what do y’all think of this? It makes some good points and Micheal Hudson is probably not right, but I have one criticism to make. One of his arguments that the richest people are still industrial capitalists (because they started businesses that do stuff), not finance capitalists, but as Cory Doctorow points out, those companies are basically just rentiers at this point. Amazon makes most of its money hosting other businesses on their site, “Meta” makes most of its money hosting being a middleman connecting advertisers and unpaid content creators poorly. Thus, it seems at least the emperial core has increased rentierism. This doesn’t mean it’s not built on peripheral industry and that reindustrializing the west would benefit average people, but it does seem to be good news about the decline of empire. Other thoughts?
the techno feudalism thing is really annoying to me but day’s post isn’t it either. also these companies are insurers and real estate speculators and landlords themselves
Yea the term is just a rebranding of imperialism but only to tech industries. It provides nothing of value.
Just a quick correction, this isn’t written by Day. As noted in the forward, it is by JW Mason:
sure inaccurate phrasing worth clarifying, i did reference most of the stuff on there is reposts and translation in another comment
Techno feudalism is stupid, the rentier thesis is far better, Mason’s piece is interesting, but I don’t feel like it fully addresses it.