On Wednesday came news that radical economist Yanis Varoufakis, scourge of establishment economics, is touring Australia in March as a guest of the Australia Institute.
The title of his new book made us sit up and take notice. It’s called Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. The marketing blurb says, “Varoufakis shows how the owners of big tech became the world’s feudal overlords – replacing capitalism with a fundamentally new system that enslaves our minds, defies democracy and rewrites the rules of global power.”
Whatever side of the political fence you sit on, you’d probably agree that we’ve increasingly ceded control of our lives and big chunks of our economies to the Godzillas of tech.
This Conversation piece is not a bad intro into Varoufakis’ thinking:
Markets have been “replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not markets”. The moment you enter amazon.com “you exit capitalism” and enter something that resembles a “feudal fief”: a digital world belonging to one man and his algorithm, which determines what products you will see and what products you won’t see.
If you are a seller, the platform will determine how you can sell and which customers you can approach. The terms in which you interact, share information and trade are dictated by an “algo” that “works for [Jeff Bezos’] bottom line”.
But to be honest, you’d also have to ask when was it ever not thus?
There’s a school of thought that says we haven’t had free markets in, oh… forever. The dominant system seems to be oligarchies at best, monopolies at worst. And until last week, feudalism and colonialism. Maybe what’s disturbing so many people now is that it’s not traditional lords and ladies who are running our lives now, but some bloke from central casting who managed to cook up a tech empire from his garage.
Worrying about a platform not being free and fair is a distraction. Markets depend on imbalances in demand and supply and the friction that comes from that to make profits. A lack of transparency helps. It lets the person or group with better thinking, knowledge, or optimistic expectations “get ahead”.
Which is why the notion of insider trading is a bit weird. It’s all insider trading, and it varies only by degree.
All this helps to keep in perspective that tech has two sides and that it’s not that much different to what’s gone before. It’s a tool, and how we use it is up to us.
If Jeff Bezos is creaming too many profits and avoiding tax, then why don’t we stop him and make him pay his dues? If Facebook is infringing on privacy, then there is nothing to stop a law being passed to stop it. China has stopped dead pretty much all tech it doesn’t like – which is to say, all it doesn’t control.
Is democracy so weak we allow the FAAMGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft instead of Netflicks, etc) and Googles to do what they want?
What’s that got to do with sustainability – economic, environmental or social?
As we dig deeper into the world of sustainability and climate reporting for our masterclass series that we’ve just launched, it’s clear that this industry needs to increasingly grapple with these massive issues.
In a meeting on Thursday at the caf downstairs from our UTS based office we tossed around some initial concepts for a forthcoming session on these topics with Sheridan Ware, former chief information and technology officer at Charter Hall and now board director at the Sustainable Digitalisation Project (SDP) and Liam Murray of Build-Apps, who’s already co-hosted a masterclass with us last year.
In her new role, Ware is keen to tackle these big issues. Tech will be increasingly central to the reporting mandates faced by the property industry, its financiers, and other stakeholders.
It will also be central to the challenges ahead on the climate. Artificial intelligence is scary, but it’s also exciting. It will probably be the one thing that can pick up on where we humans have failed miserably – with all the minutiae of mistakes that have ended up as one giant mess. Especially given we seem incapable of reacting logically to data and science and fall back repeatedly on emotion and politics – which is where, again, that topic of who controls the trajectory becomes central.
Sadly, when it comes to tech, we are still at the sandpit stage, wasting squillions of dollars on bad calls and quickly redundant systems.
Were says data is key, not systems. And that impact on people is critical to meaningful results that don’t end just replicating what we had before.
It’s what the SDP tries to nail.
Let’s make sure we don’t end up in a parody of our own making – like the planet in an episode of Dr Who that is thriving environmentally and has a brilliant, stable economy (where demand and supply are perfectly balanced) but no humans. Where are the humans? “Well,” say the machines, “We realised they were actually surplus to requirements, except for one thing: they make brilliant compost.”
UPDATED 9 February 2024: this article was posted in full after a technical error failed to do so initially.