alyaza birze ΘΔ

last week's reading was Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis; this book is interesting primarily because it is Varoufakis' attempt to put to paper a unified theory of the economic system he thinks is currently replacing (or perhaps has already replaced) capitalism. this is the much-talked-about "technofeudalism," through which (to simplify) cloud capital¹ is used to create cloud proles ("waged workers driven to their physical limits by cloud-based algorithms") and cloud serfs ("persons unattached to any corporation (i.e. non-workers) [who] choose to labour long and often hard, for free, to reproduce cloud capital’s stock, e.g. with posts, videos, photos, reviews and lots of clicking that makes digital platforms more attractive to others.") who are forced to partake in the cloud fiefs that enrichen cloudalists.

now, i will say i am in agreement with Varoufakis and his description of a change in the economic system; technofeudalism is obviously real, manifested most prominently in the large-scale transition to a digital rentier economy, and it is innately linked to things like enshittification. i diverge from Varoufakis here though. i think he does not make an especially compelling case in attempting to distinguish technofeudalism as a wholly distinct economic system that has eaten capitalism from the inside-out. when, for example, he describes the form of Amazon at length—

Imagine the following scene straight out of the science-fiction storybook. You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first, everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out that all the shops, indeed every building, belong to a chap called Jeff. He may not own the factories that produce the stuff sold in his shops but he owns an algorithm that takes a cut for each sale and he gets to decide what can be sold and what cannot.

If that were all, the scene would evoke an old Western in which a lonesome cowboy rides into town to discover that a podgy strongman owns the saloon bar, the grocery store, the post office, the railway, the bank and, naturally, the sheriff. Except that isn’t all. Jeff owns more than the shops and the public buildings. He also owns the dirt you walk on, the bench you sit on, even the air you breathe. In fact, in this weird town everything you see (and don’t see) is regulated by Jeff’s algorithm: you and I may be walking next to each other, our eyes trained in the same direction, but the view provided to us by the algorithm is entirely bespoke, carefully curated according to Jeff’s priorities. Everyone navigating their way around amazon.com – except Jeff – is wandering in algorithmically constructed isolation.

This is no market town. It is not even some form of hyper-capitalist digital market. Even the ugliest of markets are meeting places where people can interact and exchange information reasonably freely. In fact, it’s even worse than a totally monopolised market – there, at least, the buyers can talk to each other, form associations, perhaps organise a consumer boycott to force the monopolist to reduce a price or to improve a quality. Not so in Jeff’s realm, where everything and everyone is intermediated not by the disinterested invisible hand of the market but by an algorithm that works for Jeff’s bottom line and dances exclusively to his tune.

—i personally find it hard to believe that what is described is a new economic system rather than the logical, morphological conclusion of an omnipresent capitalist monopoly/oligopoly. in other words, i think that technofeudalism is primarily describing an inevitable outcome of the hyper-consolidated capitalist economy that we currently live under, particularly as separation between our digital and physical existence blurs.

probably the easiest way to illustrate my contention is to ask yourself one question, which is: doesn't it just obviously make sense for a monopoly (or oligopoly) under capitalism to establish a rentier relationship with its consumers as the next incremental step in maximizing profits? the very nature of a monopoly (or oligopoly) is that there is no real freedom of choice; either you consume a commodity or product on the terms of the monopoly providing it or you do without it—effectively the ideal leverage needed to create a rentier relationship where one did not previously exist. to say that the modern economy is rife with leverage of this sort over consumers is also putting it lightly: avoiding the rentier monopolies and oligopolies is not a particularly serious option when they operate most of the internet's digital scaffolding, facilitate most of the internet's traffic, and mediate most of the internet's commerce. (even Varoufakis recognizes consumer withdrawal as an untenable option in most cases.)

this behavior does not seem new

my contention might prompt a question like why this did not occur previously—or at least did not occur unambiguously—in the prior history of capitalism. i cannot claim absolute knowledge on this subject, but the capability to do this seems like it would be a function of globalization and corporate consolidation more than anything. i suspect that pre-Information Age capitalists were prevented from such things because they generally lacked the kind of infrastructural omnipresence major corporations have today; they also had, in many cases, stronger regulatory and political headwinds to contend with; and in some cases they also simply had too many serious competitors to realistically implement the kinds of at-scale rentier economies which now permeate our daily lives.

it is also true, though, that in some pre-Information Age cases capitalists did still have one or more of these dynamics working in their favor—and they often demonstrated an orientation toward rentier relationships as such (just on a smaller scale versus today). company towns and company stores—although not exact matches to what is taking place here—were one such reasonably widespread example; these institutions, which persisted until the proliferation of the automobile and the decline of industrial paternalism, often gave corporations extremely direct and extractivist power over the lives and labor of their employees. at the larger scale, AT&T's long-held Bell System vertical monopoly also supports the belief that a rentier relationship is the next logical step for any sufficiently entrenched monopoly (or oligopoly). beyond the structure of the Bell System (which obliged its operating companies to pay a "license contract" of up to 2.5% of their gross annual revenues to AT&T, plus cash dividends, in exchange for AT&T's services), AT&T was alleged by the Antitrust Subcommittee of the House to have

forced competitors “engaged in the rendition of telephone service to acquire AT&T patent license under threat of (...) patent infringement suits,” or refused “to issue patent licenses except on condition” to be able to control the telephone manufacturer or by “refusing to authorize the manufacture (...) of telephones (...) under patents controlled by (...) the Bell System” or by “refusing to make available to the telegraphy industry the basic patents on the vacuum tube” that are essential for telegraphy to compete with telephone or by refusing to purchase equipment “under patents which are not controlled by Western or AT&T, which are known to be superior”

this was fairly straightforward attempt to make a rentier relationship out of AT&T business partners and consumers, if you ask me. (the behavior was also, as an aside, instrumental in justifying the 1956 consent decree that limited AT&T's monopoly to a maximum of 85% of the US telephone network, obliged it to divest its holdings in other countries, and made all of its patents royalty-free.)

where i think Varoufakis gets his wires crossed

if i had to guess what part of Varoufakis' analysis steers him toward a conclusion i don't agree with, it would be in making the following assertion:

[...]a commodity is a thing or service produced to be sold for profit. Search results are not produced to be sold. Alexa and Siri do not answer our questions for a fee. Like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, their purpose is entirely different: to capture and modify our attention.

Varoufakis uses this assertion to advance the conclusion that "[...]this power over our attention that allows them to collect cloud rent from the vassal capitalists who are in the old-fashioned business of selling their commodities. Ultimately, the cloudalist’s investment is aimed not at competing within a capitalist market but in getting us to exit capitalist markets altogether."

but i think this is—in several ways—a rather obvious misread. it is, for one, actually quite debatable whether search results—and data more generally—"are not produced to be sold;" but even if they aren't intended to, there is still exceptional market incentive to do so once that data has been collected, making any distinction an academic one. in the words of Richard Seymour, data is "one of the most profitable raw materials yet discovered [...] We write to the machine, it collects and aggregates our desires and fantasies, segments them by market and demographic and sells them back to us as a commodity experience." that data has such undeniable value gives meaning to that oft-repeated axiom, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." that data becomes profit when commodified is also, arguably, the very thing which gives rise to the regime of surveillance capitalism we increasingly live under.

there are also no shortage of other commodities to be considered: attention, as even Varoufakis notes in another section of the book, is also a commodity (albeit an abstract one) in a capitalist economy; it has, needless to say, become a dominant dynamic in the digitally-mediated attention economy. algorithms also commodify our everyday lives, our self-image, our person. virtually anything and everything in the digital space is at risk, at any point, of being turned into a commodity—because the system we live in, although increasingly unrecognizable from traditional Marxist descriptions of the economy, is still an essentially capitalist system defined by production for profit.

i suppose you could say my belief here, then, is one described by Murray Bookchin. in Social Ecology and Communalism (2006), he wrote that—

Capitalism is unquestionably the most dynamic society ever to appear in history. By definition, to be sure, it always remains a system of commodity exchange in which objects that are made for sale and profit pervade and mediate most human relations. Yet capitalism is also a highly mutable system, continually advancing the brutal maxim that whatever enterprise does not grow at the expense of its rivals must die. Hence “growth” and perpetual change become the very laws of life of capitalist existence. This means that capitalism never remains permanently in only one form; it must always transform the institutions that arise from its basic social relations.

—and this is what i think Varoufakis has failed to take into account in some way. the capitalist system was always bound to change with the Information Age, because the Information Age begat a wholly new set of social relations and mediums to mediate them; likewise, the financial system has never been a stable one, always mutating into new things that trailblaze new assets for speculation and profit. neither change means that we have left capitalism, though, it just means that capitalism has taken a new form—really, it's no more than the basic interaction of base and superstructure.

we are still governed by capitalists who want wealth, and their corporations which exist to make objects for sale and profit. companies like Uber still angle, fundamentally, to give a return on investment. as argued (rather convincingly, in my view) by Palo Alto author Malcolm Harris, there is a surprisingly direct throughline between the archconservative, anti-New Deal economic ideology of Herbert Hoover and the modern sentiments of Silicon Valley capitalists and their technology today. says Harris at one point, "Even Silicon Valley’s liberals worship [Friedrich] Hayek"—Hayek being one of the cadre of capitalist thinkers promoted by the Hooverites in their war against liberalism and the social safety net. (Milton Friedman is another.) technofeudalism seems, to me, a noteworthy new development but fundamentally more of the same capitalist ideology.

notes

¹ defined by Varoufakis as

[...]the agglomeration of networked machinery, software, AI-driven algorithms and communications’ hardware criss-crossing the whole planet and performing a wide variety of tasks such as inciting billons of non-waged people (cloud serfs) to work for free (and often unconsciously) at replenishing cloud capital’s own stock; or helping us switch off the lights while recommending to us books, films and holidays, etc., so impressively in tune with our interests that we become predisposed to other goods sold on cloud fiefs or platforms (e.g. Amazon.com), which are running on exactly the same digital network that helps us switch off the lights while recommending to us books, films and holidays, etc.; or utilising AI and Big Data to command workers’ labour (cloud proles) on the factory floor while driving the energy networks, the robots, the trucks, the automated production lines and the 3D printers that bypass conventional manufacturing

or: an unintentional Cohost requiem

The process of enclosure, of carrying out our activities within these private [corporate tech] platforms, changes us, including how we relate to one another and the underlying purpose of those relations. [...] Once physically and legally enclosed, the soil began to be treated as a machine, whose role was to be as productive as possible. So, too, with our online activities, where our relationships and conversations are our modern-day yields, designed to harvest ever more data. As with corn and soy grown in great monocrops, quality and individuality are sacrificed in favor of standardization and homogenization, even when homogenization takes the form of individuals all competing to stand out as quirky and utterly unique.
—Doppelganger, chapter 2

i'm in the middle of reading Naomi Klein's book Doppelganger, and in the second chapter of the book she makes a point about corporate social media (and corporate technology more generally) and how it has enclosed the internet. far from the libertine, do-what-you-want spirit that once characterized the internet—or even the promise of freedom of expression and mass social connection that was effectively the selling point of early social media—we now live in an almost totally enclosed, enshittified internet experience. our social relations online are almost fully privatized and monetized by megacorporations, and the resultant data we inevitably give these corporations is trivially bought, sold, and analyzed by anybody who wants to do that. it is quite bad, and leads to many subsequent bad consequences.

one consequence is, as Klein observes, a mass homogenization—something that likely has an already existing name but which i personally call the caricature problem. i'd like to take some time to sketch this problem out, how Cohost avoided this problem and why it was so enjoyable, and what we'll be losing now that it's gone.

the caricature problem

in short, the caricature problem is this: the internet is so enclosed and so algorithmically captured that it punishes expressing the totalities and complexities of ourselves. to stand out we must exaggerate or flatten ourselves—become caricatures of who we are—into digestible, predictable personalities for consumption. we must in effect become marketable brands. as Klein notes, this is not incongruent with individual quirkiness or uniqueness: actually, those qualities frequently become a manifestation of this problem. even when we would prefer not to, we frequently become pigeonholed into acting out the qualities which other people perceive as defining us. gimmick or single-issue accounts "breaking character" and receiving backlash can be thought of as an example of this—but virtually all of us are subject to this pressure at some point or another, and in one way or another. often times we (preemptively) reduce ourselves like this without even realizing it.

how does this problem come about?

as described, this probably feels like an inevitability. of course social media run by Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and a cadre of other cretins with psychotic technolibertarian beliefs would render us all caricatures in this way. these are people with a very specific, very inhuman idea of what social relations should look like. but the problem is created by something more fundamental: that we mediate nearly all of our online social relations through private actors at all. the enclosure of the internet provides corporations with such a wealth of data that it is trivial for them—both individually and at scale—to manipulate every aspect of how people interact and in what ways they do so. and of course they have every market incentive to do so (to say nothing of other—frequently political—incentives).

the most prominent and omnipresent manifestation of this is algorithms, without question: how you experience social media today is overwhelmingly determined by mechanical processes that are hidden or obfuscated from you as much as possible. a good social media algorithm is invisible, and yet in its essence reflects the amount of data you (and everyone else) put into it. needless to say, we put an unfathomable amount of data into these private actors—the things we post, who we talk to, the things we like and interact with, and so on—and all but hand them the capacity to "objectify and quantify social life in numerical form," as Richard Seymour puts it in The Twittering Machine. but it should be no surprise that to "quantify social life" in this way produces perverse incentives—rounded personalities are punished, caricatures are rewarded; substantive exchanges with complexities are buried, simple narratives encouraged; and personalities become hostages to their algorithmically-served-up audiences.

this is bad, but perhaps it would be easier to stomach if the ability to "quantify social life" was not simultaneously being sold back to users in the form of metrics, which are actually even more omnipresent. social media is simply awash in numbers: likes, dislikes, reshares, comments, quoted posts, views, follower counts, post numbers, and a frankly endless number of other meaningless units. and this is to say nothing of dashboards that track profile statistics, link clickthroughs, and other business-oriented number values that have little meaning but are usually accessible to literally anyone.¹ it is simply trivial to become a caricature because you are given the ability—in painstaking detail—to know exactly what people want from you, exactly what they don't, and what might make people care or be more social with you the next time you post. this is obviously a recipe for disaster. unless you're explicitly looking for it, who sincerely wants to be on the wrong side of an issue, or the bad end of a ratio, or become the main character of the day and have thousands of people gawking at you for sport? and conversely who doesn't like being reassured they're correct, or having 10,000 people listen to what they say (even if it means compromising on their personality)?

many other factors besides algorithms and metrics inform all of this, of course, but they alone demonstrate the point sufficiently in my view. (they also have unique relevance to Cohost and why the website largely avoided these issues.)

Cohost and its lack of the caricature problem

now, i cannot give you any sense of what should be done about this at the systemic level besides "fundamentally overthrow the existing political, social, and economic system we live in, since replication of this issue is good for business"—and obviously that's a bit of a non-answer. but i do think there are alternatives to this that can exist even within a capitalist framework. Cohost demonstrates this quite well.

ask virtually any Cohost user and they will tell you that Cohost was an incredibly freeing experience for them—a space where they felt the ability to be themselves instead of a living commodity. frequently, users of the site talk about being "deprogrammed" and "detoxed" from the corrosive influence of Twitter and Mastodon metrics, which had previously governed how and what they posted about; others talk about how Cohost finally allowed their art to coexist alongside their other interests. Nicky Flowers writes of the site that "i didn't have to be Nicky Flowers™️, Internet Person Trying To Appear Professional Enough To Hire. no number-go-up, no clout. i was simply nicky." and still another common feeling is that Cohost had a sort of egalitarianism among posters where, because you could only infer influence, even "big accounts" were approachable and able to be socialized with on equal terms.

all of these experiences—and others like them—were clearly and in large part facilitated by Cohost's explicit design choices. from the beginning Cohost committed to no algorithms (instead opting for a chronological timeline and a Tumblr-style tagging system) and a near total absence of metrics (the only numbers was a private-facing notification number, which could be turned off). these were highly-touted selling points for the website, they were substantial talking points in word-of-mouth, and they were extremely well-liked choices by people who used the website actively.² even among skeptics the initial shock and discomfort from the metric choice in particular consistently tended to wear off with time. many of the theoretical problems one might conjure from their absence also simply did not happen in practice.³ "lack of engagement" for example was a reason many artists on Twitter were skeptical of the site's lack of metrics. far from this dampening visible enthusiasm for creative projects though, Cohost had a bustling art scene—especially among writers and musicians, whose mediums of choice mesh poorly with contemporary social media. although anecdotal, it also seems well established that Cohost users were quite generous and had an unusually high click-through rate for artist projects.

i will refrain from drawing strong, sweeping conclusions here due to self-selection bias, but i would argue that Cohost demonstrates quite compellingly that metrics—and algorithms—are completely unnecessary components of a full social media experience. we do not have to be turned into caricatures. it is also entirely possible—even with a small team—to build a functional, modern, well-liked social media platform without either of these. this of course begs the question of why companies don't do this more.

what we will lose with Cohost

i don't need to tell you that the answer is capital. it always is. whether they acknowledge it or not, websites make an explicit, ideological choice to encourage this phenomenon. as Richard Seymour says, data is "one of the most profitable raw materials yet discovered," and yet it is simultaneously easy to induce users to make more of it. you can see a sort of vicious cycle: data is produced by engagement so you juice engagement with algorithms that reflect user inputs. you provide metrics that quantify a user's social life back to them so they know what algorithms and people following them want. those users produce more data. rinse and repeat, the users are—in the most dehumanizing sense possible—the product. Cohost's model eschewed this, so it's an obvious nonstarter for most people in the social media business today. for most social media companies an explicit part of the path to profitability includes selling out their users (usually in multiple ways!) to venture capital firms.

but this illustrates what we will lose without Cohost: an actually existing example of a better world that is possible; a sort of socialism-in-one-website if you want to be tongue-in-cheek about it. it's not as if Cohost ever threatened the existing capitalist hegemony in social media or anything, but you might still analogize its loss to, say, Cuba, or Rojava, or the Zapatistas suddenly collapsing tomorrow. Cohost was—more or less—a genuinely socialist, cooperatively-owned social media company, a beacon of light in an appalling industry. it really sucks to see a radical experiment like this fail, and it's not obvious that another experiment like it will occur given what needed to align to make Cohost happen in the first place. the market is also a harsh mistress: that Cohost lived its values; demonstrated social media might be able to exist without making users a product to be bought and sold; and allowed its users to be real, fully fledged people means devastatingly little. as far as most people are concerned what Cohost stood for is not a viable product because it failed, and the discussion ends there.

but i don't want to say everything is completely dour, even though the probability of another Cohost-like website is obviously low. strictly speaking many Fediverse communities are also examples of this model, and so someone will continue to keep the lights on (just at a much, much smaller scale) where markets almost assuredly won't. in my view the model is also clearly sound, even at Cohost's scale, with better planning and better budgeting. if someone ever scrounges up the money and coordination to make it real, i don't see anything actually stopping a Cohost-like website in principle. maybe a "successful Cohost" in the future will succeed because it learns from its predecessor—becoming the 1917 to Cohost's 1905. i don't know.

if nothing else, though, i hope that the principles of Cohost (there is value in being in the same place as everyone; metrics are ruining our lives; human curation is good and social media algorithms have been a disaster; etc.) continue to inform the immediate future of radical social media. i would like to look back upon this as a "dress rehearsal" to a tech future that does not completely suck ass

footnotes

¹ at one point—and perhaps still, although i have not checked—Twitter provided every user with a dashboard of all of their posts, the amount of interactions they received, the best performing tweet over a given timeframe, and dozens of other measures from which it would be trivial to determine what you should and should not post.

² by far the most consistent critics of either of these choices were users who did not even register for the site, at least in my experience.

³ a lengthy aside i'd just like to put on record somewhere: to the extent that there were actual points of friction introduced by these design choices, these tended to be more inconveniences than legitimate issues with continued usage of Cohost. should tagging or following cool people that interact with your posts have been such a load-bearing aspect of discovery on Cohost? perhaps not, but i would not describe this as an actual issue—this feels too weighty for what was more an inconvenience than anything. many of the issues were closer to future-proofing than anything else. deprioritizing metrics can, for example, be a legitimate impediment to identifying where abuse is actually coming from. on Cohost this could have eventually become a serious issue since it was possible to sort of "quote retweet" a post, and none of these notified the person whose post was being "quote retweeted". but to my knowledge this was never a substantial vector for harassment; certainly Cohost was never lacking in harassment or harassers who could have done this. in any case, i think i would rather grapple with the complexity of squaring that circle than put up with Twitter metrics because it's slightly easier to trace who is imploring their 100,000 followers to harass you.