This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Technofeudalism
Nope. We've been over this. It's still just capitalism and regular old fascism and neo-feudalism. Don't need a new term to try to imply that technology is the cause. Doesn't matter that the tech industry is involved, it's still just wealthy people using profitable industry to try to cement power over others.
Have you happened to read the book? He has a chapter dedicated to his decision to call it technofeudalism rather than capitalism, hypercapitalism, technocapitalism, etc. Basically he's saying profits have been decoupled from a company's value, and that it's no longer about creating a product to exchange for profit (which, in his words, are beholden to market competition) but instead about extracting rent (which is not beholden to competition -- his example is while a landowner's neighbors increase the values of their properties, the landowner's property value also increases).
Anyways he describes Amazon, Apple store, Google Play, cloud service providers, as fiefdoms that collect rent from actual producers of products (physical goods, but also applications), and don't actually produce anything, themselves, besides access to customers, while also extracting value from users of their technologies through personal information. They're effectively leasing consumer attention in the same way landowners leased their lands to workers.
It sounds pretty accurate to me, but I haven't had much time to chew on it. What's your take on that idea?
You can introduce interoperability. I am on X. I can't go to Bluesky. Let's say that Elon Musk decides to block me because I said something he didn't like. He has blocked me before for a couple of weeks. Now, I have more than a million followers on X. I cannot leave without losing them. If I go to Bluesky, I have 10 followers. Interoperability would mean that if I go to another platform, to Bluesky, when I post something on Bluesky, then my 1 million followers on X can hear it.
Sounds like Fediverse's ActivityPub
That would mean you would be indefinitely supporting and sending traffic to X. Why not tell your million followers "I will only be posting on Bluesky now - please check out my profile there [link]" and dump X? If you're worried about your numbers dropping moving to the other platform, then your "followers" probably don't mean much or weren't that interested in what you have to say anyway (so what's the point other than a score)? Maybe I'm just doing the old man shaking his fist at the sky routine.
