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[Maximum™]

Capitalism is vile and if you aren't one of the handful of winners it is indeed dumb to support it over a much fairer and equitable system.

Anarchocapitalists are just open about being disgusting pieces of shit who want to be able to enslave and abuse others freely.

They are much like Libertarians at basically being house cats: fiercely convinced of their own independence and utterly ignorant of the complex systems upon which they depend.

[Schmaven]

Economics is complicated (well, not being an economist, it seems so to me).  From what I've seen, the options include capitalism (never heard of the anarchy version, but it sounds metal), communism, feudalism, socialism, and, probably 1 or 2 other big ones I'm forgetting?

[Bralbaard]

Anarchocapitalists are just open about being disgusting pieces of shit who want to be able to enslave and abuse others freely.

I have to admit I first misread that as Arachnacapitalism, and was wondering what spiders had to do with capitalism. I'm sure there are options for a bad movie plot in there somewhere. 

[Egan_BW]

Economics is complicated (well, not being an economist, it seems so to me).  From what I've seen, the options include capitalism (never heard of the anarchy version, but it sounds metal), communism, feudalism, socialism, and, probably 1 or 2 other big ones I'm forgetting?

You can put everything under big labels like that, but the devil's in the details, isn't it?
And if you haven't heard of anarchocapitalism, go play Bioshock. ;p

Feudalism is probably no longer a real option, and won't be until our industrial base explodes. And I don't think that the word really describes the economic relationships of the time so much as the diplomatic ones. Socialism is kinda just a softer synonym for communism which is sometimes also applied as "capitalism, but it doesn't screw you over as overtly."

[Great Order]

As an example, socialism has state-directed socialism where the government runs everything and (in theory) the proceeds go to people equitably, and on the other end of the scale market socialism where the principles of the free market are maintained, but rather than corporations everything's run as worker's cooperatives.

[Maximum™]

Arachnacapitalism probably involves the World Wide Web.

Technofeudalism is absolutely a thing, it's what all the big corporate powers are trying to become, because capitalists hate capitalism, they all seek a way to escape from it and move into a position as a rentier. Look at all the companies trying to insert themselves as middlemen like Google and Facebook taking over half of every ad dollar they "help" someone else make.

Look at the explosion of "uber for X" bullshit, Uber doesn't want to DO anything, they want to own the mechanism people use to do something, so they can charge rent for it. Companies buying up real estate don't want to do anything with it, they just want to own it and rent it to people who need space to do stuff.

Free market just means free from rent, btw, not free from regulation. The only ones more guillotineworthy than the CEOs of companies jacking the price of lifesaving medicine are the people buying hospitals to rent them out.

[scriver]

Technofeudalism is absolutely a thing

Nah, it's just what some know-nothings calls capitalism because "durr dark age medieval bad" and has nothing to do with feudalism.

[Egan_BW]

Feudalism is a response to weak state power, and I don't think that corporations would really survive that, to be honest. Their power relies on the fact that directly opposing them is illegal, don't they?

[zhijinghaofromchina]

Isn’t there anyone talking about the meeting between the president Biden and the Chairman Xi? It seems that the Chinese government and the American government are trying to cure their relations.
By the words spread by my roommate, Taiwan will come back to China the next year for the Chinese government and the American government have reached some secretive agreements, really, that’s quite exciting!

[delphonso]

The important thing from the Xi-Biden meeting was a reduction of carbon output which was really just a non-commital handshake. No formal agreements, it's basically a failure.

By the words spread by my roommate, Taiwan will come back to China the next year for the Chinese government and the American government have reached some secretive agreements, really, that’s quite exciting!

I've heard this every year that I've lived in China. Pretty unlikely it will happen under Xi. He's already proven himself and wouldn't improve his legacy with such a wager, it would only be a risk.

[Starver]

[edit: scratch that little joking reply... Not really worth the nudge-nudge moment...]

[Maximum™]

Technofeudalism is absolutely a thing

Nah, it's just what some know-nothings calls capitalism because "durr dark age medieval bad" and has nothing to do with feudalism.

>.> I am hardly a know nothing, and I'd call what late-stage capitalism is morphing into that. What was feudalism but an economic system where a handful of people owned everything and rented it to everyone else until people finally got sick of it and murdered them (justly!) which opened up room for alternatives?

What would you call "the cloud" and efforts to move everything into bullshit options like that except an attempt to set up a point where one can extract rent freely?

Doctorow is hardly a know nothing either: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/

Similarly, not relevant, but it's interesting as I've just been reading this from a great source about actual medieval people: https://going-medieval.com/2019/08/02/i-assure-you-medieval-people-bathed/

Egan, regulatory capture is absolutely a sign of weak state power and massively beneficial to corporate power: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/

Corporations getting laws passed like DMCA 1201 and other such DRM bullshit can only happen when government is weak enough for them to manipulate it, stronger government efforts tend to do things like rein in corporate profits, dynastic wealth, and overall benefit the rest of us like the US government did until Reagan and his cuntrags started dismantling it and preventing it from functioning effectively.

[scriver]

I'd call it capitalism. There is no difference between this and for example the company towns of old. These are consequences of liberalist politics and capitalist economics.

That Doctorow fella only writes about what Yanis says and I've read things by Yanis before – and all they come down to is weasly capitalist "no true capitalism" denial and "durr hurr dark age bad". He's using the term feudalism not because it has anything to do with actual feudalism but because it's has bad vibes of tyranny an primitivity. But the truth is that the tyranny of capitalism is emphatically worse than the tyranny of feudalism was; One of the first legal trends in Europe after the end of feudalism and the beginning of the reign of liberalism was the mass repeal of laws and customs from feudal age or older tribal customs which protected the common man and provided a meagre "social safety net" in order to make people destitute and force them to work under horrible conditions for unliveable wages.

Capitalism isn't morphing into anything. It's just capitalism being capitalism.

>.> I am hardly a know nothing, and I'd call what late-stage capitalism is morphing into that. What was feudalism but an economic system where a handful of people owned everything and rented it to everyone else until people finally got sick of it and murdered them (justly!) which opened up room for alternatives?

You claim you're not a know-nothing, but this is your idea of what feudalism was and you proudly showcase how you just recently – at what, age 40+? – learned that medieval people didn't like being filthy. You are a walking example of the "how loudly they speak to how little they know" correlation.

[Maximum™]

Doctorow doesn't just write about what Yanis writes, he's been going over the topic and various others for... basically since the internet and web were things.

I shared the going medieval site because I've been devouring everything she writes and think others might enjoy it, she's great.

Technofeudalism is simply noting the trend of capitalists to move from wanting to have to make stuff to wanting to own stuff others need to make stuff.

Rentiers were always terrible, associations with misguided impressions of "dark ages" which actually just meant periods lacking as many written records from a given area don't change that.

Dismantling the commons and social safety nets was a key aspect of capitalism, the distinction between feudalism and technofeudalism is that I in no way expect modern capitalists to restore said commons and social protections, they ONLY want to own things and collect rent.

[Loud Whispers]

If you're all interested, there's a sad anecdote of how two capitalists funded democracy on the Channel Islands to overthrow the last feudal government in Europe

Despite officially being a feudal government, the citizens of the channel islands held a great deal of power and independence even from the British government. Despite being "tenants" they were effectively just land-owning farmers as they held the land in perpetuity and could even sell it as freehold land. Then the Barclay brothers fought against seigneurial feudalism through non-stop legal actions, abolishing the treizième tax (under which any sale of property incurred a one thirteenth tax payable to the signeur), replacing it with a property transfer tax, which of course conveniently had loopholes the Barclay brothers used to avoid paying any property taxes. The channel islanders had two parliaments, the chief pleas, which an assembly of tenants sat in. Naturally the Barclay brothers once again fought a legal case against the constitution of each constituent island and their chief pleas, to revise the constitution so that all the tenants would be replaced by elected councillors - councillors paid for by the Barclay brothers. The Barclay brothers ended up purchasing a quarter of the arable land, four of its six hotels, half of its pubs (so one), an entire half of their main market street and multiple houses & estates, building up a strangehold on the island's economy so they could finally achieve their great dream.

To build a golf course on the channel islands.