Varoufakis is just another chancer with his own warped agenda. Anybody with half a brain knows the social media and web page platforms use whatever technological ruse it takes in order to get people to spend. It's just that most of us do not need to invent superfluous vocabulary and fancy phrases to express ourselves. We just don't buy via internet, don't let social media influence our spending and do try to buy from local shops and businesses instead. But unlike Varoufakis, we don't need to pretend we are philosophical masterminds in order to do that.

Well when you're in the habit of making predictions that haven't born themselves out, you have to be creative in finding new angles on tired themes. 15 years ago it wasn't AI that was gonna send us back to feudalism, according to the distnguished economist, and in 15 more years AI won't be something he's talking about, at least in a doom and gloom sense. Write me back in 15 years and if I'm wrong, I'll buy yeh a moussaka in Thessaloniki. If I'm right, buy me sarma in Skopje, Macedonia.

Here in Chicago the illegals are taking over and getting free stuff that we do not get even though we pay for it!

AI is dangerous precisely because it mimics human thought and creativity and makes it redundant. It dumbs you down as you use it.

Good point - let's not carried away with pictures of idiot consumers all easily manipulated. AI is currently interacting with us at the level of being a 'stochastic parrot' (as many current critics contend) so we get stuck in boring loops ... KZfaq will list more Yanis Varoufakis clips for me after watching this one.

Just give it a few months and you'll be buying a refrigerator every week.

It's not about AI. It's about selling advertising space. You are the eyeballs, you pay with your attention, and possibly your mind, but that doesn't make the shareholders richer. The money comes in at the other end, from the refrigerator salesmen. And the more ads they have to pay for per sale, the better for the ad-tech company. So, you not getting any relevant ads is not a bug, it's a feature. But you are still the target demographic, so the analytics (also sold to the advertisers) say that the advertisers have reached exactly who they paid for.

We need new Padlom first

Same

Vote for him if you are an EU citizen

Always the same nonsense BS. A Marxist professor criticizes the system that lift up people from poverty while proposing a system that put 1 billion in poverty and killed 100M. ☠️

Better spelled possibly… demoNcra$$Y 🤓

You live under a top down anti democratic capitalist economy that prevents democracy from entering into 70% of life spent at work and incentivises the corruption of the remaining 30% of democracy people actually get when not in work. Youve never actually had democracy. -.- The workers at Huwawei under a communist single party government, have more meaningful democracy in their lives than any westerner ever has because they are also joint owners and run it democratically, 1 worker owner, 1 vote, all deciding what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits. Which they all just voted to share out equally among all workers there. 9.5 billion dollars in profits given away to workers, with much more to come.

always has been

I think Yanis himself reminded us that Aristotle warned that democracy tends to end up in oligarchy; I guess he actually described a cycling?

It's more so that capitalist democracies have always collected wealth at the top, which perverts the very purpose of a democracy as wealth buys and controls political power at will.

Wrong. Advertising works because there will ALWAYS be people which will be susceptible to purchasing what is advertised. If this were not a fact, advertising would not exist. And the silly elitist position of looking down at them as rubes is actually quite reactionary.

Same here, but I understand enough to see that this man is brilliant!

This World is Nuts...

You don't have to use an iPhone. There are phones which are modular, allowing you to replace or upgrade any part of it. The main problem is not just with phones, but what happened to the internet. It used to be that anyone could do what anyone else could do, technically. Anyone can have their own mail server, file server, chat server, web server, what have you, and they all worked together. Send mail from any device to any other. Now, you have to have an account on the same host as the person you want to communicate with. And you don't get the code to set up your own. All your communication is controlled by someone else, they control what you can see and what you can say. And it gets worse. You don't own your own devices, you only have a temporary licence to use them for a while. And that is considered normal. You don't own your car, the manufacturer does, and they can shut it off and lock you out at their own discretion. They also track everything you do with it, and sell it to surveillance capitalists. There are exceptions. There are still devices that are truly yours, and there are still decentralised services. But those have become the exception.

Yes, we do.

can't remember who said it but "civilization is a race to solve the problems that it has created "

💯

That's a bald-faced lie. Nothing about cloud technology is unavoidable. This is not the final step, it is a deliberate direction that things are taken in at huge expense. Technology used to be something that did things for you. It still can be. Scissors for example are a tool that is not deliberately designed to do things to you. Turning everything into a subscription based service is not normal, and it is not unavoidable, and it certainly isn't progress. It is self-defeating. The technologies that have survived and improved are the ones that are easy to replicate, many are literally child's play. Monopolised, secret technologies tend to get lost to history. And that is exactly what these cloud services are. They take things away from you that could be yours. They lock away how things work so nobody can improve them, or just cut out the surveillance. This is deliberate, and not unavoidable. It didn't have to be this way, and we shouldn't tolerate it.

@@davidwuhrer6704 First, it's not so nice to be called a bald-faced liar. My face isn't bald and I wasn't lying. Second: You appear to understand very little about the power of technology to control-entrap us. To start with, I'd recommend you read Ronald Wright's "A Short History of Progress"...Get up to speed on the concept of a "progress trap". Third: Why are we (a majority of us anyway) tolerating it if it doesn't have to be this way? Why do we keep tolerating so many other tech progress traps into which we've fallen?

@@Avianthro I'm not calling you bald-faced, I'm saying that the lie you are repeating is bald-faced. And it is a lie. I don't know if you honestly believe it, but the fact is that it isn't true. I thought that to be self-evident to anyone who understands technology enough to hold a soldering iron, or was alive more than twenty years ago and witnessed how things changed. But I did nothing more than assert that, so let me go into more detail. You claim that it is technological progress itself that is responsible for deregulation, privatisation, dinosaurs mating, and for monopolies resulting from this horizontal and vertical integrations enshittifying services and infrastructure. But nothing could be further from the truth. Computer networks, and the internet in particular, began as a way to get terminals to connect to more than one computer, and then to connect computers among each other. The guiding principle for network protocols back then was to decentralise everything. Unlike phone networks, computer networks and protocols were designed to not have a central point of failure. Damage and censorship could be routed around without changing any configurations. Nothing could be controlled by a single entity, what one could do, everyone and anyone could do. Today, computers are so small that the USB3 standard requires a computer inside the cable. In the early 1990s the idea of an "internet of things" was proposed. The idea was to put microchips into everything, to connect all devices, and to combine them in novel ways to not have to rely on one central computer for everything. One proposed example was computerised post-it notes; you could use each for different things, although each could do anything any other could. With today's technology - system on a chip, e-ink, and Bluetooth or WiFi - this would easily be possible, but that is not what happened. An example for what happened is the WebPC: Microsoft designed and promoted a modified IBM PC clone that would not store any data other than the OS; all user data would be handled over the network by Microsoft's own machines. It didn't sell, nobody was stupid enough to entrust Microsoft with their own personal data. Today there is Microsoft Azure. Douglas Engelbart, often credited as the inventor of the mouse although he did a lot more than that, said that if we could build computers that fit in our pockets, we could give them our shopping list and they would give us the shortest path to collect all our groceries. That would be a simple and obvious application. Today we have computers in our pockets, but, again, that thing did not happen. There is an app for everything, but not that. Instead there are apps that let us compare prices between shops, but ignoring the time and fuel needed to get there. The "internet of things" today is a way to change the hue of your lightbulb from your phone, not by connecting your phone to your lightbulb in the local network, but through a central server somewhere else, a server you don't control and cannot replicate. The IoT is a way for your car manufacturer to shut down your car if you miss a payment, to make sear warmers a subscription based service, or to brick your tractor if you try to change the oil filter yourself. The decentralisation that is fundamental to the internet has been undermined legally and technologically, not inevitably, but deliberately. Take email, for example: It is older than the internet, and its protocols enable any device to send and receive text from any other device, or multiple devices, with no central node it has to go through, and even across different networks. Unix systems use email for local notifications and errors, and civil aviation uses emails (specifically the ITU X.400 protocol) for weather reports. Yet most of us don't use it that way. Most of us have one account on someone else's machine and route all our mails (other than local errors and notifications) through that. But still, no matter which host you sign up with, they all send and receive from each other. This is not the case with other services like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Discord. If you want to send or receive messages to or from there, you need an account on the same host. And you cannot set up your own. This is not technological progress. It is a regression. Things that used to be expected are being made Impossible. Things that used to work simply are broken with considerable effort. And notifications today don't patiently wait for you to read them like they used to, they interrupt you and demand your attention. By design. Not by necessity. There are other, more obscure examples (like for example X.509), and a lot more historical detail about how things got broken. But suffice to say that the lie you are spreading is in essence saying that technological progress made it inevitable that Boeing passenger planes are losing parts in mid-flight now. I don't know how anyone could honestly believe that.

we have known it for some time; read "Who Owns the Future?"

No matter what you call your economic system, people who work for no pay are called slaves.

Well put

in the same way we all do things against our own best interest, because we have no choice, and we have no desire to change because we are creations of the system. We consume or we cease to exist, in the public sphere anyway

Publishers decide to sell on Amazon. Authors have no say. .

He argues that it is the end of capitalism, in the sense that capitalists like profit and oppose rent. He argues that capitalism has not been overcome by socialism as seemed inevitable at the beginning of the 20th century, but replaced something new and worse. The cloud capitalists or technofeudalists, neither capitalists (who make profit from the surplus value of labour) nor feudalists (who extract rent from the land they own) in the traditional sense, extract rent from owning something that doesn't produce anything. Their power is from controlling the flow of information. In that sense it is the end of the type of capitalism that overcame feudalism. It is not the end of socialism, but the part it plays may change. Keep in mind that this new capitalism doesn't require a reserve army of workers, but it does require a reliable supply of consumers. Socialist policies could provide that, but not all schools of socialism would be content with that.

maybe but it has also educated people around the world and enabled a backlash, the scum will always rise to the top in any social system, history shows us that

@lava12.23 So do I, but we have to decide against TH and for humanity every day, and I am one of the few who go for that. No TV, no smart phone, no navigator, no amazon, no war lie tax, no money in the bank, no dirty jobs, aso aso.

I don't mind being a cyborg, but I want to own my own organs. And I don't want to be the terminator's skin. If anything, I'd want to be at least the brain.

@@davidwuhrer6704 If your life depends on artificial dialysis your thoughts are unfree. It is better for your brain to use a bike than to use a plane.

@@zzausel I don't think with my kidneys

@@davidwuhrer6704 Sorry having argued.

Zuckerberg promised that Facebook would not show ads and that he would not sell people's private data. So we can at least blame him for breaking that promise. But we can also blame the people who did figure out how to make money from it at the expense of Zynga, the people who decided to block the mail and jabber interfaces, and the people who buy people's personal data. Zuckerberg was well compensated for his services.

Would that be an improvement? At least cattle are well-fed.

That's a matter of definition. According to Smith and Marx, capitalism replaced feudalism, by allowing higher social mobility, and by rewarding productivity. In that sense, capitalism is not feudalism. Varoufakis also says that technofeudalism is not feudalism. Technofeudalism is capitalism in the ways you describe, but his thesis is that it is noticeable different from the capitalism of Smith and Marx and even Mises and Friedman.

That's already the case. Microplastics.

They are useful to their owners. All those ad impressions wasted on you make them money.

@@davidwuhrer6704 Thats gonna be a problem at some point. Ads are useless for it alone. The goal is to sell.

@@maluziusnetwork355 The goal for the ad-tech sector is to sell ads. Their customers want to sell stuff, but they are at the mercy of the ad-tech sector. (Or at least that's what the ad-tech sector is telling them.)

I've had similar thoughts, but I think it's important to note the role of the concentration of power. Millions of landlords is a very different situation than a handful of 'cloud capitalist' entities.

He's selling his books dude, he doesn't care whether his thesis is right or wrong. He knows there's nothing anyone can do to change things. Nor does he want us to try, he's just an ideas merchant.

@@ChucklesMcGurk Jordan Peterson is an ideas merchant and nothing more than that. Where as Yanis, has stood by and stood up for the oppressed on many an occasion across this earth no matter the cost to himself be that for Assange, for Corbyn, and many more besides in hope of electing better into office or in hope of aiding a just cause, while spending a lot of the money he makes from those books on the Diem25 EU political organisation in effort to very much try to change things no matter how unsuccessful, he does not sit on his arse giving talks and writing books and doing nothing more than being paid well for such. He is regularly found on the ground with his fellow members of the majority workforce, and has personally suffered for such having been beaten black and blue by a far right mob last year. The left does not have the advantage of capitalists funding us lavishly for our compliance with capitalism due to the left being fundamentally against such a system. So how the hell else do you expect the most prominent members of the left to fund any form of left wing organising if not via selling their works.

Cory Doctorov says that capitalists hate capitalism. "Competition is for chumps." one capitalist is quoted as having said.

I would say it's important to first gain a decent understanding of the problems. Einstein apparently said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions." Conversations like the one in this video help the participants and the spectators to understand the problems. They also help to spread the word, which is another important step on the path towards solutions.

From what I gather, he's saying the opposite: The end of the market system is what's bad.

@@davidwuhrer6704 Ok. Fair point. I listened to it again. So he's saying a few different things: (1) the new cloud-based economy produces little apart from a recursive modification of human behaviour; (2) this is a form of feudalism insofar as it introduces a new type of Rentier class (cf. Ricardo); (3) this kind of economy supplants or at least supplements older forms of industrial capitalism. ...

Governments aren't making those decisions for fun. Who has far more influence over the government than anyone else does? Capitalists.

Exactly 100% BACKWARDS, corporations have taken over govt and are using it to enrich themselves. The govt created the Fed to be independent so that it does not have to respond to democratic concerns. That way it can steal our money and assets and the govt just shrugs and says, oh well, too bad. The problem IS capitalism because it always tends towards monopolies without govt intervention.

What Banks?? There is this company "Donald J for Jinius Trump" a very recent addition to the "capitalist" stock market. BILLIONS for emptiness. AKA Cloud captital or what ever You want to call snake oil owns us all!!

You got that completely backwards.

You should watch the video before commenting.