this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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...Are we following the same economist?
Yanis has been very clear that this stage of capitalism could still be considered capitalism, but he's specifically meaning this period as technofeudal because the relationship of worker to the mode of production has meaningfully shifted with the owners of cloud capital
Say what you will about capitalists owning the railroads, utilities, etc., I and most people reading this don't work for these companies for free and therefore give these companies egregious valuations
The workers under cloud capitalism (the other name for this shift) are better described serfs as they are not wage labor and will never be
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.
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
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.
It's not, that's the whole point. The money flows don't reflect actual value flows, thanks to super exploitation.