SeventyTwoTrillion

I think I generally agree; as you lay out, I think a decent way of summing it up would be "As a competitive capitalism tends towards monopolized capitalism, capitalist firms generally trend towards developing characteristics that are comparable with feudalism, but they fundamentally remain different modes of production, and even stereotypical monopoly capitalist firms like those in Big Tech have not reverted to a feudal relationship between the oppressor and oppressed class. These firms still maintain firm control over the means of production and are profit-seeking, investing large sums of money into maintaining those profits. The commodities they are selling may be more abstract than steel or wheat or linen - such as a "branded musical experience" - but they still sell those commodities."

I do also really agree with his critique of the techno-feudalists not really paying attention to the state nor geopolitics. Obviously I haven't read any of their work so I can't say for sure whether he's being 100% honest when he says that the techno-feudalists pay little attention to those things, but assuming he's telling the truth, I think it's a pretty big blind spot given that imperialism is the primary contradiction.

I'm also on team "I don't think this was the right phrasing but the fundamental idea is essentially correct." Like, I really can picture myself on both sides of this argument. I think that having a genuine belief in a "destined eventuality" of a revolution is important to counter capitalist realism, and it's really only in the last year or so that I feel like I've fully transcended that doomerism and believe in the very depths of my heart that capitalism will indeed be overthrown just like how feudalism and the slave empires were. So I think it's heartening when people talk about a revolution as if it's something that very much could happen rather than being caught in spirals of doomerism and pessimism, even if that speculation is imperfect and even has some liberal brainworms writhing around in there.

I also think that believing that a mythical revolution will save us is, more than anything else, simply ahistorical. Things are going to get worse before they get better. A LOT worse. Even once "the revolution" is occurring. Even for a number of years after "the revolution" has officially been won. It'll all be so much worse that the 2020s will be looked upon with fond nostalgia and mythologized as the "pre-war" times where things were simple and happy. And, most importantly, I feel like this idea of "The Revolution" being something almost divinely created and bestowed upon us, rather than actively fought for with the death and sacrifice of thousands, perhaps even millions of people, leads to a big fracture with the idea of putting in effort towards The Revolution. How many Tumblr and Reddit radlibs are actively cheering on Hamas and Hezbollah (and, god forbid, Iran - the object of so much scorn over the last few years due to all the "my people yearn to be free, let's overthrow the patriarchal and women-hating regime of Iran!" propaganda and color revolution attempts). I would bet that most of them are currently dejectedly commenting about how much the situation in Gaza sucks and how it's all doomed, while the Resistance continues its incredible fighting and is bringing Israel to its knees. The Resistance are working towards the revolution, but not The Revolution, and so they cannot be supported.

This rule does not apply for conservatives, I actively encourage them to get on helicopters as much as they physically can

those four oblasts are looking awfully annexed for a "failed annexation"

he's Pinochet at home

I imagine so, I just wonder what subgroup of Zionists in power would be willing to go along with it, and how the population as a whole would react. Like, I can't imagine the Communist Party of Israel getting anywhere close to the levers of power and everybody else in the Israeli state seems to be in a competition showing off how badly they want to kill every single Muslim on the planet. This is why I'm so curious about what happened in immediate post-apartheid South Africa or even immediate post-Nazi Germany, because in this situation, you have millions of Israelis who would look at the total genocide of 2.4 million people and go "And we're just warming up! Look out, Lebanon! Look out, Jordan! Look out, Egypt! Look out, Iraq!" instead of even the slightest remorse. These are among the most fucked up people in all of human history. How does that end? Radioactively? I just have to hope that if a war with Hezbollah begins, that there's some Zionists in the state that have been keeping their heads down and don't buy into the Zionist ideology that much and so would be willing to coup the government before the Samson Option triggers.

Yesterday's Naked Capitalism update on the situation in the Middle East doesn't have much new to sink our teeth into - the US airstrikes probably haven't done much, battles inside Gaza continue, as do the atrocities - but there is one piece that caught my eye.

A tweet of Ben Gvir speaking:

“I am not a sheep, if there is a ceasefire in Gaza, we will LEAVE the government!”

“I will NOT allow the signing of an agreement that will lead to the victory of Hamas!.”

The speaker, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is head of the National Security Council. More important, he’s willing to topple the government if he does not have his way. From a recent Wall Street Journal story based on an exclusive interview with Ben-Gvir:

Now, crucially, Ben-Gvir has enough support in the ruling coalition to undermine Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rule, and he says he is willing to use it. In his first interview with a foreign news organization since joining the government, Ben-Gvir warned that he would oppose any deal with Hamas that would free thousands of Palestinians held for terrorism or end the war before Hamas was fully defeated.

Ben-Gvir is a forceful proponent of clearing Gaza entirely of Palestinians and turning it into a Jewish enclave. He also believes Trump would be more willing to back these plans than Biden. It appears to take some months to organize new elections in Israel after a government falls (knowledgeable readers please pipe up). One could assume a caretaker government would continue existing policies and would not enter into something as important as a ceasefire deal, let alone one that was more than short term. So it is a little earlier than optimal for Ben-Gvir to force new elections. And Netanyahu obviously wants to stay Prime Minister as long as possible to hold off his prosecutions. But this calculus is part of the equation.

So if the ceasefire proposal collapses (and given the Resistance's demands, I find it hard to imagine how Israel could possibly agree while still being beholden to the Zionist project) and war with Hezbollah begins, who will be the Karl Dönitz of Israel?

As there are simply way too many businesses across the world that rely on some form of Google services to function, the transition to a completely different Chinese ecosystem will be a very expensive and painful process, so the path of least resistance for them is to actually drop Chinese technology, regardless of how much more advanced the latter could be. It’s simply the cost of services imposed upon them. Anyone who wants to do business with the US or use US-related technologies will have to meet a certain standards in their hardware and software, and it would be very easy for the US to say that Chinese tech are not meeting the criteria.

This feels like it would merely create two separate blocs with middle-men connecting them up. Because even if the US says "If you use the Chinese alternative then you are a poopypants terrorist and we won't trade with you," then I don't immediately see why China would do the same thing in return, allowing businesses in, say, Ethiopia to use China's tech ecosystem, then it's transferred to, say, India which would only use Google, then onto the US. So it would just drive up costs for America overall.

So like, for this point:

We are already seeing that Huawei’s future HarmonyOS (HongmengOS) will drop support for Android services, ultimately creating an ecosystem of its own.

Does this necessarily imply that there would be no way of transferring between the two, akin to between two file formats or like, a USB adapter? Even the creation of a specific service whose only purpose is to allow that conversion to occur?

I'd like the input of somebody more technologically savvy, really, because this sounds like it could get quite complicated and I don't immediately understand what the purpose of cutting off support for a different tech ecosystem would be unless it was for purely protectionist purposes (and even then). I could get America doing it, but not China. Obviously the time of the USSR was largely before the internet really took off, but are there any digital parallels from then?

Here's a long piece I posted further up if you want some more food for thought.

Evgeny Morozov's Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason is probably the best single retort I've seen of the techno-feudal argument.

It's difficult to give a good summary of it (it's a decently long and well-researched piece) and I don't want to just be like "Oh, Varoufakis and his fellow techno-feudalist believers are idiots because they just didn't consider this basic fact!" but it seems like the techno-feudalists are essentially defining capitalism as a system where there's innovation, whereas feudalism is a system where the rich merely live off rent and don't really do much innovation, and while this is a plausible, even attractive hypothesis for left-wingers ("Those lazy bourgeois failsons can't even do capitalism right anymore! They aren't innovating or making anything!") it doesn't actually seem, like, true. And in the cases where it is true, it's not really incompatible with Actually Existing Capitalism, merely their theory of capitalism (assume a vacuum, assume no air resistance, assume a spherical cow, assume a can opener, etc).

That's really the great, forgotten stage of most Grand Theories I find - you can very easily create a theory that sounds lovely and plausible and fits the preconceived notions of the world of your audience, but actually going into the data and evidence and fitting it all together and considering all possible refutations of your idea and then pre-emptively responding to those refutations and explaining why they are wrong without just saying "These refutations suck because they're bad and wrong and made by bad and wrong people; here's a total caricature of those ideas, laugh at them!" That is the place where theories go to die. Liberalism and neoliberalism crumbles there. "Judeo-Bolshevism" and its modern equivalent of Cultural Marxism crumbles there. "Wokeism" crumbles there. And I think that this is where the techno-feudal hypothesis also simply crumbles. And Marx remains.

Britain has done genocide in every continent except Antarctica.

don't give them ideas

while this is funny, he's literally like 200 years old so we all knew he was gonna die of something in the next few years