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Who knows one day we’ll see Youtube finally crumble
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.
I would love for this headline to be correct, but it seems far more likely that it is wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. /Drcox
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.
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.There is no way this AI bullshit will replace 100000 people, no need to worry there.
Incidentally, we were in Denmark a month ago and your country is awesome. You all have a lot of things figured out.
Too much agriculture, too few forests. But that’s fixable.
Compared to most I think we have it pretty good here. But that doesn’t stop us complaining, and sometimes we have to remind ourselves that it could be worse. We could be living in Sweden. 😋
Jokes aside, we are lucky that we also have good neighbors, and of course we love our Scandinavian brothers.
That is not how capitalism works but love an optimist.
Like Elon Musk, the richest man ever who is best friends with the president?
Insane take.
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.”
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.
Looking more like Wired has fallen from grace. Why would investors care about negative societal consequences of Big Tech as long as they make money? And it wasn’t Microsoft who cut corners, it was CrowdStrike. That’s a big enough error to be the target of a Microsoft lawsuit. I stopped reading there cause this just seems like hot garbage.
Optimists cause more harm than good.
Fortunately, there’ve been successful Monopoly destroying actions in the past. When money power/ capitalists get too much influence political power strikes back.
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money and political power is the same thing now.
It is in USA, but not in EU and China.
So what you say is true for USA, but not for the world.Because it happened in the past as well. And the big tech companies were split, cut down, and destroyed. Big tech was not IT in the past but other “advanced technologies” at their time.
The past is a good reference to learn from, but it can’t be a blueprint for the present. There are different circumstances between then and now which complicate things, like the aforementioned big money in politics.
Just a few in the US - and they were all different at that time. They were all intertwined with politics at their time. Quick google search though, not sure how good the sources are:
Railroad: https://digfir-published.macmillanusa.com/roark7e/roark7e_ch18_4.html
Steel, oil, and tobacco: https://19thcentury.us/19th-century-monopolies/
Or just recently: take a look at China. How Chinese Big Tech influence on society was crushed and control was taken back by the Communist Party in the past 5 years.
There are two genres of capitalist optimism.
one is the “it’s going to be different this time baby I swear” and the other is “prayer to an angry god”. This piece obviously is of the former category.
