Yanis Varoufakis

The Demise of Capitalism and the Rise of a New Power

Techno-Feudalism

Soham Dasgupta

You may well ask: when the bubble finally burst, why did we not let the bankers crash and burn? Why weren't they held accountable for their absurd debts? For two reasons.

First because the payment system - the simple means of transferring money from one account to another and on which every transaction relies - is monopolised by the very same bankers who were making the bets. Imagine having gifted your arteries and veins to a gambler. The moment he loses big at the casino, he can blackmail you for anything you have simply by threatening to cut off your circulation.

Karolina

With every day that passes, some cloud-based corporation, whose owners you will never care to know, know, owns another aspect of your identity.

Every time we go online to enjoy the services of these algorithms, we have no option but to cut a Faustian deal with their owners. To use the personalised services their algorithms provide, we must submit to a business model based on the harvesting of our data, the tracking of our activity, the invisible curating of our content. Once we have submitted to this, the algorithm goes into the business of selling things to us while selling our attention to others.

Techno-Feudalism quotes

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