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Yanis Varoufakis views Big tech as digital landlords in his book 'Technofeudalism" . He argues that they extract rents from owning the digital space as landlords did in the Middle ages while monetising our attention. They are not capitalists in the sense that they don’t sell goods and services for profit but rather control the environment where others buy and sell.
It’s an interesting take on where we are and how dystopian big tech has turned out to be.
That reads as an excuse, “they are not really capitalists” type of argument. Yes, they are. They sell products, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta… They all sell products, they are all capitalists to the very core. It’s just that, one of their products is us.
I hope I’m wrong, but this seems very naive. Just as an example, we just had a report released here in Denmark this week, that stated that AI could replace 100000 civil servants. Denmark is a small country of only 6 million citizens.
Who will run the servers for those AI services? Probably Microsoft or Amazon or some other tech giant.
The truth is the tech Giants are getting bigger and more powerful, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, TSMC.
These companies are all bigger and more powerful than they were a decade ago.And just because we can run Linux, and have found a sliver of freedom there, doesn’t really help in the big picture of modern technology.
When your government chooses to use proprietary solutions, there is little that is done to prevent it. It shouldn’t of course be necessary, the politicians should be smart enough to know dependency on proprietary systems is costly even dangerous in the long run. But lobbyist always manage to shoot down open source initiatives.
So here we are, chugging along to ever more dependency on and power to big tech, as individuals and companies and in public services.I use Qwant search, I used to use AOSP (Android Open Source Project) for my phone, and I use Linux. But that doesn’t prevent big tech to take more power. The current and next big play is AI, and all the above companies are fighting to dominate that within their fields, and no small player has a chance anymore. Because the cost of entry is in the billions.
EU is taking up the fight, and is regulating all these companies, with the exception of TSMC which AFAIK hasn’t been shown to play dirty (yet).
Hopefully governments across the world, will cooperate to put a lid on the amount of power a single company can attain.AI hype being overblown is also uncovering at a rapid pace. Even at the lay person level, AI is just bullshit now.
I would love for this headline to be correct, but it seems far more likely that it is wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. /Drcox
Who knows one day we’ll see Youtube finally crumble
I was a little confused by the tone of this one. I scrolled back up and realised it was written by Signal’s Meredith Whittaker, and it made a bit more sense.
wow that’s optimistic. how about big tech gets with government to make laws that prevent the use of such egalitarian protocol based tech. instead, big tech is mandatory and further continually monitors you from your phone which you are mandated to carry. AI minders alert the morality police or etc to come issue beatdowns to dissenters.
So the autocrats will disband the technocracy? This is watching rich people have a slap fight with billions of dollars and think to yourself, “Ah yes this is good policy.”
