Re: <nettime> Yanis Varoufakis: What is techno-feudalism?

On Wed, 2 Feb 2022 at 05:21, Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> wrote:

Hi Luke,

On 31.01.22 22:54, Luke Munn wrote:
> Amazon.com, Facebook, etc. are not markets. As you enter them, you leave
> capitalism behind. Within these platforms, one algorithm (belonging to
> one person or to very few persons) decides what is on sale, who sees
> which commodity is available, and how much rent the owner of the
> platform will keep from the profits of vassal-capitalists allowed to
> trade within the platform.
>
> *This is incorrect and shows the risk of an economist/politician doing
> media analysis. There is not 'one algorithm' running Amazon or Facebook.
> In fact, many contemporary platforms employ hundreds of microservices,
> with teams assigned to one or more of these services, often in different
> coding languages or frameworks. Yes, the platform-owner exerts a
> significant degree of control over the conditions within it.

Facebook is, literally, controlled by a single person. Does it matter if
the actual work is carried out by distributed teams/technologies,
sometimes with more, sometime with less coordination, sometimes even in
competition with each other, if they are all integrated in, and oriented
towards, the same bottom line?

> But this
> does not annihilate pushback from producers (e.g. eBay lowering fees
> after protests from sellers, Uber being forced to class freelancers as
> employees in certain jurisdictions, etc).

The fact that power is not absolute, that there are competing sources of
social power and that the exact configuration of these is dependent on
shifting alliances does not contradict the claim these companies have
amassed the outsized amount of power and that this power is of a
different kind.

> Yanis's analysis also erases
> any competition between platforms (e.g. Netflix vs Hulu vs HBO etc).
> Platforms don't 'leave capitalism behind' - sure they introduce new
> conditions but also rely heavily on conventional aspects of capitalism
> (e.g. Uber beholden to investors, Google's revenue coming from
> advertising). *

I'm not sure if Netflix etc are the best examples, but the point here is
that many of the platform companies don't compete in the market (though
there is competition between them for monopoly position), but they are
market-makers for others and that provides them with a different kind of
power. He calls it command power, but earlier attempts called this
'power of the protocol', or even earlier 'control society'. This all
goes in the same direction. Being able to shape people's action without
telling them directly what to do.

> Big Tech’s workers do not even collect 1% of their employer’s revenues.
> This is
> because paid labour performs only a fraction of the work that Big Tech
> benefits from. Who performs the bulk of the work? Most of the rest of
> us! For the first time in history, almost everyone produces for free
> (often enthusiastically)
>
> *Also incorrect. In my PhD on Uber, Airbnb, and other platforms, cost of
> labor actually consumed a huge amount of the bottom line each year.
> Indeed, these frustratingly high costs were what fueled Uber's
> self-driving car pilot programs, and drove pundit speculation that human
> labor would soon be replaced. Of course, this turned into a nightmare
> and Uber stopped that program in 2020 I believe.

The 1% figure struck me also as very low, but it seems pretty clear that
the number of workers in these companies is relatively low, given their
international reach and number of people with whom they interact.
Delivery is quite different from social networking and the inability to
shed labor costs is one of the reasons many people have pointed out that
Uber as not path to profitability expect by gaining a monopoly.

> *This analysis not only erases the visible pool of working class labor
> that fuels platforms like Deliveroo, Uber, etc, but it also ignores the
> hidden labor that many platforms benefit from. Gray and Suri call this
> 'ghost work'. We can think of content moderators forced to suffer
> through traumatic content day in and day out. Technically they work for
> third party companies that contract to Big Tech, neatly severing much of
> the responsibility for workers. There's also a raft of other IT services
> (e.g. data labelling, microtasks, crowd-work etc), with much of this
> hidden labor sourced from the Global South, with poor pay and precarious
> conditions.
>
> *
> *Sure, platforms also benefit from free labor in the form of reviews
> (although there's also a black market for these). But the danger here is
> that Yanis suggests that the problem is naive young Westerners doing
> free labor because we've reached some shiny and unprecedented new form
> of capitalism. The reality is that platform labor looks very much like
> older forms of labor - racialized, gendered, leveraging colonial
> disparities, etc. *

Sure, but wouldn't that outsourcing and racializing of labor at the
heart of the most advanced industries amount to breaking of the
capitalist promise (so dear to the US) that work provides the route to
social mobility and that fact that one is stuck in a place without the
chance of social mobility. Perhaps that's only that the conditions which
have always governed the "periphery" are not at the heart of the system,
but even then, it strikes me as something significant. Agreed, V is
glossing over a lot of important details, but I don't think it's
incompatible with the overall argument.

> Command capital, in contrast, comprises produced means of organising the
> means
> of industrial production. Its owners can extract huge new value without
> owning the means of industrial production; merely by owning the
> privatised informational networks that embody command capital.
>
> *Yes, but other commentators have picked up on this years ago. There's
> the widely used Tom Goodwin quote: "Uber, the world’s largest taxi
> company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media
> owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no
> inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns
> no real estate." His book came out in 2018. In fact, my own book from
> 2018 basically focuses on how platforms 'exhaust' or extract this labor
> rather than 'using' it in the traditional sense. That's not to say more
> attention and research on this isn't useful and needed - it is. But the
> implicit claim throughout the interview that no one else has recognized
> or diagnosed these conditions (that he terms techno-feudalism) is a
> little too much. *

Absolutely. These are older ideas (well, which one's aren't?) The first
time I heard the term neofeudalism was in Peter Drahos's Book
"Information Feudalism" in 2002.

all the best. Felix

> *Ngā mihi / best, Luke*

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