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Episode #206 ... Capitalism is dead. This is Technofeudalism. (Yanis Varoufakis)
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize. This thanks to the people on Patreon that make this show possible for the whole world to listen to patreon.com philosophizethis as usual, I hope you love the show today. So we've been talking a lot lately about some of the problems we're dealing with in the modern world. The ways that different philosophers are diagnosing what they think the problems are, the ways they think we could be moving beyond them. And one of the culprits of all these problems, a name that keeps coming up in these conversations is our good old friend Dr. Benjamin J. Capitalism. These philosophers just can't seem to get that name out of their mouth. They can't stop bringing up the fact that the problems we're dealing with might have something to do with the economic, political, religious, organization of people's lives that we often just politely call capitalism. As complex of a thing as that's proven to be, sometimes seems like it may be something more than that at other times. But one perspective that hasn't been covered yet that seems very necessary to be mentioned as part of these conversations is what if we aren't even living in a capitalist system anymore? What if we're focused on the wrong things because of that? Or as it was put by the philosopher economist Yanis Varoufakis recently, we know things have changed when it comes to technology and the economy in the last couple decades. But what if things have transformed so much that if you look around you and you pay attention to the way politics and the economy is actually structured, capitalism is dead. It's been dead. And what is actually going on is we've entered into a brand new age that's structured entirely different than before. An age of what he calls techno feudalism. I mean, if that were true, then again, it just needs to be said. Seems like something that's necessary to talk about here. We know the world's always changing into something new. We know it never stays completely still in terms of dialectics. And we know that there's no guarantees out there that the world's gonna stay the same thing long enough for us to solve the problems being created by it before it evolves into something else. So in that sense, it's entirely possible for you to live most of your life railing against the evils of something like monopoly capitalism, only to get to the end of your life and realize, wow, I've been chasing a ghost this entire time. See, if these philosophers are talking about how to make things better, then it is crucial that we have a real understanding of what the problem is that we're dealing with. And what if instead of capitalism, what if we're actually living in something that more closely resembles the power structures of the feudal system of the Middle Ages? Well, first reaction, you might expect to all that could be, no, that's obviously not true. And my evidence to support that is just to look all around me at all the capitalism. Look at the trade agreements we have, look at the stock exchange, look at the expansion of people starting their own little small businesses for the love of God. Look at the dating world. No matter where you look around you, you see at least the logic of capitalism embedded into it. How could we be possibly living in a world that isn't capitalist? But Yanis Varoufakis would say, hold on a minute. Consider what it would have been like for someone at the end of the feudal system when capitalism was replacing it. For example, imagine getting into a time machine and going back to the year 1776, say in the City of London, you would step out of that time machine and you would see the evidence of feudalism all around you. You'd see feudalism in the House of Lords, the House of Commons and government. You'd see peasants still working the land. You'd see aristocrats, you know, being all aristocratic like they do. And yet he says, what we know about the state of the world in 1776, the year Adam Smith publishes the wealth of nations, is that feudalism had already died. It would take years for the transition to be fully complete. Slowly at first, but then ever more quickly over the years. But for anybody that knew the future or could see it coming because they were paying attention, feudalism was already dead. Here is Yanis Varoufakis saying something very similar, that capitalism is already dead. And to nail down exactly what he means, it's important to understand what distinguished capitalism from feudalism in the first place. During feudalism, power primarily lied in the hands of the people that owned the land and meaning in the feudal system, lords were the highest level of power. They controlled giant pieces of land. Vassals were the sort of mid level management of the setup that were granted control over portions of that land in exchange for military service should the lords ever need it. And the serfs were the peasants who worked the land in exchange for personal security from the vassals and a home to live in. The whole thing worked together. Point is, though, power in this sort of setup again lies in the hands of those that control the land. But when capitalism comes along, the power shifts because of the changing economic structure, into the hands of the people that own the means of production now, the people with the property, the people that own the machinery that other people can operate to produce for them surplus value. In other words, to be someone controlling the means of production is now what makes you a member of the ruling class in this new capitalist world that's emerging. One last important thing to note here that we have to remember about capitalism that distinguishes it from the feudal system. Yannis Varoufakis says, along with this change in terms of how you hold the most power in the world, there are two main characteristics of capitalism that are always in capitalism. Those are markets on the one hand and profits on the other. No matter what kind of capitalist society you live in, markets and profits are going to be two pillars of that society that make the entire setup possible. But he says to contrast that reality with the type of situation that we're actually living in today. One example he likes to use to show all the differences here is to consider what happens whenever you buy something off Amazon. Because as he says, when you enter Amazon.com, you are exiting capitalism. You are entering into a new sort of place where markets no longer exist. Sure, Amazon may look like a market on the surface, but what it really is is a digital platform where an algorithm is connecting buyers and sellers. And there's a big difference there between those two things, the first indicator that this isn't an actual market should be that there's one guy essentially that owns all of it. Some guy named Jeff Giannis says. Jeff Bezos. See, in traditional capitalism, markets are about people coming together in a competitive environment, engaging in voluntary exchanges for the sake of mutual benefit. Those are the conditions that are necessary for a market to perform the functions of a market. But that's not actually what Amazon.com is or even aspires to be, in theory. And this guy, Jeff Yanis says, doesn't manufacture all the stuff he sells on his website. He doesn't have any interest in making all the products that get sold. Like a traditional capitalist, his goal is to use his algorithm he's developed to connect sellers to buyers and then to take a fee for using his algorithm as payment, sometimes up to 40%, depending on how targeted the algorithm was in connecting the customer to the business. So consider what sort of situation that creates. When you go to Amazon and you type in binoculars or electric bicycle into the search bar, you get different results than I do, and I get different results than my neighbor next door who gets different results than your grandma does. Jeff Bezos determines the results of what comes up on your grandma's screen. Think of what this means. We have one guy that essentially not only determines who's allowed to buy or sell stuff on his platform, but also what you can even see as the options for you to buy. Meaning if for whatever reason, it doesn't benefit him or Amazon for you to see a particular product, you just won't see it. But that's not a market, Giannis says, that's bypassing markets. What that looks like, he says, is more of a Soviet style economic setup where buyers and sellers can't even talk to each other and coordinate transactions. More than that, it would be one thing if this algorithm was rigging things in favor of the sellers against the buyers. That would at least be an old fashioned garden variety monopoly that we've seen time and time again. It would be quaint if we had that. But no, this setup doesn't even rig things in favor of the sellers. And it certainly is not selecting to make sure you get the best pair of binoculars or the best electric bike you possibly could. No, the algorithm here is selecting for what maximizes that fee that Jeff skims off the top of every transaction. That's the business model of Amazon. And as Janis says, the level of exploitation there boggles the mind. It just cracks me up the way that he says that because to put this in another way, Amazon is charging rent to the sellers on its website to be able to use their digital platform and algorithm. And to extend this to the metaphor of how the power structure of the feudal system worked, Amazon owns the digital platform and algorithm that access the land. Sellers come to the landowner and act as vassals used to in the Middle Ages by paying a rental fee to the landowners to be able to do business. And then we, the vast majority of people, become the unpaid laborers that make the whole system possible. We are the serfs or the peasants, because with every time we use one of these big tech services for free, with every Google search, with every email you send, with every picture you post on Instagram, with just your phone sitting in your pocket, constantly connected to Google Maps, you and your data become the unpaid surf that trains the algorithms that then further train you so that you can further train them to be able to perfectly predict and manufacture every desire you could possibly have. The fees that sellers pay to use the software that allows them to reach buyers becomes the equivalent of ground rent that vassals paid to the lords during the Middle Ages. Only now for Yanis Varoufakis, he doesn't call this ground rent. He calls it cloud rent. Now, this is obviously not a traditional capitalist setup. It's changed in very significant ways. And at the risk of this seeming like we're picking on Amazon here, it's important to point out this is the same general strategy that so many other big tech companies use, as well as Uber, fundamentally creates nothing, really. They own software and an algorithm that they rent out to the sellers, the people driving to be able to find the buyers, the people that need rides. Instagram, as another example, fundamentally creates nothing really. People create the content. They upload their photos and videos for free. Instagram's just the algorithm that promotes your stuff and then finds ways to make it more addictive for people to stay on the app. And you'll see this same setup all over big tech. Giannis says the general idea is that in techno feudalism, to own the means of production anymore is not the way you seize the most power in the world. Because, as he says, even the people that own the means of production in our new world are often beholden to the people that own the means of behavioral modification. And that is the new form of power that defines techno feudalism. To be a part of the new ruling class of cloud capitalists is to own the means of behavior modification so that you can then endlessly charge rent and skim fees off the top of the people that actually produce things of value in the world. And the reality is that with each day that passes, a greater and greater percentage of commerce and the resources in the world around us are under the control of this new class that's emerged of cloud capitalists. So, just to clarify, those two pillars of capitalism that were markets and profits are gone now. Markets in this new world have been replaced by digital platforms, and profits and innovation have been replaced by rental fees and the mass printing of money at the level of the central banks. Which makes this a pretty good time in the episode to talk about some important pieces of why Giannis thinks all this happened in the first place. First of all, Giannis is the former minister of Finance for the country of Greece. He was particularly involved in the negotiations in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. So that's the world he's operating in. For the sake of context and as someone high up in these discussions that are going on at the time, he says he was in the White House one day, he was talking to President Obama, which total name drop, by the way. I mean, we get it. Giannis, you know, the president. Anyway, he says Obama at the time ran on this platform of hope and change and how in 2008, we're in the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, as Obama says, largely due to the neoliberal economic policy that got us into that situation in the first place. And Obama said that he was going to change the policy and create an economy that worked more to the benefit of the working class. Now, to Yanis Varoufakis, Barack Obama did nothing of the sort. To Yanis, 2008 is going to be looked back on as a pivotal moment in modern history where the right confluence of events went down, where there was enough frustration among the people to actually lead to real political changes. In fact, Giannis has an entire book that he wrote in 2020 called Another Now. Where in the book, it's an alternative timeline of the recent past where in 2008 the world economy actually collapses this time around. And on the other side of it, in the book, society is rebuilt in another way. His book lays out how he would do. But anyway, to him, these were the stakes of the events of 2008. This could have been a time when everything changes. But instead, he says he was having a conversation with Obama around 2008, and he was essentially apologizing to Giannis. He was saying, hey, look, I had to save the banks, right? The banks are like the arteries of the economy. You let the banks fail and the entire system goes down with it. To which Giannis said he thought, yeah, you need to save the banks for sure, but that doesn't mean you gotta save the bankers along with it. Because what happened after 2008 is we got a combination of two things, Giannis says. We got austerity measures for the public. That's you and me, combined with the greatest liquidity event in the history of capitalism for the people at the head of industry. In more everyday terms, what this means is that the people trying to survive back in 2008 got to just tighten their belts, cut back on spending, live off savings if they had any, and just sit around and pray for the economy to recover soon. It was a joyous time to be had by all of us. But then the central banks, on the other hand, got to just print money, which people say print money, but more accurately, what they mean is that they got to just digitally credit their accounts with trillions of dollars, about $35 trillion in total. Yanis says. Now, that money is supposed to go on to do great things. You make it available for people. It's supposed to create a situation where banks are capable of giving more loans at lower interest rates to hopefully stimulate investments and save the economy. But the reality of the situation, as most of us know, is that it was mostly big corporations that were able to access that money. It was called quantitative easing at the time. We're going to ease the negative impact the decline is having on the economy by printing astronomical quantities of money again. If the goal to pull an economy out of a recession is to stimulate investment, then by making all this money available, the hope is that these big companies will use it to invest in products or services that get the economy moving again. But in reality, what happens, Giannis says, is that companies get this massive injection of capital, and most of them didn't actually invest it in new products or services. And, I mean, can you blame them? Like, if you're General Motors at the time, why would you invest billions of dollars into five new cars that you want to develop, when the reality of the public at the time is that nobody has any money to buy a new car anyway? So what these companies really did is they took out these loans, and they went to the financial markets, they bought back their stock, they bought bonds, they bought financial assets that really aren't investing in any physical goods for the future. All of them did this, Giannis says, except for one industry in particular, the tech industry. Did you know that nine out of every $10 spent to develop Facebook or Meta into the company it eventually became was taken from this central bank. Printed money. Yeah. He says that's not specific to just Facebook either. There's many giant tech companies it would know the names of with very similar stories to that one. And you can imagine how it happened. Our economy is on the verge of collapse. Big tech is one of the most promising industries we have. We're already living in an age of neoliberal deregulation. Why would the government use this as an opportunity to get in the way of companies that people think are maybe capable of saving us? No, in true neoliberal fashion, Yanis says, the governments became essentially an employee of the tech industry, working for their growth. So the tech industry uses this privileged position to spend the money they get and invest it into physical assets. They invested in server farms, they invested in fiber optics, digital infrastructure. They invested in the production of the resources that would eventually lead to what we now know as techno feudalism. So, as Janis Varoufakis says, the way it's likely going to be written in the history books is that capitalism eventually became the thing that killed capitalism, because neoliberal deregulation, combined with the biggest liquidity event in the history of the world, created the conditions for a veritable feudal system to emerge from within it. Now, knowing this, it's important that we understand some of the changes that go on in the economy when something like this happens. Remember, markets and profits no longer perform the same functions as they used to during the age of monopoly capitalism. Markets, as we've seen, have been replaced by digital platforms, and profits are no longer the engine that drives the economic model forward. Profits are no longer the signal for an investor that it's a good time for them to be investing in a particular company. In fact, in some cases, it's the opposite. Now, to Giannis, because the entire logic of investing has been reconfigured around the money that's being regularly printed by these central banks. He gives an example of this happening in the real world. He says, on the 12th of August, 2020, 9 o' clock in the morning, the news comes out in London that the national income of Britain, the GDP, had fallen by more than 20%. Now, that had never happened before in the history of capitalism. British GDP falling by 20%. Now, based on the logic of the capitalism we used to live under, the result of this should have been pandemonium in the streets. At the very least, a good solid conniption fit or a panic by investors everywhere. But then, he says, about 15 or 16 minutes later, after this news was announced, the London Stock Exchange goes up by 3%. Now, as he says, there can be no explanation of that along the lines of capitalism, something else had to be going on, and here's what it was to him. Since 2008, capitalism has been kept alive by an IV drip of central bank money, and companies for decades at this point have gotten used to the fact that when difficult economic moments come around, these central banks are going to reliably panic and then they're going to start printing more money. So if you're an investor, the logic makes perfect sense. When the GDP goes down, that becomes a good time for you to buy because you know the central banks are going to be printing more money and artificially propping up the economy. This is just one of the fundamental ways the economy changes when we find ourselves in a techno feudal setup. And just so we don't got to interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that supports the sponsors of the show today who signed a contract to help keep this podcast going for an ad free experience of the show sub at any level@patreon.com philosophizethis first up today is Element. Too many people neglect electrolytes while fasting. Then they feel tired, crampy and weak during the fast. This usually gets blamed on a lack of food, and that's certainly part of it. Fasting should cause some hunger, but it shouldn't cause dizziness, weakness, fatigue or cramps. These are often symptoms of an electrolyte deficiency. Diet is your main source of electrolytes, and during a fast you're not consuming anything. So fewer electrolytes come in during a fast and more go out, which makes it easy for a deficiency to develop. To maintain energy levels and increase comfort during a fast, it's important to take electrolytes. The problem? 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Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to RocketMoney.com PT that's RocketMoney.com PT RocketMoney.com PT and now back to the Podcast Another big change that occurs, though, is that remember how we talked about before that in techno feudalism, more and more of a percentage of the economy is going to be made up of those rental fees, as opposed to real products or services being provided to people. Well, when that happens, Giannis says, think of what it's doing. Less and less of the economy is made up of money circulating as people engage in mutually beneficial transactions. In other words, there is an economic energy that would normally be there contributing to the health of the economy that is no longer there in techno feudalism because it's all tied up in rental fees. And there's multiple things that blossom out of this as a result of that. The people on the ground level feel a deterioration of the strength of the economy, despite the GDP continuing to stay the same or go up. Governments become more fiscally stressed trying to compensate for it, and central banks need to constantly keep printing more money to try to keep capitalism alive on this IV drip. But then they find themselves not able to print money fast enough. In fact, everything about the way the economy is set up is more fragile when people have one, more precarious forms of employment working for what are essentially algorithm rental companies, and 2 less access to purchasing what Giannis calls durables things like houses that allow for people to plan for future events in their lives. This whole thing leads for him to a deterioration in the living standards of the average person, where there isn't an easy explanation to people for why all this is happening under the logic of the capitalism they're used to. No, it would take an understanding of this techno feudal setup that's actually dominating the macroeconomics of people's lives. And this failure in education. He thinks what that leads to in the average person is something quite understandable, but undeniably horrible. It leads to people desperately seeking an explanation for why their lives are not going very well financially. And instead of blaming the decades of failed policy from the liberal democratic establishment, which Giannis thinks is the actual culprit here, people instead sometimes start to blame groups of people from within a society. For Yanis Varoufakis, literal decades of discontent from failed policy eventually fosters in people things like xenophobia, racism, sexism, or anything else that seems to be an internal explanation for all the problems in a society. Decades of discontent with zero accountability creates literal Nazis. To Yanis Varoufakis, and this is the explanatory link to the rise of populism on both sides of the political aisle in recent years all over the world, has an interesting point he makes about populist candidates in general. He says, there's this assumption people make that there's some kind of eternal conflict or a war that's going on between the bad establishment candidates on the one hand and the populist candidates on the other. That's the assumption people make. But he says that's not actually the case if you pay close attention. In reality, he says, the populist and the establishment candidates always need each other, because obviously, the populist candidate would have no need to even exist if it wasn't for the establishment being bad and not serving people's needs in the first place. So the populist needs the establishment for sure. But as Yanis says, what's also true is that the bad establishment candidates always need the populace, because otherwise, he says, who could they ever possibly stand a chance of winning an election against if not the joke of a populist candidate that a lot of people are already terrified of? So, again, in reality, Yanis says, the establishment and the populist actually end up helping each other and allowing each other to stick around longer than they otherwise would. Now, let's start talking about some solutions to all this in the eyes of Yannis Varoufakis, because one thing that I think might instantly come up in someone's mind after hearing something like techno feudalism is that, man, I thought it was bad before, but congratulations, you've actually managed to make things seem even worse than they were before. Giannis, congratulations. You've done. You've done well there. In fact, techno feudalism has become a bit of a feather in the cap of a lot of the more thoughtful brands of conspiracy theorists out there. And for understandable reasons, who would ever want to go back to a power structure that's imported from the Middle Ages? I mean, to be told you're living under the thumb of royalty, it just sounds like a pretty bad thing to hear when you think you're living in a democracy, but see, one important difference when it comes to the relationship between the citizens and the people in power today is that possibility for democratic participation. And in many ways, the fact that we're not actually in the feudal system ends up changing a lot about our options moving forward. What I'm saying is that in a weird way, there's a hopefulness you can start to feel when you finally have an accurate understanding of the problem that you're trying to solve. So the first thing that needs to be said when we're talking about possible solutions here is that Giannis is not going to say that in response to techno feudalism, that we should be getting away from all this technology and telling people not to use it. He makes it very clear that he's bringing zero negativity to any of the people out there that are taking advantage of these digital platforms and algorithms. He says, in terms of us identifying what the real problems are, how can I get mad at someone for being addicted to the machine? I'm addicted to it. He says, these services are incredible. Of course we want to find a way to make these things possible. And just because they're creating problems right now at the beginning of all this, doesn't mean we should be getting rid of them. He compares it to when capitalism overtook the feudal system. Again, he says, imagine if back then when people saw the problems that might come up with capitalism, imagine if Adam Smith at that point said, well, shut it all down. Let's all stop using these machines, because there seems to be some potential problems we're going to have to work out along the way. It's like, no, let's contend with these problems as human beings do, and let's try to find a way to make these things actually work for people. Now, it needs to be said. Giannis certainly has plenty of ideas for how to restructure society that would land him more in the camp of post capitalism, along the lines of what we were talking about with Mark Fisher a couple episodes ago. For the sake of clarity, he does think eventually we need to move beyond capitalism, or else, quite frankly, he says, we're going to die if we don't. But since we're talking about ways to move forward from within the current system, as it stands, one idea he has to help break up the control that these tech companies have on our behavior, this digital serfdom, is to place a ban on the free versions of these services from big tech companies. And that may sound like a strange thing when you first hear it, like, why would anybody ever want to pay money for something instead of getting it for free? Well, mostly to Giannis, because it's already not free to you. It just doesn't cost you any money right now. What he's saying here is something that most people already know full well, that whenever you use a free search engine or free email or Facebook, Instagram, TikTok maps, all these things are not actually free. You just pay for these services in data. This is the business model of many big tech companies. This has become a hallmark of our times that people will willingly participate in every day and then act upset when they're made aware that it's going on. Tech based businesses will trade their free services for important information about you. And having talked about it on this podcast before, knowing what we know about the possibility, some would say the reality of us living in a digital panopticon, Ioannis says we cannot let this continue to be standard operating procedure. It cannot be the norm To Yanis Varoufakis that companies can make their service available for free, attract as many people as possible, harvest data from those people, and then use it against them to have a tyrannical level of manipulation over people's behav. But of course the companies will say back to all this, hey, get all that. But this also isn't just a charity. I didn't stay up all night coding for months on end just to make this algorithm because I love connecting people to their next pair of binoculars or something. It's not a labor of love what I'm doing. We can't just offer the best search engine in the world for free. And the way we make it work is we got to take a little bit of your data and then that becomes the way that we make money. So here's Giannis's point. One possible way out of this, he thinks, is to ban the ability for companies to have these free services and make the new standard operating procedure for companies to move to a model more based around microtransactions, where instead maybe using something like a search engine would cost somebody a couple cents per search, but then there'd be no justification for companies to harvest the data that allows them to control the means of behavior modification that leads to techno feudalism. Now, an obvious objection to this could be, well, what about the people that can't afford a few cents every time they search for something? Do they just not get to use the Internet? I mean, what about the people that are in a place in life where they got $6.78 in their bank account until they get paid tomorrow, and they are literally calling the online banking to check their balance to make sure they're going to be able to afford the bag of chips they're getting on their lunch? I mean, that isn't an unheard of situation for people. And a lot of us have been in a place like that before. Well, in those sorts of cases, Giannis thinks something like Social Security services should be able to step up for people where they could apply and get assistance for this access to information. The overall thinking being by him that as a society, we live in the world right now, right? We can look around us, we've lived long enough to see the cost of companies having this tyrannical level of control over people's behavior and data. And if we're just weighing options here, a small amount of people getting government assistance to be able to access this stuff is just a better alternative than what we have right now. Another thing to consider here about the general ways that Yanis Varoufakis is thinking about these relationships between technology and the people in a given society is that he thinks these technological inventions, like the smartphone or server farms or really whatever it is, all of these are inventions that he thinks are standing on the shoulders of giants. And that's a key reframing of what technology even is to human beings. That at least needs to be mentioned here as part of this whole conversation. You know, Steve Jobs, when he's in charge of the team that invented the iPhone at Apple, he did not, you know, renounce his life in human society, move out into the woods, build a yurt, start eating squirrels every day, and then start working on the blueprints for making the iPhone. No, I mean, aside from, obviously, all the rest of the people on his team. To Giannis, he and all of us inherit, upon birth a huge amount of work in science that's been done before we were even born. Breakthroughs in chemistry, in physics and engineering, the kinds of breakthroughs that someone who invents a new piece of technology relies on heavily to be able to invent it. But the key point to remember here is that many of these breakthroughs are the result of government subsidized research. So to put it in another way, to make Giannis's point, your tax dollars are being spent to subsidize this research. Then people use the results of that research to invent a new technology. They patent it, they build a company around it, and then a digital panopticon is the potential result of that whole process. Or as Giannis says, every invention is collectively produced and then privately appropriated. And without turning this into some black and white thing where Giannis is saying we shouldn't allow for people to be rewarded for inventing great stuff, can we at least explore the terrain of this conversation where we consider, are there technologies or inventions that are just not safe for people to be able to patent and build a company around in the first place? Like, should people be able to invent something, patent the technology, and then literally control people's lives and thinking with it? The example Giannis likes to use here in these conversations is the invention of Wi Fi. True Story, if you don't already know it, it's pretty interesting. Wi fi was originally created by people working for a government funded organization called CSIRO in the country of Australia. Tax dollars are what created Wi Fi. And as the story goes, when people in Australia originally came up with Wi Fi, they had a big press conference. They told everyone, aye, hold on to your budgie smugglers, we got Wi Fi for you. Now. That's actually why they picked the name wifi. It sounds so good in an Australian accent. Point is, when they came up with Wi fi, they made that technology available for people and released it into the commons. Wi Fi, in other words, is public domain. There's no company that they built around it. If a company owned Wi fi, Yannis says, they'd be one of the biggest companies in the world. But they didn't. So there's a larger conversation that we need to be having, maybe more of a philosophical conversation than anything to do with patent law or something. And it's a conversation about technologies that become such a ubiquitous part of life, or a tech that has the ability to control such fundamental components of people's lives, that we ask, is this something that actually needs to be collectively owned, or at the very least, much more heavily regulated than it currently is? I mean, for the same reason people think it's problematic for someone to own the roads that people drive on or the water that people drink. Is it also potentially problematic for people to own the means of modifying people's behavior? Should the wright brothers get 10 cents every time a plane takes off from an airport? Some people would say, no, you can't patent flight, and that that kind of thing actually belongs to the commons. Giannis gives other recommendations for what we can do from within the current system. One of the ones he's talked about before is the possibility of us changing the structure of corporate law altogether. Now, again, this would not be something that is calling for the end of capitalism, but instead it's something that wants to rethink what it is to be a company within a capitalist framework. And like a lot of other theories that have come out in this area, what it's going to center around is not the inequality of income necessarily. That's obviously a common area that people focus on when talking about problems in the world. But instead, what this one focuses on is the inequality of ownership. It's actually an idea heavily explored by another economist named Louis Kelso. He did it in different ways, but the overall interesting point that they're making here is, does capitalism actually work really well, as long as the benefits of ownership are properly distributed among people. Do people just need to feel like they own a piece of the world that they're a part of? And this goes for ownership of private property, ownership of the means of production. It even goes down to the ownership of publicly controlled resources. Like, does it make sense that when somebody's born to a wealthy country that they would own a piece of the assets of that country that they're contributing to every day? This has been done before in other countries. And as you can imagine, this is something that pretty easily extends for philosophers into corporate law as well, in the way that we require companies to treat their employees. And there have been dozens of strategies over the years that have been suggested for how something like this would be structured. But to Yanis Varoufakis, maybe one way something like this could look in practice is in the same way that a library card works, that a student is given when they enter into a university, where upon entering, students have this library card that cannot be sold, it cannot be bought, but it does give them certain privileges and access that's only available to people that are part of the school. When they leave the school, they no longer have it. Well, could this work more or less in the same way where employees are given something like a library card, where they can vote for things like the direction of the company moving forward? And it wouldn't be some kind of forced equality across the board, Giannis says, because employees could always vote to give more votes to the people that create the stuff that makes the company valuable. And it wouldn't be forced equality, he says. But what it would do, he thinks, if this was written into corporate law, is it would end labor markets and share markets in one fell swoop. People would no longer feel like the only leverage they have as part of a company is to threaten to rent their labor out to another company that they have no control over either. Anyway, that whole discussion could be an entire episode if it was something people wanted to hear about. As usual. Just find a way to let me know whether that's something you find interesting or not. The larger point here today, though, is one about techno feudalism and just something that's important to close with here. None of these strategies that we just talked about are meant to be some sort of panacea. The point is to consider that if Yanis Varoufakis is correct here in this analysis of the big changes to the economic structure we're living in, if we are living in techno feudalism, then these sorts of questions we're talking about are more along the lines of the ones we should be thinking about if we want to find a way to really move forward. Because just in general, whether it's something at the level of macroeconomic policy or even just something in your personal life, it's possible to spend way too many years of the limited time we have here looking for answers in all the wrong places. Because ultimately you're asking all the wrong questions. And philosophy, to me, is one of the best ways to know whether you're asking the right questions or not. So I hope you enjoyed this intellectual safari of joy here today. I hope you have a good rest of your week. As always, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.
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