Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺@im_Mateus_
Yanis Varoufakis on why capitalism is dead:
"Something quite remarkable has happened to capital in the last 15 years."
Yanis walks through the history of power to make his case.
Under feudalism, power came from owning land. If you owned the land, you owned the communities living on it, and you had the political power to send the sheriff to collect your share at harvest.
Capitalism shifted the source of power from land to machines:
"When we talk about capitalism, what do we mean? We mean a system where power comes from owning the machines that allow you to retain a residual after you've paid off your workers. What you retain is profit, and that profit is the source of all power under capitalism."
But here's where Yanis makes his key distinction. Capital itself isn't new, it predates capitalism by 10-20,000 years. A hammer, a plow, a tractor: these are "produced means of production." Things we make not because we want them, but to produce something else.
Then he points to something different: the cell towers, the optic fiber cables crisscrossing the Earth, the servers deep inside our oceans.
"When people say, 'I will upload something to the cloud,' well, the cloud is a metaphor for this machinery that is all over the face of the Earth."
This machinery, Yanis argues, doesn't behave like capital used to. He uses Alexa as his example:
"That machine behaves as if it is your servant, but it isn't. It's a portal to the cloud capital that belongs to Jeff."
The machine listens. It learns. It starts giving advice. And Yanis admits something striking:
"When Spotify suggests music for me to listen to, I always like it. Whereas when my best friends recommend music to me, I usually don't like it. The machine knows me better. Same with Amazon. Amazon has never recommended to me a book which I didn't enjoy reading."
So when he types "electric bicycle" and Amazon presents three or four options, he clicks. He doesn't shop around a marketplace.
"Jeff Bezos collects 40% of the price you pay for the electric bicycle. He hasn't produced the electric bicycle. He takes it from the capitalist who produces the electric bicycle."
This is why Yanis says we've crossed into something new:
"Now we have a new form of capital that is not a produced means of production, but it is a produced means of behavior modification. That is no longer capitalism. Welcome to techno-feudalism."
