You don't have to accept the arguments of capitalism's defenders to take those arguments seriously. When Adam Smith railed against rentiers and elevated profit to a means of converting the intrinsic selfishness of the wealthy into an engine of production, he had a point:
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
For leftists property rights can be a means to human rights (like revolutionary land reformers who give peasants title to the lands they work), but where property rights interfere with human rights, they are set aside.
In his 2023 book Technofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis claims that capitalism has given way to a new feudalism - that capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism...and feudalism:
Regarding the last boost: if there were a functional left politics in the United States, it would have pushed back vigorously and relentlessly against the cloud and would still be doing so today. In Marx's terms, the cloud removes the means of production from the hands of the workers and places them under the control of corporations. In that way the movement of most digital work into the cloud is analogous to the trends the Luddites were fighting against, with the movement of skilled weaving work into factories performed by loom operators and subsequent deskilling of weavers.
This should have been vigorously resisted as it was unfolding, but it was not as far as I can remember. It should be vigorously opposed now, but it is not. Data centers, our modern mills, are consuming vast quantities of critical resources like electric power and clean water, to the point that there are communities struggling to provide these resources to human beings who live there. Yet the pushback against this expansion is muted, and data centers are expanding rapidly. Where is the left's response to this corporate seizure of the means of production?
People are worried about generative AI taking jobs, and rightly so, but I think these concerns point to an overarching trend towards a kind of digital feudalization. Generative AI is already created by taking peoples' hard work without any compensation. You're permitted to use the technology "free of charge", but you can't pay the rent or mortgage, or buy food, with ChatGPT output. This essentially renders all of us as peasants.
The threat from bosses that you could be fired and replaced with generative AI, even if false, presses down wage demands and encourages doing work for no compensation. In this climate, people feel compelled to learn how to use generative AI to do their work because they perceive (again, probably rightly) that if they don't do that they will eventually find themselves without employment opportunities. Once again, if you're in a position of doing uncompensated work like this on behalf of a powerful entity, you are in a relationship distressingly similar to the one a peasant was in to a lord in the feudal system.
I'm not saying anything new here, just thinking out loud. But doesn't the left have anything to say, loudly proudly and often, about this? These are bread and butter issues for the left, aren't they?
“The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states.”
For the pro-monopoly crowd that absolutely dominated antitrust law from the Carter administration until 2020, Amazon presents a genuinely puzzling paradox: the company's monopoly power was never supposed to emerge, and if it did, it should have crumbled immediately.
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Amazon is the poster-child for monopoly run amok. As Yanis Varoufakis writes in Technofeudalism, Amazon has actually become a post-capitalist enterprise. Amazon doesn't make profits (money derived from selling goods); it makes rents (money charged to people who are seeking to make a profit):
"Deliberately grounded on a tiny reef in the #SouthChinaSea, part of an island chain claimed by the two Asian countries, the #BRPSierraMadre is now the unlikely base for a detachment of Filipino marines who stand guard over the atoll, scanning the turquoise waters for Chinese ships." #AyunginShoal#SecondThomasShoal#Philippines