This is a glimpse at our future under Techno-Feudalism, by the way. Five companies own all the entertainment and charge you extortionate rates to rent it. Please enjoy these last few years of Steam allowing indie games to be published with $20.00 or lower prices - once Gabe Newell goes away, inide devs are going to get “Spotified” out of existence by whatever venture capitalist buys up Steam.
Techno-feudalism is just monopoly capitalism. 🤷♀️
Techno-feudalism highlights an interesting point which is basically that, what occurred during the historical dispossession of the commons, is now re-occurring with regards to the “digital commons”( i.e. whatever form of P2P “free” internet humanity managed to foment); anything that cannot be annexed into a private, rent-seeking “Platform” will be increasingly subject to sabotage via legalese and economic plunder.
While this first occurred during the rise of global capitalism, it is also a regular practice which reinforces capitalism. I guess they struggled to achieve this in online spaces for a good while - but that is no longer the case.
Honestly, techno-feudalism is just a bad name for this - as you point out it implies a shift away from capitalism rather than a process of capitalist encroachment/renewal and it also just plainly doesn’t have that much to do with feudalism (except the erosion of it). Varoufakis’ main gripe as far as I understand is how rent via ‘Platform’ is becoming a hegemonic force in the digital market domain - but, his title almost seems to imply that rent-seeking is foreign to capitalism and only occurs in feudalism which is misleading and idealistic (i.e liberalism).
Yeah I didn’t like his book. Varoufakis thinks that we were seeing the defeat of capitalist profit seeking and a return to feudal rent seeking. Capitalism reverts to mercantilism, capitalist firms reduced to merchants within feudal markets controlled by feudal fiefdoms like Amazon, and the working class eradicated by gig work and turned back into serfs.
I think he’s overestimating the durability of this new market paradigm, and basically ignores that monopolies in the late 19th-early 20th centuries were exactly the same. This is what the railroad barrons did, plop themselves on the new tech and collect rents from capitalist firms.
I think what’s happening has more in common with enclosure and the transition away from peasantry into proletarianization. It’s just more capitalism