It’s un fucking believable the biggest cartoon release in history is censored in the UK and Europe. Fucking freedom, can’t event take the little one to see a cartoon cause it’s about underdogs rising against their oppressors.

Pain, hunger, and cold are physical too!

I guess the party Corbyn is cooking up is the only hope now

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.

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Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms.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.

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.

Obligatory (and, sadly, real):

diamat sucks, change my mind