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.
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