Big Tech Are the New Soviets
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The notion that Big Tech has become akin to the old Soviet Union is sparking a lively debate, with commenters dissecting the parallels between the two seemingly disparate entities. While some argue that the Soviet society wasn't truly communist, others counter that it was indeed a manifestation of communism, albeit a flawed one, highlighting the disconnect between ideology and reality. The discussion reveals a consensus that both capitalist and communist ideologies often fall short of their theoretical ideals, with one commenter astutely observing that "pure ideology" can be the root of the problem. As the conversation unfolds, it becomes clear that the comparison between Big Tech and the Soviet Union is more than just a provocative headline, it's a lens through which to examine the complexities of power, control, and the human factor in shaping societal systems.
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Marxism (and capitalism) sell themselves as ground upwards movements but are in fact top down. They are both based around materialism which leads to a cynical attitude to life and individuals.
We are heading to a centralised command economy. Marxists want more of that, not less, but sell it as liberating the working classes.
Marxists want the working class whose labor is applied to capital in production to direct capital, and thereby production, rather than capital being privately owned and its owners directing labor, and thereby production. While the democratic centralism favored in Leninist theory and its derivatives is (at least in the theory in which it is conceived) a means of achieving that, current Western Marxists are, IME, all over the map with regard to centralism. They are more united about who should wield power over the economy than about the structure of how that power should be wielded.
Well yes, because it does. You dont even need a fully planned economy, some market forces aint bad and some small bourgeois aint bad either. Bird in a cage etc etc.
Communism at a large scale does not work because it goes against human nature - we're not bees or ants or other similar animals but rather belligerent primates with a cultural predilection for living in families and clans. It is there where Communism can work, at a small enough scale so that leechers and moochers can be put in their place and there is no (need for a) Party. As soon as the size of the Communi(ty) gets so large that any individual can no longer check on all of the others Commun(ism) no longer works since it offers far too many opportunities for less scrupulous individuals to leech of others and for ideologists to rise to power 'in service of the people'.
And yet, we don't live as such animals and our collective behavior changed throughout history thanks to our reasoning capabilities taking over the inner "animal".
That 'inner animal' comes out the moment the shelves in the supermarkets are empty and the electronic payment systems are down. Those reasoning capabilities may have put a thin cultural veneer over the beast but it is still there, ready to defend itself and its own if push comes to shove as well it should - cultures have a way of collapsing when times get hard.
"scientific socialism"... really?
Without a market for their goods they'll end up just where they started, ripe for a new revolution.
Regarding the markets, considering their ever growing export sector, I wouldn't worry too much for now ;)
[1] whether Lenin ever used the phrase I'll leave in the middle but the concept stands
Yanis Varoufakis himself attended private school and his father in law was one of the biggest industrialists in Greece. I'm sceptical about how much he knows about working class realities.
Pure ideology.
It may well head towards technofeudalism, but I dispute that. With automation, the peasantry become dispensable to the ruling class and that isn't very feudal at all. Feudalism is a system where money and power flows upwards. In feudalism, the lords are dependent on the peasantry for food, goods and troops... Which is not the case when all these are provided by machines.
Obviously if you remove from your mind all market mechanisms, then it doesn’t look like a market anymore
https://www.proskauer.com/blog/amazons-most-favored-nations-...
But like, my question is, Doesn't this cripple every company which sells electronics on amazon or something?
I think amazon tries doing it to say that you would only get the best price here, thus people might buy from amazon which can then increase the sales making retailers believe they need to be on amazon agreeing to MFN policy and then crippling their custom market too I suppose
Are there any loopholes to this? What if I am a seller and then I can have lets say my book be on amazon for 100 bucks as an example and I can create a website where I sell it for 110$
But when someone signs up they can get a voucher for 20$ and then they can apply it for what I am selling which for them becomes 90$
I think amazon's MFN is monopolistic especially for things like books which is what amazon first was created for.
I kinda wish if there was a service where I can buy one time right to publish a book from the authors directly for like the books price and then be able to download it or print it from local competing printing/tech service shops..
Yes, it is monopolistic - some call it technofeudalism, because Amazon owns the "land" and extract land rent out of it - with questionable service in return.
The argument about Amazon requiring cheaper prices is true in theory but in practice not strongly enforced. I just bought a kettle on Amazon instead of from another seller who had it 2 euros cheaper because I combined the purchase with other stuff that the seller didn't have. I have readily told people that some items they were buying could be found for cheaper on AliExpress, but they didn't care because they wanted the convenience and fast service. By the way, many of Amazon's suppliers sell the same product cheaper on AliExpress and other marketplaces; that completely kills the argument in the first place.
Amazon is successful because other companies were complacent and ignored the upcoming internet economy. Amazon built a very complex logistic system that took a very long time and a lot of investment to build. Now that they dominate, the lazy competitors cry about monopoly. In my country (France), the traditional supermarkets are just about now coming in with alternatives to compete, and they are very far off the mark for both service/selection and often price as well…
The MFN principle is enforced - but only for the same reseller. The same product may be sold in another channel under another reseller, Amazon cannot touch that. AliExpress is surely outside of that scope. Also, EU managed to "convince" Amazon to stop MFN in principle in EU countries, practice is different (they don't enforce it, but give credit breaks) - it's still being enforced in USA and subject to legal challenges: https://www.johnstonclem.com/news-insights/amazon-antitrust-...
Having built an extremely strong position, they can now increase prices and fees, and leverage power over sellers to stop them from listing lower prices off-Amazon, if they want to also sell on Amazon. See page 42 of https://web.archive.org/oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/... for an example of this
You won't be able to just replicate their strategy, and they've spent ridiculous amounts of money on next-day/same-day delivery infrastructure that nobody's gonna be able to invest that much. But if you do have any ideas on how to disrupt Amazon and be more convenient than them in 2025 let me know :)
But what would be the payoff? Getting to compete head-to-head with Amazon? Amazon, that's a well-established incumbent, with a well-known pattern of ruthless dealings, including leveraging their ties with governments, to protect their monopoly?
No one's going to be able to make a profit doing that.
(Note that my personal opinion is that Amazon profits / are protected thanks to governments through unfair IP / patents though)
"The wisdom of the market" only works with an ideal free market, or something close to it.
Such a thing has a number of requirements, such as low/no barriers to entry, perfect information, elasticity of demand, etc.
Those do not exist here. No useful information on how things "should be" can be obtained from the fact that Amazon cannot meaningfully be challenged.
Your position, essentially, boils down to "however things are right now, if they're even remotely stable, that's how things should be, because that's what the market wants." Worship of the status quo.
The WEF includes the top 100 companies in the world, along with the leaders and opposition leaders of every country. He's part of it.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/
You just keep pounding on the fact that he is from privilege, but that alone is not enough to be suspicious.
At the very best, you are arguing guilt by association.
He doesn't just come from privilege... He never really left it.
Some people have claimed that this is what he is doing. You have provided zero evidence that it is not. You merely keep repeating the same statements about his origins and his affiliation with the WEF.
I am not saying you are wrong. I am saying you have not supported your position in any meaningful way.
What are his words? What are his actions?
Where is the evidence?
Where is the harm?
> they claim to want to liberate the working class when they were never part of it
that is not irony.
Do you believe only working class people can improve the situation for working class people? That seems counter-intuitive to me, as people outside the working class usually have more time and education to think about changes and advocate for them.
What was it the Who once sang, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"? I don't think he has ever been much out of privileged circles.
The way ordinary people's lives can improve is self-advocacy and self-determination. You're not going to find that from Cambridge University where he teaches (one of the snobbiest and class ridden institutions in the UK which often resembles Hogwarts more than a modern university), the World Economic Forum (which prefers closed meetings to public ones and is furtive about its aims), or anythjng like that.
I think it's overall a good thing that not all people from elite backgrounds with above average IQ/skills end up being purely upper class aligned.
You say he is talented. I say he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and has been promoted by some powerful institutions such as mainstream media and elite universities. He did not get up there on his own. He isn't some street kid from Athens who clawed his way up by his own intellect.
By the way, I don't have a big problem with Corbyn as an individual. I think he is personally honest. I do have concerns that a decent man like him (or Bernie Sanders) may be used by individuals who are less honest. That has happened in the British Labour Party many times.
I'm not sure what you're implying though. I don't think he is being platformed by current mainstream institutions if that's what you're saying.
Now I know that in the US, people group everyone with a job in the middle class, but that's just semantics.
However, class is also about your origins not just your wallet and YV is in no way a horny-handed son of toil.
It's birth, not brains or organizational skills that make "leaders" in Europe. Hell, the highest European politician gets criticized for exactly that a great many times. Very lucky to be born where she was born, not much at all in terms of accomplishments, and zero spectacular achievements.
Also you can't have a feudal system when the peasantry have been replaced by machines which is the end game here. Feudalism is parasitic but it still requires goods and services to flow up from below. When your food, defence and goods are all supplied by robots or AI, then that is not the case.
Do machines drive your Uber ride? Deliver your food? No. They assign jobs to gig workers. Those are the serfs. Your goods and services are by people managed by AI.
Yes, I know, FSD is just around the corner. /s
https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/how-google-maps-quietly-al...
People also consistently share advice/tips on restaurants to try, and that largely escapes tech control. And even a well-reviewed/noted restaurant isn't immune to people's choices. As someone who has restaurant owner friends, I can assure you that tech companies have very little impact on the restaurant's success/survival.
He has no experience or understanding of poverty from the inside. Like a lot of his ilk, most of his understanding is second hand and theoretical. He wouldn't last five minutes on a factory floor.
Having been through the result of implemented hypothetical solutions, they suck. They not only suck, but the suck all of the oxygen up, so that real, better solutions can't replace them.
In my opinion, the modern-day socialists are the equivalent of priests who spend all day convincing people to give some of their money because they are going to make a “better community” and help the poor. In practice, anyone who knows the other side of this trade would rather have a solution that doesn't involve them…
She comes from a really poor background and its informed her views and made her into the great leader she is today. I'd recommend giving it a read!
https://archive.ph/liqSA
If he was compassionate, he would condemn the WEF, instead of enabling it. It is an antidemocratic organisation, is partnered with big business and does not allow free press coverage of its events.
It does seem reasonable that people should have experienced poverty to understand it. The world has been full of people who came from privileged backgrounds who claim to speak for the working class and don't understand them. Maxim Gorky talks about this with Lenin and Lunacharsky.
p.s. Also please don't use that word "change". It is meaningless. Change is something which happens anyway. "Progress" and "improvement" are better.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/03/yanis-varoufak...
He’s in Washington for a meeting with Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary and Obama confidant. Summers asks him point blank: do you want to be on the inside or the outside? “Outsiders prioritise their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions,” Summers warns.
Or, the 1% and the 0.01%.
The superrich are perhaps more alien than most aliens would be to us. (I'm assuming you are not a billionaire).
The cynic in me thinks it's because they stand to gain even more power/privilege this way. I think those people are disgusted by the fact that filthy capitalists can gain money and thus power while largely escaping their own power/control.
So-called elite education is fucked up in a bizarre way. They all end up with an ideology that could be summarized by anything that isn't government controlled is necessarily bad. Not very surprising because the whole point is them getting this education to be “worthy” to lead. Hard to do when people can manage without your leadership. Allegedly they are smart, but I think their actual intellectual power is below that of most engineers.
https://www.politico.eu/article/alexis-tapis-yanis-varoufaki...
There is a great difference between theoretical communism and practical communism. Theoretical communism was just a bunch of lies without any relationship to the practical communism that was implemented in any of the countries claiming to attempt to realize a communist society.
On the other hand, practical communism has been everywhere something not opposite to capitalism, but something equivalent with the final stage of unregulated capitalism, where the big monopolies have won in every market, leaving no alternatives.
During the last 25 years I have been dismayed to watch every year how the Western societies become more and more alike to the communist societies that they had criticized vigorously a half of century ago.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/
For example, if I use Uber, a significant fraction of the fare (let's say 25%) is taken by Uber. That takes it out of the local economy. And because Uber has good tax lawyers, they pay minimal taxes in my country, so it leaves my country's economy completely.
With an old style taxi firm, the boss took a cut - but then he spent most of it in local shops, or his wife bought clothes at a local boutique and a nice haircut - keeping money going round the local economy.
Now, every time you use a cloud service, you take money out of a local economy.And people wonder why we have huge social and economic problems.
I'm looking at something like 1000 kWh on a heat pump a year in a mild weather, where kWh is around 0.30 eurocents. I don't however own the pump, energy company leases it to me, so I pay about 150 a month the whole year (cold months are about 4 GJ, but it totals to 18-ish in a year). Then there is another 10-30 a month for normal in-house electricity consumption.
When I had actual district heating (powered by gas, when the gas was expensive af) and the house was "leakier", I looked at something like 50ish GJ a year and paid close to 350.
Gas is even more expensive. I had to have mine cut off.
Note well: I do not have answers for these questions. But I think the questions are interesting.
Losing to Uber means my money is not being used in my economy, it goes away, it pays a few devs/local staff while it's stashed away in other financialised assets that do not help my neighbours (well, perhaps it helps the richest ones).
Most local produce initatives fail because they're not actually better than the global/international variants, especially considered from a price/quality pov.
> In the liberal fantasy, spearheaded by Adam Smith, bakers, brewers and butchers laboured within markets so cut-throat that none could make more money than the bare minimum necessary to keep their small, family-owned businesses running.
In a cash only capitalism world that you can’t conspire to have more than you earn. You earn what the market earns.
But debt suspends capitalism long enough for someone to “beat” the market. And when capitalism resumes you have this perverse player operating under exceptional circumstances.
> Joseph Schumpeter … Progress he argued, is impossible in competitive markets. Growth needs monopolies to fuel it. How else can enough profit be earned to pay for expensive research and development
I know this to be false. Almost all the big tech companies consistently FAILED to bring about innovation through research. They instead had to acquire SMALLER companies and teams that had the innovation.
YouTube, Android, Instagram, WhatsApp etc…
And almost every other innovation was gained at the startup stage not the monopoly stage.
Uber, AirBnB etc..
But when it comes to information technology those situations are far and few in between.
How is youtube recomendation system, transcription, automatic subtitles, content id system, etc not innovative?
The Soviets, too, innovated. Sputnik shock and all that. But at some point the structures were just too rigid - just like they have become in Big Tech capitalism.
YouTube is quite innovative, by the way, just not in the way it should be. Its comments sections change on a frequent basis allowing for ever more complex shadow banning and censorship systems. Its search algorithms also tend to exclude certain channels and big up others.
Whatever one thinks of the Soviet political system, they did have some great achievements. Some of the ones that people forget include first probe and first automated rover on the Moon, first space station, first probe on Mars, first rover and picture from Mars (albeit scrambled), also first pictures from the surface of another planet (Venus)
NASA tried to claim recently it had the first sound from another planet (Mars) and airborne probe (helicopter). The Soviets had already transmitted audio from Venus in the 1980s and had a balloon there.
> Whatever one thinks of the Soviet political system, they did have some great achievements.
So true. Kids and I are slowly working through the Gelfand correspondence course (math) and it's amazing.
And what you describe is fiddling with knobs at best, not actual new innovative features.
There are definitely innovations from the big companies but not “key” innovations.
In the article it looks at innovation from a national level. I.e new products and services, and methodology.
The scaling you describe is great but its only impact is within YouTube, and it’s not unique. Every other company of that size has also figured their own way to scale. No one was depending on YouTube for this.
Almost everything can be termed innovation, but we need to be mindful that we are trying to justify the existence of monopolies. Ie “society needs them otherwise we couldn’t figure it out”. With that the threshold for innovation increases quite a bit.
Despite claims to the contrary, we live in a system where government and big business are coalescing. In fact, they make many decisions together behind closed doors at the World Economic Forum, which Yanis Varoufakis is a member of. (You don't get into Davos unless you are either a) invited from the inside or b) pay vast amounts of money to attend.)
https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/
And now they are going all-in with AI. And I don't believe their official narrative. At all.