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Because y’all shouldn’t fall for this moralistic and anachronistic nonsense. The rentier bourgeoisie controls the servers and data centres (vulgarly called “cloud”) like they did before with the railways, the shipping infrastructure, the airlines, energy, the production and redistribution of oil and gasoline, and even other forms of communications infrastructure.

Reframing the rentier bourgeoisie as some new unique stage of development beyond capitalism (and smuggling in liberal moralisms about “fiefdoms” and “feudal lords”) is just yet another European attempt at reframing the current regressive nature of capitalism as not-capitalism in order to defend the status quo as a “democracy” at risk.

And this author doesn’t even get into Imperialism in his critique.

  • Red_Scare [he/him]@lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    15 days ago

    This is extremely eurocentric or rather Global North centric. There is no value (in the Marxist sense) in the “cloud”. Real value is still created by workers mining minerals that go into CPUs, harvesting cotton, assembling smartphones, making sneakers in sweatshops etc.

    The value of their labour is extracted by Western firms selling their products. Much of it is transferred to non productive employees in the Global North, influencers, content creators, marketing and PR people, you name it.

    For Marxists, the fact that money flows to those people and not the ones making all the hardware necessary for their “content”, doesn’t mean influencers are actually more productive than sweatshop workers.

    All the talk about technofeudalism, post-industrial economy, etc is only possible because the real production is removed from our sight (in the Global North) so it’s easy to forget most of the world is still physically toiling to make all our shit.

    • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      There is no value (in the Marxist sense) in the “cloud”.

      This is just wrong, there is a vast amount of dead and living labour involved in building and mantaining the cloud (data centers), every single piece of hardware in a server is a commodity itself, just like the software required does not develop itself. In order for them to have no value, they would literally need to pop out of nature. Same goes for data, there is a lot of dead and living labour involved in collecting and storing data, even if computers have made it infinitely easier to reproduce and distribute data than before. A single byte of data or row in a table is insignificant and near worthless, but we are talking about trillions of bytes of data handled by data centers, it’s qualitatively different.

      This does not mean i agree with Yanis, i dislike the man and his kind with every molecule of my body, but disregarding data is frankly absurd.

      • Red_Scare [he/him]@lemmygrad.ml
        0·
        15 days ago

        You are totally right but that’s not what Yanis means by “cloud capitalism”, which is what I was referring to.

        “Cloud capitalism” is about collecting fees for access to digital markets, collecting your personal data, monetising user content without paying creators, actual content of user-facing platforms like YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Facebok, not things you’re talking about: labour involved in building and mantaining the cloud, server as a commodity itself, labour involved in collecting and storing data. This is why the user I was replying to referenced “unpaid labor”, none of the things you mentioned are unpaid.

        In https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-age-of-cloud-capital:

        Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud rent. As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labor, but they are not in charge as they once were. They have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labor—in addition to the waged labor we perform, when we get the chance.

        The exercise of capital’s power to command workers and consumers alike was handed over to the algorithms. This was a far more revolutionary step than replacing autoworkers with industrial robots. After all, industrial robots simply do what automation has been doing since before the Luddites: making proletarians redundant, or more miserable, or both. No, the truly historic disruption was to automate capital’s power to command people outside the factory, the shop or the office—to turn all of us, cloud proles and everyone else, into cloud serfs in the direct (unremunerated) service of cloud capital, unmediated by any market.

        From factory owners in America’s Midwest to poets struggling to sell their latest anthology, from London Uber drivers to Indonesian street hawkers, all are now dependent on some cloud fief for access to customers. It is progress, of sorts. Gone is the time when, to collect their rent, feudal lords employed thugs to break their vassals’ knees or spill their blood. The cloudalists don’t need to deploy bailiffs to confiscate or to evict. Instead, every vassal capitalist knows that with the removal of a link from their cloud vassal’s site they could lose access to the bulk of their customers. And with the removal of a link or two from Google’s search engine or from a couple of ecommerce and social media sites, they could disappear from the online world altogether. A sanitized tech-terror is the bedrock of technofeudalism. Looked at in totality, it becomes apparent that the world economy is lubricated less and less with profit and increasingly with cloud rent.

    • Philo_and_sophy@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      Respectfully, I think you’re missing a great deal of labor value in the cloud.

      One branch is the developers who are creating the cloud infrastructure and the algorithms that keep us hooked, the other branch is us as users (or serfs more accurately) who are training these algorithms endlessly via social media consumption

      I don’t know if you’re in the tech industry or have exposure to the level of engineering as well as the value of processed data harvested from users, but the massive valuation of tech companies in Western stock markets vs the rest of the society should be a reasonable indicator

      Both of these forms of labor power create the underlying value of cloud capital (as well as the all of the upstream workers, but they are not novel forms of value to your point)

      Secondly, there seems to be a meaningful incongruence regarding influencers. I think we agree that their form of labor pales in comparison to the other labor inputs noted above.

      Technofeudalism isn’t concerned with influencers at all, and it’s a red herring to suggest so imho

      But to your closing point, while I agree this comes from a global north perspective, its consequences are universal in that serfs from the global South are tilling the land of cloud capitalism for free just as much as folks from the global north

      • Red_Scare [he/him]@lemmygrad.ml
        0·
        15 days ago

        One branch is the developers who are creating the cloud infrastructure and the algorithms that keep us hooked, the other branch is us as users (or serfs more accurately) who are training these algorithms endlessly via social media consumption

        The value of producing algorythms vs producing servers themselves is hugely overblown, there’s value transfer from one part of the global population to another.

        We don’t create value by shopping online, algorythms training by observing our behaviour does not change that.

        the massive valuation of tech companies in Western stock markets vs the rest of the society should be a reasonable indicator

        It’s not, that’s the whole point. The money flows don’t reflect actual value flows, thanks to super exploitation.