Absurd, idiotic headline. Apart from being pure slander of the Soviets, the whole premise vulgarizes socialist economic theory and what economic planning even means. The more i read from Varoufakis the more i’m beginning to think he’s really a moron.
He thinks he’s so clever coming up with these comparisons, with nebulous concepts like “neofeudalism”, as if he’s just discovered something completely new that no one discovered before, when all it is, is just monopoly capitalism. All to avoid applying a good old fashioned Marxist analysis which is more than enough to explain these phenomena without resorting to estoteric theories about a new “feudalism”.
The more you read him and others like him the more you start noticing the conspicuous, Marxism-shaped hole in their analysis. Because of course we can’t be seen to be talking in Marxist terminology and applying dialectical analysis can we? That wouldn’t be respectable, our liberal academic peers would call us names…
The result of this Marxism-phobia is that he has to vomit up onto the page sentences like:
So, just as the Soviet Union generated one kind of feudalism in the name of socialism and human emancipation, today, Silicon Valley is generating another kind of feudalism — technofeudalism, I have called it — in the name of capitalism and free markets.
No, you pretentious wannabe, the Soviet Union was not “feudalism” and neither is monopoly capitalism.
Idk why anyone ever thought this guy, who is clearly an anti-communist radlib, had anything intelligent to say.
That’s an issue I have too. Algorithms don’t just spawn out of nowhere. It’s takes both education and, yknow, labor to actually design and code these Algorithms. That’s also not mentioning the IT infrastructure that is maintained, which itself needs resources usually mined by the global south.
And Algorithms also exist outside of computers, at least what we call Algorithms do. Sure there’s not computer code, but there’s psychological and social Algorithms. For example, how Casinos and box stores are constructed to make people lose track of time. How slot machines and such have this and that odds of paying out to entice people while still making a profit. Sure it’s maybe more prominent nowadays but it’s not mystical