I’m starting to think that serfdom, as an aspect of feudalism, is too modern for the new technocrat caste.

A few days ago, Sam Altman did an interview saying he no longer supported universal basic income for those put out of work by AI. Instead, he supported “shares in ownership” or “shares in compute”. That is, instead of a guaranteed income, the lower classes would be gifted some sort of income producing asset based on the value of some particular tech company or the AI industry as a whole. If the industry did well, the lower classes dependent on it would thrive; if the industry failed, they would starve.

That’s not serfdom. That goes even further back, to the patron-client system of ancient Rome. The patron, generally the leader of a wealthy noble family, would provide their clients with money, food, and gifts. In return, the clients would vote for the patron and his allies in elections, act as bodyguards and enforcers for the patron, intimidate/beat/kill the clients of rival patrons to keep them away from the polling booths, advertise the patron’s businesses, and generally do whatever the patron wanted. The clients helped the patron maintain their wealth and political power, and the patron would share the rewards of that wealth and power with their clients.

Think about the sort of country we would have, the sort of politicians who would be elected and the sort of laws who would be passed, if Altman’s idea came to fruition. Imagine if we had a significant unemployed underclass whose financial security depended solely on the success of the AI industry, and who would be rewarded by their technocrat billionaire patrons for electing AI-friendly politicians or blocking AI-friendly regulation.

Mere serfdom would be preferable.

Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. Computers and tyranny do not necessarily go hand in hand. Tyrannies have worked very well without computers (consider the Nazis) and the most computerised nations in today’s world are also the least tyrannical.

Wow. Asimov made some good points, but that one sure didn’t age well.

You’re right, it was vision.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

I want to agree with you, but I don’t.

If you’re trying to send a political message, like any other kind of propaganda or PR or messaging in general, it’s on you to tailor it to the audience you want to reach. If your audience doesn’t understand your message, it’s because you didn’t convey it correctly. Remember, your audience has no obligation to listen to you at all, much less put in the work to understand an overly subtle or complex message. They are going to take your message the way they understand it.

And if you’re writing anti-fascist satire, it has to be understood as satire by the target audience, or you’ve accidentally produced fascist propaganda instead of satire. And that is literally what happened with Helldivers, and The Boys, and the Punisher, and Starship Troopers, which is a hilarious example because Heinlein originally wrote the novel as fascist propaganda, and Verhoeven tried and failed to turn it into satire, because he underestimated just how fucking much Americans love the taste of boot.

(And that’s not even counting the amount of actual fascist propaganda that hides behind “satire” as a fig leaf to deflect criticism - like the shit dribbling out of the American White House Twitter accounts, eg, portraying black women as deformed apes.)

Americans are, as a society, illiterate, pig ignorant, and so poisoned by arrogance and contempt that they think their ignorance is a strength. All this is true. But if you fail to understand your audience and fail to communicate in a language they understand, it’s not the fault of your audience. It’s yours.

tldr: Americans are too stupid for satire, so if you’re making media for Americans stop fucking trying to use satire, kthx.

More common than you’d think. Any reputable journal will anonymize its submissions so that reviewers don’t know the author of the article they’re reviewing. So if your past articles are relevant to your present article, and you fail to cite your own past articles, and the reviewer doesn’t know who you are but does know you didn’t cite some relevant past articles…

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You are right that capitalism tends towards monopolies. But I think there’s a significant difference in what, exactly, is being monopolized. Capital itself is not being monopolized. Access to the marketplace is being monopolized.

In a traditional capitalist monopoly, you would have to buy, for example, shoes, from just one shoe factory, which has a monopoly on shoes, is the only factory able or allowed to sell you shoes, and can charge whatever price it wants.

In the current economy, you can go to Walmart or Amazon and buy hundreds of different shoes from hundreds of different factories, all competing against one another - but those shoe factories all have to pay rent to Walmart and Amazon, and have to sell their shoes at the price Walmart and Amazon tells them to, and have to agree to sell their shoes at lower prices at Walmart or Amazon than on their own website. If they refuse, they’re not allowed to sell on Walmart and Amazon at all.

And because so many physical consumers only have access to a Walmart, and no other stores; and because so many online consumers default to Amazon for all their purchases; if the capitalists don’t submit to Walmart and Amazon they lose so much of the customer market they won’t be able to compete.

That’s the feudalism part. The capitalists aren’t in charge. The vectoralists are - the people who control the flow of information, the lines of communication between producers and consumers. And the vectoralists have split the economy into a handful of private fiefdoms, and make money not from producing anything, but from charging rent for access to their private fiefdom and the customers entrapped within it.

And since this phenomenon is most advanced online, where Amazon controls almost the entire online physical goods market and Google and Apple control almost the entire app market, we can call it technofeudalism.

Traditional monopolies certainly exist - for example, the American food supply is controlled by only a handful of companies - but those companies aren’t the ones controlling the price of food. Walmart and Amazon do.

Or to put it another way: in a socialist economy, like the USSR’s, the government controls the flow of goods and the allocation of resources.

In a capitalist economy, the owners of capital - the land and factories and natural resources that produce goods - control that flow.

And now, in a technocratic economy, the flow of goods and services is controlled, not by the government, and not by the owners of capital, but by the vectoralists.

I think it’s a vital distinction to make.

You could go further and say what’s happening now isn’t capitalism at all. Yanis Varoufakis calls the modern world economy “technofeudalism”: it’s controlled by information hypercompanies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, that make money not by producing anything, but by controlling the flow of information between consumers and producers, and charging producers rent for access to consumers.

If you’re an app developer, you pay Google and Apple whatever they ask, and you follow their rules, or you don’t get to sell your product in their app stores; if you sell products, you give Amazon their cut, or you don’t get to sell in their market. And because Google and Apple and Amazon have so effectively entrapped customers, capitalists who don’t agree to their terms can’t get to their consumers at all.

It’s vassal capitalism. Capitalists pay their technofeudal lords their 30% cut of revenue and compete with each other for the remaining scraps. And then they raise prices and cut wages, squeeze their workers and exploit their consumers even more, in order to make enough money to survive at all.

I’m immediately berating them because I know that they’ve chosen to do this, nobody has put a gun to their head and forced them to do this.

You should be aware a lot of scammers are forced to do this:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/06/cambodia-government-allows-slavery-torture-flourish-inside-scamming-compounds/

Probably because I don’t live in Russia or follow Russian media. Anyway, TIL a new conspiracy theory 😆

Western media replies, “It never happened; Russians have always been enemies of the Western world.”

As someone who consumes a great deal of Western media, I have never heard this claim anywhere, from anyone, before now.

And “the Communist Revolution was secretly funded by the West to sabotage the glory of Imperial Russia” is also something I’ve never heard, though it is certainly one of the takes of all time.

Western-based international banker financial support for the Bolsheviks…

Oh, nevermind. That I’ve heard before.

Trump could sue any or all of those parties. I wouldn’t try and guess which ones he’ll actually sue, especially since he’s most likely angling for a settlement/bribe and doesn’t care whether he can actually win in court.

Surely American laws don’t apply to British companies, otherwise they should comply with the laws of every other country or risk getting sued?

American laws do apply to British companies if they’re operating in America. That is in fact how international law works. If a company is operating in a particular country, they are subject to the laws of that particular country, inasmuch as their operations in that particular country are concerned.

And there’s a complex network of international treaties that I really don’t feel like looking up that gives various countries the right to enforce their legal judgments in various other countries.

Think about Elon Musk threatening to pull Twitter out of the entire EU because he doesn’t want to follow the EU’s laws banning Nazi propaganda. The EU can, in fact, ban Twitter from platforming fascists in the EUs, fine Twitter if they continue to platform fascists in the EU, and seize whatever Twitter assets they have access to in the EU in order to collect those fines. And Musk can’t do shit except take his ball and go home, because if his propaganda site operates in the EU it’s going to be subject to EU law.

Similarly, if the BBC is operating in the United States, it is, at least in theory, subject to United States law with respect to content it disseminates within the United States. Which means they can be sued, can be found liable, and can have their assets seized by the US government as far as the power of the US government reaches. Which is pretty damn far.

Legally: under American law, Trump would need to sue in a jurisdiction where he could show actual damages, which would be somewhere in the United States, where the BBC’s coverage of the American election could have influenced people’s votes. I’m not as familiar with British libel law, but I don’t think actual damages are required, only malicious intent? So in that case he could sue in Britain again.

Practically: the BBC has spent its entire existence currying favor with dictators and oligarchs throughout the world, and they’re not going to miss the opportunity to bribe the most powerful man the 21st century has yet produced.

In fact, I think the BBC invited this lawsuit by publicly driving out its top leadership and accusing them of leftist bias. Trump’s suing over biased coverage the BBC just admitted to doing, and only because they publicly admitted to it. I suspect this is a coup by right-wingers within the BBC who were looking for a way to ally themselves with Trump and invited the lawsuit as an excuse to give Trump a lot of money and buy his favor. So they’ll almost certainly settle with a massive cryptocurrency/cash payment to Trump before this ever sees court.

Would you prefer “the global capitalist oligarchy whose imperial core is centered in Washington; whose children are filled with nihilistic despair as they watch the empire consume its own working class as it previously consumed the victims of its colonial conquests; whose children, as a result, aspire to nothing greater than hedonism and decadence, reflecting the fundamental moral rot at the heart of the tottering edifice”?

Cause I didn’t have the patience to write all that but I can if need be.

Born too late to explore the oceans.

Born too early to explore the stars.

Born just in time to remind you to hit that like button, share with your friends, and subscribe so you don’t miss a thing.

The West is lost.

It did in 2003.

Given how much Trump’s policies are driven by nostalgia, I think he probably wants to put a new Papa Doc or Baby Doc in power. A nice loyal pro-American Haitian dictator, who’ll build himself a beautiful golden palace surrounded by Trump hotels, and wine and dine politicians and journalists and celebrate the rebirth of Haiti and be sure to thank Trump obsequiously for his support, while gang extortion is replaced by security force extortion and the Haitian people continue to starve.

If it helps, I think bicycle theft is (mostly) a symptom of state violence.

What I mean is, most people who steal bikes aren’t doing it because they want a bike. They steal bikes to resell them.

Some people do it because they’re homeless, can’t get a job, and need money to live.

Some people do it because they’re drug addicts, can’t function well enough to do a job, and need money for drugs.

Some people just do it because they’re broke and it’s easy money.

In other words, because of capitalism, because of capitalism, and because of capitalism.

And all those people are willing to risk state violence (in the form of being arrested for theft) in order to get the money they need.

Because, in general, those groups are already the subject of state violence in so many ways that they’re not deterred by more state violence. I mean, why the fuck shouldn’t a homeless person steal a bike? Because he might be arrested? He might be arrested for sitting on the fucking sidewalk minding his own business.

When you risk arrest every single day just for existing in public, or for using the chemicals that big pharma prescribed to you, addicted you to, and then illegalized you for being addicted, the marginally greater danger of arrest from stealing someone’s bicycle doesn’t really make a big difference.

Fix the fucking social safety net and bicycle theft will plummet.