Varoufakis on "crypto"

January 28, 2022 11:06 PM

Technofeudalism is a new system in which the techno-lords are extracting a new power to make the rest of us do things on their behalf.
posted by clew (28 comments total)

I didn't know he'd written a novel too. With tax strategies!
posted by clew at 11:07 PM on January 28, 2022

Yanis is a straight-up global treasure.
posted by flabdablet at 1:06 AM on January 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

The problem with Bitcoin is not just its fixed supply. It is the presumption that the rate of change of the money supply can be predicted and foreshadowed within any algorithm. That the money supply can be de-politicised. So, it is not a question of how sophisticated and complex the algorithm is. It is, rather, that a purely political, unknowable, process can never, ever, be captured by an algorithm. It cannot and, therefore, it should not.

Can we please have Varoufakis put in charge of, like, everything, like, yesterday?

It would be so, so nice to have global leadership capable of, you know, thought.
posted by flabdablet at 1:19 AM on January 29, 2022 [11 favorites]

Command capital, in contrast, comprises produced means of organising the means of industrial production.

So, literally, Meta
posted by polymodus at 3:20 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

Technofeudalism is a new system in which the techno-lords are extracting a new power to make the rest of us do things on their behalf. This new power comes from investing in a new form of capital (command capital) that allows them to amass a new type of value (command value) which, in turn, grants them the opportunity to extract surplus value from (i) vassal-capitalists, (ii) the precariat, and (iii) everyone using their platforms to produce on their behalf, unconsciously, even more command capital.

This is pretty much exactly the way I've always understood what the advertising industry does, an understanding that underpins my unbounded and visceral loathing for that industry.

Beyond even the manufacture of consent, advertising is about the industrial-scale manufacture of demand and the cooption of the very people in whom that demand is manufactured to help manufacture more of it. Displaying an advertisement in e.g. the form of a Nike logo on an otherwise unremarkable hoodie or drink bottle makes it more desirable and commands a higher price than would otherwise be achievable. People don't get paid to advertise Nike, they pay to advertise Nike. If that doesn't count as command capital I don't know what could.
posted by flabdablet at 4:24 AM on January 29, 2022 [23 favorites]

Yanis is a straight-up global treasure.

Ditto Evgeny Morozov.
posted by doctornemo at 5:14 AM on January 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Holy shit, that guy is smart.

Also, "the apotheosis of misanthropy" is my porn name.
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 5:37 AM on January 29, 2022 [10 favorites]

I didn't know he'd written a novel too. With tax strategies!

There are also a couple-few econ mystery books by Ken Elzinga and someone else. Back in the day, Elzinga assigned* The Fatal Equilibrium, which as I recall was better than you'd expect but still sort of an extended terrible unfunny dad joke. I suppose it is the best whodunit I've ever read that stops to go into why price should equal marginal cost.

*Not as a douchebag "buy my text" thing; he at least asserted that he donated anything he got from the book to charity.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:41 AM on January 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm a YV fan - have been since the late 90's and it's been interesting to see how his thought has evolved - but this whole interview has a low Kolmogorov complexity:

Interviewer: What do you think about X-tech?
YV: We live in a system of oppression and technology is fundamentally incapable of saving us.

It's kinda cute that he thinks that just because everyone has an e-cash account with the central bank there's any chance of helicopter money, tho.
posted by memetoclast at 6:53 AM on January 29, 2022

It's kinda cute that he thinks that just because everyone has an e-cash account with the central bank there's any chance of helicopter money, tho.

I didn't take that section to mean he thought the helicopter money would come, but that the fear of that possibility was driving Wall Street's reactions. In theory, the next massive stimulus could skip the banks if we all had official US Treasury digital wallets, and a way to use that wallet for commerce without first depositing something in a bank account.

That was a fascinating article. Thanks for posting.
posted by COD at 7:15 AM on January 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Highly recommend David Golumbia's analysis of crypto: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-politics-of-bitcoin

All too often crypto criticism is limited to convenience, legal and environmental factors; good to see political analysis of the crypto philosophy come into the mainstream.

What these advocates effectively want is a world without trust, without community or governance; a series of encrypted transactions to replace every social interface. Like so many snake oil disruptors and technophiles, they exploit (often warrented) distrust of centralized authority and institutions to push for the annihilation of society itself.
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 7:17 AM on January 29, 2022 [17 favorites]

It's kinda cute that he thinks that just because everyone has an e-cash account with the central bank there's any chance of helicopter money, tho

He's pretty explicit about not thinking that. Perhaps you need to read more carefully.

Helicopter money would become a realistic option for an economy in need of a bit of quantitative easing only after the displacement of the existing oligarchy by an actual democracy, because only then could a central bank that works for the benefit of all, rather than that of the oligarchy, come into being.

At that point and not before, digital wallets might become a convenient mechanism for the distribution of helicopter money. They're a considerable administrative convenience, no more. Certainly not a revolutionary technology in their own right.
posted by flabdablet at 8:11 AM on January 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

There is a lot going on in this interview.

The bit on China fascinated me. Is Xi really pushing digital wallets to break the power of that nation's financial sector?
posted by doctornemo at 9:36 AM on January 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Break or consolidate or coopt remains to be seen. Probably will have learned a thing or two from watching Modi fail at it.
posted by flabdablet at 10:08 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

the annihilation of society itself.

Or as Ayn Rand phrased it, “setting Man free from Man”
posted by acb at 10:34 AM on January 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Yeah I'm Asian American so the China comment was interesting how Varoufakis even mentioned the child tutoring controversy 8n relation to everything else. He takes the side that it's a good thing, but obviously it's also a very draconian way to attempt to solve the problem of elitism.
posted by polymodus at 11:32 AM on January 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

His tossed-off characterization of capitalism as a system which underemploys its people and underinvests in common goods is mind-blowing for me.

Of course capital is interested in underemploying and underinvesting in common goods, so as to maximize the fear and minimize the capacity for effective organization for the masses. But, just off the top of my head, the ways that capital underemploys everyone is multifaceted. It's not just about the standard trope of keeping US workers capped at 31.5 hours a week so they aren't eligible for any corporate benefits. It's about giving middle managers in a single firm overlapping duties so that their labor is duplicated, conflicting, and ultimately wasted. It's about creating sinecures for the idle scions of industry, so that those fortunate sons are compensated for never doing a day's work in their adult lives. It's about product and market segmentation, so the same generic product can be packaged in sack, spandex or silk and priced accordingly to deny a competitor any inroads and to stultify any ambition by anyone to work to improve said product.

Capital is poison.
posted by infinitewindow at 1:17 PM on January 29, 2022 [9 favorites]

the concept of asian workers producing value in blockchain-based games is familiar to me from Neal Stephenson's novel ReamDe.
posted by OHenryPacey at 1:26 PM on January 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Liberate the servers from the cold, weak hand of Bezos.
posted by eustatic at 5:45 PM on January 29, 2022

The only thing that will work is: To take over parliaments so as to legislate a corporate law that ends tradeable shares, and introduces the one-share-one-employee principle in its stead. To take over central banks and make them issue digital currencies on a distributed ledger that makes basic income possible.

Varoufakis once took over a parliament and a central bank, but when it was time to build a new ledger in defiance of the European Central Bank he hopped on his motorbike and bravely fled
posted by moorooka at 5:58 PM on January 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

To be fair, it wasn't a case of him fleeing so much as finding his position untenable due to a lack of support from his colleagues.

I'm quite sure that had Varoufakis actually been given the Party backing required to stare down the ECB, he would have done so and Greece would have been better off for it, but that's not how representative democracies work in an age of mass-marketed opinion and manufactured consent.
posted by flabdablet at 8:28 PM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

It's easy to put forth radical solutions that you will never need to own in practice. Tsipras couldn't stare down the ECB because Greece didn't have a working parallel payments system. The idea of one wasn't enough, given that the country's money supply was under the control of a hostile power. At that point, you can only ride off into the sunset in order to preserve your radical cred. The Syriza moment was a once-in-a-lifetime challenge to neoliberalism. Its failure is a lesson in how the strategy of "taking over" parliaments and central banks will fare, even under extremely favourable political circumstances.
posted by moorooka at 8:54 PM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

It's certainly a lesson that the oligarchy would love us all to learn.

There's another lesson, one having something to do with solidarity and circular firing squads as I recall, that I probably need to drag out again and brush up on.
posted by flabdablet at 8:58 PM on January 29, 2022

The lesson is that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house
posted by moorooka at 9:53 PM on January 29, 2022

Maybe not, but they might well find some use in building perfectly fine houses for everybody, of which the same cannot be said for having at the master's house with wrecking bars and fire.

It's way easier to break stuff than build it, and every revolution I'm aware of has involved endless amounts of completely avoidable suffering in order to install the new boss, same as the old boss.

So I'm an anti-conservatist, not a revolutionary, and I thoroughly approve of DiEM25. If that means I lack radical cred, I can live with that.
posted by flabdablet at 4:01 AM on January 30, 2022 [3 favorites]

I never quite understood the appeal of using inflation as a way out of a severe national debt problem. When it's proposed for a country like Greece, I check to see if public opinion polls there still show strong support for staying in the Eurozone — as they did during the depths of the financial crisis. And indeed that is still the case.

Who wants to have their income and savings worth less? Of course that's not popular. This is I think why inflation-as-a-solution is usually proposed by outsiders.

Dropping out of the Eurozone would have had a massive impact on Greece, likely far, far worse than austerity measures (which I am strongly against) did. The EU/Eurozone is a tightly integrated economic area. During the financial crisis there were daily articles and opinion pieces especially, but not exclusive to, the Anglocentric press about how the euro will likely fail. In hindsight that didn't happen at all. So what's the lesson there?
posted by UN at 1:04 PM on January 31, 2022

This notion of "command capital" is very intriguing to me but some brief googling indicates this may be a term of Varoufakis' own coinage and mainly (only?) appears in this article. I'd be interested to see this idea fleshed out a little more. For example, does it include all advertising-based stuff since advertising is meant to "direct our consumption patterns"? If so, how does this idea carry over to previous ad-based businesses like TV or newspapers? Or is there a more subtle distinction that I'm not getting? The other half of his definition seems more straightforward to me in that it applies to the enormous mass of largely uncompensated user-generated content that underpins sites like Facebook, TikTok, YouTube (owned by Google), and Twitch (owned by Amazon) as well as things like user reviews & star ratings across the board.
posted by mhum at 1:59 PM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

mhum: Agreed that command capital as expressed here is a bit confusing. It doesn't help that everybody and their mother is trying to popularize their own buzzword for the new form of (post) capitalism we may or may not be entering (a decent overview).

Presumably, the distinction between command capital and previous "attention merchants" (see Tim Wu) like newspapers is that old media were were extremely limited in terms of scope: you might post in the classifieds, but the newspaper wasn't also selling their own used cars and shipping that car to you (Amazon). The newspaper didn't also sell you your phone (Google/Apple) and decide which friends could get through to you on a given day (Facebook). Command capital has incredible new tools to not only shape consumption preferences but also shape attention, convenience, and more broadly costs associated with economic exchange -- because the "markets" are either directly under their control (Amazon marketplace) or they are monopolies.

Related: this is a pretty perceptive industry overview of different types of data business models. If one was building a theory of data and capitalism this wouldn't be a bad place to start.
posted by ropeladder at 4:20 PM on February 1, 2022