he actually describes (which I take to be the rapidly accelerating consolidation and aggressive maintenance of monopolies,) then a majority of what he talks about remains true and compatible with my understanding of capitalism, and an interesting perspective.
Valve and Steam are things that I (and people I know) have considered to be somehow separate or distinct from other corporations and walled gardens, which I usually have no trouble recognising and seeing for what they are. I think on some level I’ve been choosing to stay naive and uncritical about this one corporation, and reading this helped me be more honest and consistent towards it.
eg. thinking through some of the dark patterns involved in serving algorithmically generated product lists rather than complete catalogues, it’s a level of manipulation that I can’t ignore, it eclipses any sunk cost fallacy or vestigial fondness I have towards the platform. Their non-deterministic nature almost certainly hooks into the brain in a similar way to gambling.
I guess it’s like when Facebook users left en mass after Cambridge Analytica coverage made the data harvesting and social manipulation impossible to ignore. Despite the network effect, sunk cost etc, the facts were too sinister to ignore for a huge part of the userbase.
I suppose it bears acknowledging that despite any of his assertions, the precedent for all of this had already been set well before he went to valve, most obviously by the likes of Amazon.
Is there a point at which technology can co-opt most people’s agency to freely make economic transactions of their own choosing, closing off social mobility, and rendering people as an extractive resource to whichever executive administers the walled garden(s) they are stuck in, with the walled gardens as an institution being unavoidable? Because that would be a reversion to serfdom.
I think a lot of the misunderstanding from Varoufakis and the ideas behind “technofeudalism” comes from the idea that the cloud just is there ready to be exploited in the same way that land has historically been to farmers. The cloud is not some ethereal space ready to be conquered, it’s an extremely expensive network of millions of computers, hard drives, routers, etc, which needs a vast amount of workers to be manufactured and maintained. Cloud services aren’t free to reproduce or unlimited in scope, they require a lot of capital investment and labour, and the relation of those workers to the means of production (the data centers) is identical to that of workers in a factory.
Data pipelines are heavily subsidized and generally public expenses, but so are most roads for the distribution of material goods, so that’s not a good argument in my opinion either. Was the music industry always techno capitalist then, because a few companies own the copyright of music and control who plays it (radio) at a fee? I’m not convinced at all by the idea that so called “technofeudalism” is conceptually that different from the distribution of historical immaterial goods such as mass media, cinema, music or even stuff like theater performances.
Had no idea he worked for Valve.
He helped design the f2p economies of counter strike, TF2, Dota
Damn so he developed the underage gambling addictions that powers them?
Same.
Pod Damn America did an episode on him and my main takeaway is Jake and Anders need to stream themselves playing some TF2 because they knew nothing about the game
Valve still credits him as their current economist afaik. Read that just last week anyway.
I don’t think that he was still working at Valve when he became the Greek finance minister for SYRIZA
I think he’s a full time activist and author at the moment. I can’t find any indication that he still works there.
