User Profile

One does not need to be left-leaning to know that rent's stunning comeback could only mean deeper and more toxic stagnation. Wages get spent by the many struggling to make ends meet. Profits get invested in capital goods to maintain the capitalists' capacity to profit. But rent is stashed away in property (mansions, yachts, art, cryptocurrencies, etc.) and stubbornly refuses to enter circulation, stimulate investment into useful things, and revive flaccid capitalist societies. And so a vicious cycle begins: deeper stagnation ensues, causing central banks to print more money, enabling more extraction and less investment, and so on.

— Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis, Varoufakis, Yanis. (Page 139)

the breakthrough for Apple, which turned it into a trillion-dollar company, was the iPhone- not just because it was a great mobile phone but because it handed Apple the key to a whole new treasure chest: cloud rent.

The stroke of genius that unlocked cloud rent for Steve Jobs was his radical idea to invite 'third-party developers' to use free Apple software with which to produce applications for sale via Apple Store. In one fell swoop Apple had created an army of unwanted labourers and vassal capitalists whose hard work yielded a host of capabilities available exclusively to iPhone owners in the form of thousands of desirable apps that Apple engineers could never have produced themselves in such variety or volume.

— Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis, Varoufakis, Yanis. (Page 127)

The transition from feudalism to capitalism was, in essence, a shift of power to command from landowners to owners of capital goods. For that to happen, pants had first to lose autonomous access to common lands. That's why the enclosure in Britain were essential for capitalism's birth: they denied British labour [...] opportunities. [...] By restricting access to land, the enclosures helped capital to [...] grow exponentially in power. Before long, the worldwide commodification of previously common lands had enabled capital to achieve supremacy in all corners of the globe.

— Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis, Varoufakis, Yanis. (Page 64 - 65)

[...] the financial options, or derivatives, that were the occasion of the 2008 crash, [...] all it took was a downturn in the underlying share prices. Why could the financiers not see this? [...] Computers! [...] By the time these derivatives containing other derivatives had come out of the computer, not even the genius financial 'engineer' who created them could understand what was in them. [...] Once computers had guaranteed that no one could possibly understand what these derivatives were made of, everyone wanted to buy them because... everyone was buying them.

— Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis, Varoufakis, Yanis. (Page 54 - 55)

Paul Volcker explained succinctly and cynically what they were up to: '[A] controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate objective for the 1980s.' [...] In practice, [this] required, beyond the neutering of trade unions, an engineered recession in order to reduce workers' bargaining power and the elimination of the shackles that President Roosevelt had slapped on the bankers to restrain their recklessness.

— Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis, Varoufakis, Yanis. (Page 52 - 53)

Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine if capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessors: rent.

— Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis, Varoufakis, Yanis. (Page xi)

"[I've asked] Big Bird if he can swap with Bill Nye the Science Guy. That would work for Mark, Malala, Beyoncé, and maybe the pope. But my hopes are dashed when I'm informed that [...] Big Bird and his team are not prepared to do any more accommodating for Mark Zuckerberg."

— Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Page 197)