this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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The idea that we are entering an era of techno-feudalism that will be worse than capitalism is chilling and controversial. We asked former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to elucidate this idea, explain how we got here, and map out some alternatives.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I read a similar article a few weeks ago, and I think your concise summary is better than the article linked in this post.

I think Yanis goes a bit overboard with stating that capitalism kinda no longer exists, since it really is about a new group of rich people simply inserting their companies as evil middlemen who leach money off the whole system.

I'm not sure the solution has to be revolutionary or super complex. I'd think that large countries and groups of countries (e.g. USA, the EU) could implement their own mega marketplaces, leaching off much less money and avoiding the sort of corrupt BS that Amazon etc do to keep prices artificially high, and these governments could also stop allowing the mega platforms to do business in their region. Big countries want to facilitate an economy, and if private industry is proving to be too broken with their current approach, governments could step in to create more functional marketplaces that still work nicely in the internet age and don't have horrible middlemen crap dragging everything down.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Nationalize Amazon.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

ya middlemen is a good term for it. I don't think that it really needs an entirely separate branding from capitalism, but idk i guess that also makes for an eye catching headline.

I agree that governments have the tools to deal with these kinds of things. It's just getting them to actually do something about it that's beneficial to us as average people is the tough part lol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

They are not just middlemen, they control the entire sales platform - both buyer and seller.