Four_mile_circus

@Four_mile_circus@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Big AI has PC users furious. Nvidia and Micron's weird emotional appeals make it worse⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You could go further and say what’s happening now isn’t capitalism at all. Yanis Varoufakis calls the modern world economy “technofeudalism”: it’s controlled by information hypercompanies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, that make money not by producing anything, but by controlling the flow of information between consumers and producers, and charging producers rent for access to consumers.

  If you’re an app developer, you pay Google and Apple whatever they ask, and you follow their rules, or you don’t get to sell your product in their app stores; if you sell products, you give Amazon their cut, or you don’t get to sell in their market. And because Google and Apple and Amazon have so effectively entrapped customers, capitalists who don’t agree to their terms can’t get to their consumers at all.

  It’s vassal capitalism. Producers pay their technofeudal lords the bulk of their profits and compete with each other for the remaining scraps. And then they squeeze their workers and exploit their consumers even more in order to make enough money to survive at all.