The Fallacy of Techno-Feudalism

So her criticism is that Varoufakis' term is invalid because we do not have a perfect analogy to medieval feudalism? Of course the analogy is not perfect! I mean when we talk e.g. about "fascism" in modern day, how close is it to Mussolini's fascism? When we talk about "democratic government" how close is it to the Athenian democracy?

This is just being pedantic over the terminology, as means to discredit Varoufakis' thoughts and arguments.

The counterarguments are really weak to refuse the analogy. They actually might convince a more aware reader that the opposite is true. E.g. Voluntary participation argument asserts that everyone has choice. This is equally true as saying that an alcoholic can simply stop drinking. In the economy where the winner takes all this is not that easy…

> (Terminology aside: Note that the economic system in much of medieval Europe is better understood under this term, manorialism, rather than ‘feudalism.’ Feudalism, as a term, has been generally going out of style among medievalists for a long time, but it is especially inapt here. In a lot of popular discourse (and high school classrooms), feudalism gets used as a catch-all to mean both the political relationships between aristocrats and other aristocrats, and the economic relationships between peasants and aristocrats, but these were very different relationships. Peasants did not have fiefs, they did not enter into vassalage agreements (the feodum of feudalism). Thus in practice my impression is that the experts in medieval European economics and politics tend to eschew ‘feudalism’ as an unhelpful term, preferring ‘manoralism’ to describe the economic system (including the political subordination of the peasantry) and ‘vassalage’ to describe the system of aristocratic political relationships.)

https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they...

This article is just another example of worshipping at the alter of billionaires.

The whole argument hinges on falsehoods. They argue that participation is optional in the current web ecosystem and that's just simply not true, not only for the web as a whole, but individual fiefdoms too.

Try getting a job without LinkedIn. Try buying a phone that doesn't run android or iOS. Try selling an app without sharecropping an app store. Try running a browser that's not based on chrome or Firefox.

And there's others with slightly more choice, but not a lot, email, social media, link aggregation, music platforms. All with just a small few main choices.

And the other argument is that feudalism stiffled innovation with its rigid hierarchies, that that's exactly what we have today with a few platforms having all the network effect, and killing off innovation. Small Web is dead. Small forums are mostly gone. Used market place is hidden behind a Facebook login wall.

Technofeudalism is here, you have no choice.