English language
Published Aug. 18, 2023 by Random House Children's Books.
Exzellent piece of work, absolute surprise to see Varoufakis getting to the same conclusions as Cory Doctorow. What Cory calls enshittification leading to chokepoint capitalism, for Yannis is the mechanism leading to techno-feudalism. Brilliant and great insight.
However: how to get out of it remains absolutely unclear
Late-stage capitalism has given way to cloud-based fiefs, and we are the serfs. I need convincing on some of the detail (e.g. how effective are they at manipulating our desires?), but mostly agree with his main argument. Pairs well with Cory Doctorow's #enshittification ideas (@pluralistic@mamot.fr).
Seems largely accurate in describing a world where technological rents have overtaken profit as the drivers of economic and political power. I do think it falls into the trap of putting too much faith in the near-magical manipulative abilities of algorithms, rather than recognizing the sheer thuggishness of the tech giants as the true source of their dominance. But that’s more a disagreement on the mechanism than the result.
