#InternetArchive#DigitalLending#eBooks#BookPublishing#Copyright#IP#Rentism#Feudalism: "Supporting the archive could be seen as a denial of the unstable financial position of people in the book world and the hard, sincere work of the people who make and sell the books. But the suggestion by the four publishers that offering expensive and complex licensing deals to libraries is the only solution for more income and a better situation for authors, is incorrect.
There’s a hidden income that the authors do not profit from: by participating in the systems that publishers and distribution platforms offer the readers also pay by giving access to their data. This is not a source of revenue generation that authors have an interest in preserving. Furthermore, there is little evidence that library lending has a negative effect on book sales. Expensive licensing deals, the proposal put forward by representatives of the Big Four publishers, mean that libraries will have to offer fewer e-books to their readers, which in turn means fewer readers, which is not benefiting authors. Finally, the licensing structures are a vehicle for censoring and retracting books. In 2022, Wiley withdrew thirteen hundred academic e-books from libraries right at the beginning of the academic year, forcing students to buy the expensive books they needed for their studies."
#BigTech#Capitalism#Feudalism#TechnoFeudalism: "After his combustible, short-lived political career, Varoufakis tells me (as he details in his new book), he went back to his mathematical training and began really looking at the algorithms driving the major winners of post-crash capitalism: Big Tech. What he found wasn’t capitalism, wasn’t even a marketplace, at all.
“The moment you enter Amazon.com, you’ve exited capitalism,” he says, adding that it’s a trading platform, not a market, and you must not confuse the two. And here, the self-described Marxist appeals to the wisdom of not just Adam Smith, but also the arch-free-market economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. “If they were alive, they would agree with me” that every market has to be decentralized, at least to some degree, he says.
“We all walk into a market, even if there’s only one seller, at least we can talk one to one another as buyers and exchange views.” For Amazon, Google, Facebook and all of what he calls “cloud capitalists,” there is no conversation of economic exchange that isn’t mediated by the algorithm, “which is owned by one man,” adding that such an outcome would be a “wet dream” of the Soviet Union’s State Planning Committee, or Gosplan. “If Gosplan had the algorithm, they would be over the moon, because it’s the ultimate in centralization.”"
#Capitalism#Marx#Marxism#BigTech#Technofeudalism#Feudalism: "In Technofeudalism, you argue capitalism has brought about its own demise, but not in the way that, say, Marx would have expected. Capitalism has its own contradictions — most fundamentally in the antagonism between capital and labor — and yet those contradictions seem to have produced a mutation that is perhaps worse than anyone might’ve expected. So how did capitalism kill itself and what is replacing it?
YANIS VAROUFAKIS
This book falls squarely within the Marxist political-economic tradition. I wrote it as a piece of Marxist scholarship. So, from my Marxist perspective, this is a tragic book to have to write.
The contradictions of capitalism didn’t lead to the anticipated resolution where, after all these centuries of class stratification, society would be distilled into two classes, poised for a high-noon clash. This decisive confrontation between oppressor and oppressed would result in the liberation of humanity — the emancipation of humanity from all class conflict. Instead of that, however, this clash between the capitalist — the bourgeoisie — and the proletariat ended up in the complete victory of the bourgeoisie: a complete loss after 1991, especially.
In the absence of a competitor in the form of trade unions — the organized working class — capitalism went into a rampant dynamic evolution that caused this mutation into what I call cloud capital. This transformation effectively marked the end of traditional capitalism. It killed capitalism — a development that embodies a Marxist-Hegelian contradiction, but not the kind of contradiction we would have hoped for.
Cloud capital has killed off markets and replaced them with a kind of a digital fiefdom where not just proletarians — the precarious — but bourgeois people and vassal capitalists are all producing surplus value for the vassal capitalists. They are producing rents."
"How to replace bad ideas" may be of even broader interest & importance? I second the recommendation for "Tyranny of a Construct", well worth reading on its 50th anniversary!
and that's just the start, as UBS Head of Wealth Management points out; this will continue 'over the next 20 to 30 years, as more than 1,000 billionaires pass an estimated $5.2tn to their children'!
When you cut away the reward for #innovation, this is just a new form of #feudalism!
It is just a horrible idea for your boss and your landlord to be the same person/entity. Power relationships with landlords and bosses are quite bad enough on their own. Combining the two is beyond evil.
The last time I made this mistake, I at least had some other money (student loans) coming in, so when it went bad, I could still quit and in fact I continued to live there for at least another several months.
But to have to move at the same time you're losing your income? Do not put yourself in that position.
Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it
In 1993, when he first got the internet, Varoufakis’s father posed a “killer question” to his son: “now computers speak to each other, will this network make capitalism impossible to overthrow? Or might it finally reveal its Achilles heel?”
Today in Labor History November 6, 1217: The Charter of the Forest was sealed by King Henry III, re-establishing rights to the “forests” for “free men” that had been eroded by William the Conqueror and his heirs. “Forest” included large areas of commons such as heathland, grassland and wetlands, productive of food, grazing and other resources. At that time, royal forests were among the most important sources of food, as well as fuel for cooking, heating and charcoal production. “Free men” were a subset of peasants who paid lower rents and who were subjected to fewer restrictions than other peasants. The document was complementary to the Magna Carta and was considered radical for its time and place.
Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:
"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (#SteinsLaw)
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)
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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:
That end seems to have come, but what followed capitalism wasn't socialism, it was the return of #feudalism, an economic system where elites derive their wealth from #rents, not profits:
Profit is the income you get from investing in capital - machinery, systems, plant - and then harvesting the surplus value created by workers who mobilize this capital.
So capitalism is dead and we are in a new age of technofeudalism?
A situation where a privileged class controls the essential digital infrastructure and individuals and corporations from the period of capitalism are forced to pay rent or risk eviction. 🤔 :awesome_rotate: 🤔
Long before he was Greek Finance Minister his blog posts as Steam's resident economist were essential reading, as he shon light on video game economies & Valve's upside down working methods.
In his new book he argues that #capitalism as we know it is dead, replaced by a new form of #feudalism. He's making a compelling-enough argument that I feel I should pause my other work until I've finished reading it.
The second decade of the 21st century is truly a bounteous time. My backyard has produced a bumper crop of an invasive species of mosquito that is genuinely innovative: rather than confining itself to biting in the dusk and dawn golden hours, these stinging clouds of flying vampires bite at every hour that God sends:
But "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop" (#SteinsLaw). Perhaps our mistake was in waiting for capitalism to give way to socialism, rather than serving as a transitional phase between #feudalism and...feudalism.
Socialists have been hotly anticipating the end of capitalism since at least 1848, when Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto - but the Manifesto also reminds us that capitalism is only too happy to reinvent itself during its crises, coming back in new forms, over and over again:
Now, in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism,#YanisVaroufakis - the "libertarian Marxist" former finance minister of Greece - makes an excellent case that capitalism died a decade ago, turning into a new form of #feudalism: #technofeudalism:
To understand where Varoufakis is coming from, you need to go beyond the colloquial meanings of "capitalism" and "feudalism." Capitalism isn't just "a system where we buy and sell things."