Summary

Maia Mindel:

" Capitalism is changing into a more monopolized form dominated by Big Tech, which is increasingly profitable via rents and not via legitimate innovations. But that is not feudalism. Feudalism is a mode of production, aka a way of creating and distributing profits. Again, because Marx’s central contribution was the political economy of the labor theory of value, his description of capitalism is one where capital is privately owned and labor creates the profits but doesn’t receive them. Feudalism, in contrast, Morozov describes as “The surplus extraction happens quite visibly, so nobody is in denial about it. You would go and harvest and work in your field, and then somebody would come at the end of the month or year and take away whatever’s left (…) that will happen in a much more violent, explicit, visible way”. Under feudalism, thus, all factors of production are merged: peasants control labor and capital, and what they don’t control is the surplus. Beyond fact checking the Marxist theory, he also counterargues with Spotify and Google, which make their money from subscriptions and advertising without dispossessing their users of anything (their privacy, their data, their attention span, et cetera), which makes them not feudal, but capitalist - and, in fact, Morozov argues, they could be turned socialist or communist without much loss of anything, since the profit side of the business is immaterial. Shoshanna Zuboff’s concept of “surveillance capitalism” is relevant here, of Big Tech forcing everyone into “a hamster wheel, a new self-perpetuating system of exploitation” through its grip on private entertainment.

Then, he goes after Durand’s book: his central thesis is that Global North multinationals have increased their profits without increasing investment or production by exploiting their dominant market position in Global South markets to charge for rents for their intellectual property, monopoly, data extraction abilities, scalability abilities, and technology transfers (a longstanding bugbear of dependency theorists). Durand’s comparison to feudalism is as follows: you cannot separate users from their data or platforms from their externalities, such that the digital factors of production are again merged; with this set up “investment is no longer oriented towards the development of the productive forces, but to the forces of predation”. But, again, this misses the political economy component of Marxism: the capitalists still own all the capital. You, the user, do not own Google. Google owns Google. You just use it. There’s no difference in political economy between Google and the computer I’m typing this on - you pay for it and you use it, but the company that owns them is a private company whose profits are remanded back to its private shareholders. As said in a New York Magazine article by Malcolm Harris, “And that’s how you know that this is still capitalism”. Durand, it should be noted, defends himself, but not quite well: he doesn’t manage to contest Morozov’s description of capitalism and he doesn’t manage to establish a clearer one, instead falling back on the fact that Big Tech’s rents, fees, and monopolies are just like the feudal lords’ rents, levies, and monopolies. His argument, basically, is that the logic of production is replaced by the logic of predation, on “digital serfs” as sitting ducks waiting to be robbed blind by the cloudalists - without acknowledging the obvious, that predation occurs under capitalism as well (nobody outside the fringes of libertarian theory would deny that unfair things have ever happened in the context of a market exchange)."

(https://someunpleasant.substack.com/p/a-claude-of-the-seven-kingdoms)

Critique of the Techno-Feudal Reason

Summary

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