Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we discuss some things that stood out to us in the book techno feudalism, which is a 2023 release that lays out what the author believes killed capitalism.
Hello.
Welcome to the call like I see it podcast. I'm James Keys. Shotgun with me today is a man who liked the world's major central banks, spent the last decade plus focused on making money. Tunde Ogun, Lana Tunde, are you ready to break down whether it's still true that cash rules everything around us?
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Only if cream gets the money.
Yes.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: All right, all right, all right. Now, before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you subscribe and hit like doing so really helps the show out.
Now recording this on June 11, 2024. And we continue our culture series today by doing some reading between the lines in the 2023 book Techno Feudalism, what killed Capitalism? Vaianis Varoufakis, the economist, politician and author and also former finance minister in Greece. In the book viral focus lays out factors like monetary policy from major central banks and also how the Internet and the technological environment has evolved over the last 15 years, which has led to a decline in markets and capitalism as it's understood and as it was laid out and has been practiced over the last few hundred years, and the rise of a new system, which looks a lot like feudal systems, which capitalism ultimately replaced in many societies going back hundreds of years. So, Tunde, just to get started, what was your reaction kind of to the premise of this book and how it lays out these things?
[00:02:05] Speaker B: I thought it was a very good book. I first of all, got to tell the audience thank you to you, because you're the one suggesting this book. I'd never heard of it, and it really did a great job of doing exactly what you just described, which is, and it's kind of this longer arc of the last few hundred years where feudalism was a system which I know we'll define in a minute, but capitalism actually led to the replacement of that entire system over about 100, 150 year period.
And now what he's made, the author has made a case that we are, we've slid back into a version of feudalism, but we can't see it as easily because it's not necessarily physical labor and things like that that are being rented. It's more of our attention, which leads to other areas where it's felt.
And I want to say this as a joke, I appreciate you pronounced his name very smoothly, because I can't pronounce it with a name like mine. I'm very sensitive to that and the other thing I want to mention which you mentioned is this book. Not only is it a great book, which we'll discuss, but the fact that he was the finance minister of Greece, I think does carry a little bit more gravitas because this isn't someone just kind of throwing tomatoes from the cheap seats at our system and kind of commenting from the outside. I mean, to be the finance minister of, you know, one of the world's major countries and a large economy, I think, says a lot for his input into this topic. So, you know, that's kind of my initial thought on the whole thing.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, one of the things I'll mention and what he goes into in the book talks about how the word, how we describe these things matters. Because one of the things, like you talked about, how people may not notice that the capitalism, or at least the dominance of capitalism in terms of an economic system has kind of receded is because a lot of the things that he talks about that have replaced these tenets of capitalism with more tenants, things that were more, that were seen in feudalism, you know, like versus the prominence of profits or the goal of profits versus the goal of rents. But is that we don't notice these because we have the terminology. The things that have replaced these things are still termed and shrouded in wording that we use to describe capitalist systems. So we don't notice that the way they're functioning is different. We may still, we may look at Amazon and feel like, oh, yeah, that's a marketplace where you have all these competing sellers and all that. And we not, might not recognize the way that that's set up actually is. The capitalists, you know, the people who are, who are operating in that market are all subservient to a, to a, to a landlord, you know, who's taking rents from each one of the sales no matter who you buy from. And so, and then just briefly, you know, like the kind of, from a big picture standpoint when you're talking feudalism, the, from an economic standpoint is where we'll focus. But the land is long, is all owned by a central authority. I could be a king or, you know, whoever it is. And then they have their vassals who get pieces of the land. And those people manage those lands. They're, they're owed, they owe taxes. They, you know, the rents and so forth to the ultimate, to the sovereign or to the owner of the land. And then the vassals then exploit the labor of the, the people who live on the land as well, and so, or they live on the land so that the vassals then, you know, collect from the people who work the land and then they owe that back to the ultimate authority, the person, the central authority that owns on the landlord. Well, the landlord being, you know, more so like the vassal, so to speak. So the feudal period ends. So, well, you know, one of the big things that where it ends is that once the, the landlord, so to speak, realize that if they actually kicked the people off the land and have sheep so they can get, and they can trade wool internationally, but it's much more, they can make a lot more money that way. And so that led to the feudalist system unraveling essentially, because, okay, at that point, let's kick the people off. And that there's, this is like a notable historic story that leads to the.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: French Revolution and amongst a lot of.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: Other changes, but let's kick the people off of the land and let's, let's put sheep there and then let's export wool. And so what he draws the analogy of, basically, is that that's essentially what Amazon has done with Internet commerce in the sense that, okay, well, everybody has to come and sell on my platform, be subject to my algorithm. In terms of when I, again, when I type in I want to look for a basketball on Amazon. It's not, it's not a marketplace in the sense that it is showing me, you know, best quality, lowest price, yada, yada, yada. It's showing me what Amazon wants me to see. And that could be based on any number of factors based on the way their algorithm is working, based on what they know about me. And so it has gone from the idea of, okay, I'm going to go to a store and see what they have. A store is a market is kind of an old word for that. Oh, word for that. And see what we have to. Our decision making is guided anywhere we go on the Internet, our decision making is guided by algorithms that are controlled by a owner of that algorithm, whether it be an owner of a company or the company itself or whatever. And so our experience, the way we engaged in, the way we engage in what we consider markets is much more about, it's mediated basically, and the serfs, so, or, excuse me, the people who are paying the rents actually aren't us as the consumer. It's the person who is, who are paying a piece of everything they sell in order to be there on Amazon. Like he points out, the first cloud fiefdom being the app. The app store with Apple is there's, okay, hey, you know, everybody who wants to sell some sell stuff on the app store has to give Apple a cut, you know, and this goes back to, you know, like the late two thousands, you know, 2008, 2000, 920, ten. And so you got this app store, iTunes, and Apple takes a cut of everything. And so, but you got to be there because that's where the people are. So the, this can. And so essentially, the point being that this is how this is. Now, the capitalists, as we understand terrestrial capital, regular capitalists are subservient. They have to go, they have to engage with these companies, these cloud capitalists, in order to interact with consumers. And they don't control how those consumers interact with them basically anymore. It's like, okay, yeah, you're just gonna, you're gonna interact with the consumers the way Amazon or Apple or whoever's algorithm says you are. And for every sale you make, you're gonna give us a piece of it, which looks a lot like a central authority controlling all the land and giving people fiefdoms. Yeah.
[00:08:53] Speaker B: And, you know, it's an interesting point you make about the algorithms because I think that's the part that to us, meaning the consumer, the public, we don't see that. So it's a little bit more like you said it earlier in this discussion, it's a little bit, it's much harder for us to see that capitalism may be eroding under this new regime of the techno feudalist because we don't see the algorithm in between at a, you know, lightning speed. Like you said. If I type in something to Amazon that I want to see, I don't see all that split second behind the scenes of how Amazon is putting guardrails and deciding on what I see now.
[00:09:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: Part of it is that probably helps to get me to the point a lot quicker. Right. I'm not sitting there looking over 30,000 different items trying to find the right, you know, garden tool or something. Maybe they just put two in front of me and I got it, and it makes my choice easier. But understanding that is also they are now the feudalists.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: And one thing, one term I want to throw out real quick while you're right there, is that, you know, he describes, you know, capital being the produce means of production, and he describes cloud capital and these cloud setups as produced means of behavior modification. And so that, that's the, what you're saying is that the algorithm, basically, the algorithm studies how you and how other people react to certain prompts and essentially knows how to put in front of you what it may think is either best for you or best for Amazon in the long run, or whatever cloud capital firm we're talking about. And so it's a big part of. But once you do that, though, the key piece you have to realize is that that is not a market, that is not a knowing participant in a market deciding based on best quality or, or lowest price. This is what I want to do. That is your decision making being guided by someone, by someone else who has a different motive going. And not to say that it's the end of the world or anything like that, but it's something that we should be aware that's going well, just to be.
[00:10:52] Speaker B: Yeah. You know what it is? It reminds me of, as we're talking, like, the idea that on the surface everybody kind of says, oh, yeah, we live in a democracy and all that.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: But the reality is, when you really break it down, yeah, it's a constitutional Republican. There are a lot of undemocratic things that we just accept because we're just used to it, like the electoral college or like gerrymandering or, you know, all these kind of things. And so, you know, we feel like we're in a democracy, but you could really look at it and say, okay, this is not.
[00:11:19] Speaker A: We've really democracy, you know, like we vote on something, but we don't. Yeah, it's not like a. It's not a pure democracy in a sense. We are shorthand for, oh, yeah, I vote in the election is, oh, yeah, it's a democracy when, like you said, there are democratic elements to it, but it's not a democracy as it's defined, so to speak.
[00:11:37] Speaker B: Correct. One of the things I want to add here is this book was interesting for me, in a sense, especially with what I do for a living, just, you know, in financial services and all that, because there's been a lot of sometimes wondering, like, how is it these same, let's say, ten stocks, they have this huge outside now, I think it's. Or the magnificent seven, which is Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, basically, the big tech players out there, they make up now over 30%, I believe, of the market share of the S and P 500, which is the broad index representing the us stock market. It's supposed to represent the 500 largest and well capitalized companies on the exchange, which, you know, under normal circumstances, out of 500 companies, to have just seven that make up now 30% of all.
[00:12:32] Speaker A: The value of those companies, I'm crazy to hear.
[00:12:34] Speaker B: Yeah. That means 493 other companies that are supposed to be the largest in our economy make up the remaining 70%.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: This is the highest imbalance, I believe, in the history of the United States at this point. And so, and so prior to reading this book, I just didn't understand how that was. I thought, okay, just investors like these tech stocks. But after reading it, I mean, that's, that's because, and you said something which, again, this isn't about being sinister or accusing anyone of any. This is the way the system played out, which, because part of this is technology, part of this is the financial part.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: So.
[00:13:10] Speaker B: And that's what I think he misses a little bit in the book, because you made a great point about Apple in the earlier stages of a lot of this, like zero eight through, let's say, 2010, 2011.
Well, think about it. We only had so many choices. You either had a phone from Nokia, Motorola, BlackBerry, or Apple back kind of in zero eight, or prior to zero eight, BlackBerry and Nokia and Motorola kind of, they were behind the times because Steve Jobs was revolutionary and created the iPhone in zero eight, which had the touchscreen. You can watch videos. So what are the public en masse went to iPhones. So to your point, this stuff happens so fast that by 2010, the majority of the world is on either an iPhone or maybe, you know, Google gets into it with the Android phone and they become the two options. So part of it is the technology that developed. And then we get into, like you said, the financial side, where. And what he says in the book, you lower rates to 0%. You have a very accommodative kind of government hand in glove letting technology companies do things that maybe 100 years ago weren't as acceptable, like antitrust, getting antitrust regulations.
[00:14:24] Speaker A: Regulation always comes next because it can't. It wasn't well enough. And you don't want to necessarily stifle innovation. You don't want to start over regulating things too quickly. Like, you kind of want to see it play out. I would think, you know, this is my personal opinion on this. You want to see it play out. And then once you see it play out, once you see books like this and say, okay, to get a handle on what's going on, then you can try to regulate it. But if you try to regulate it too early, you might step on the people that are really pushing it forward too early, you know?
[00:14:51] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I mean, I don't disagree. I'm just calling out the kind of the arc of this trajectory. And it's a good point you make because I think what's happened here is this technology that we've all come to embrace kind of developed so quickly. I mean, this idea, I mean, think about it. Like I said, the iPhone was created in 2008, the iPad in 2010. I mean, it's almost impossible to remember what, just 20 years ago. I mean, we're in 2024, in 2004, none of this stuff was really around social media. I mean, we had MySpace at best, remember? So the way that we interact with all the stuff on our phones. And like you said about the Apple app store, that became a real marketplace, which then Apple was the only gatekeeper. So it creates this, it creates the environment for feudalism to come back. But now, like, that's why I find it interesting. Always says the cloud, they're cloud feudalists, not, not like real property feudalists. And it reminds me of things like the metaverse and all that. Like it's going to keep going. I mean, I could really see, you know, movies like ready player one coming out in reality where people are spending money, are buying cloud space, like spending money out like we do on real estate for real space. They'll spend money in the metaverse like that. And so, and who's going to control that is meta, right? I mean, they're going to at least be the gatekeeper and let, they'll decide what other companies who makes money on their platforms and all that. So it's, it's, yeah, but, but because we're not dealing with people owning big swaths of land where we can see, you know, poor people kind of tilling the land and say, wow, that's, you know, those people are getting the raw end of the deal. It's, it's not as easy for us to see.
[00:16:29] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I mean, and that's, but seeing it and having it described and this is a big part of the book is just, okay, we can start getting a handle on what's happening and then figure out what type of ground rules or regulations or guardrails need to be in place to optimize this, to get the best for society in addition to continue to innovate and so forth. So I think that's a big part of what we're, the reason why something like this is important is because we have to understand what's happening, why it happened. I mean, one of the key pieces, and I'll just mention this briefly, is, you know, with that post 2008 period, the two things that he pointed to was that because the, the banks and the bankers were, were bailed out and a lot of money was diverted that way. But there wasn't a lot of funds that were directed to the people. You know, like for the masses there was more austerity. But for the, the bankers and so forth, which they ran, the payment systems they ran, like things would grind to a hold if they weren't, if the banks at least, you know, weren't, weren't put back in a decent place. But because of that, though, all of the money that was being printed and so forth, that was going into the hands of businesses and people or whatever, there wasn't a lot of incentive to invest that into things that, to make more products and so forth, products and services, because the people still were tight. And so a lot of that money was just reinvested and reinvested and reinvested. And it built up a lot of things. You know, it allowed for, you know, all of these things that didn't turn a profit for a really long time. The ubers of the world or the doordash, they weren't turning profits right away, but allowed them because this endless supply of money. So they were able to build up these huge cloud thiefs that ultimately, now we're living amongst and we are beholden to, you know, and so now we're in the situation, of course, what's next? The other thing I wanted to discuss from this book before we, before we move on was the idea he talked about this brewing cold war potentially with, with China. Because obviously you have these us based companies that, you know, like, have established these cloud based fiefs that, you know, like, hey, if you're in this space online, then you're in this person. You're in Jeff Bezos's feast thief because you're in Amazon. Or if you're in YouTube, then, you know, you're, you're in. Google's fee for, you know, wherever you are, is that this brewing other world powers may look at that and if they're capable of and say, well, hold up, we don't want those companies to have all the information about what people want and what they don't want to be able to control or to suggest the behavior of these people through algorithms and so forth. So we see China now, you know, and we see their businesses. They're putting together businesses that are establishing their own cloud fees and have established their own cloud fees. And so you're seeing this battle over the world turf, basically, of which people are going to plug into which collection of cloud thief. So what was kind of your thought? What did you think about that in terms of this potential for a brewing cold war between the cloud fiefs, on one hand from american based companies, or on another hand, chinese based companies, which we're seeing right now potentially with the way the us companies are or the way as us government is looking at TikTok?
[00:19:36] Speaker B: Yeah, no, and that's what I was going to say. Like TikTok, the anxiety about, remember Huawei?
And, you know, and that's, to me, I know we did our show about TikTok.
That's, to me, the part that makes it difficult to see through a lot of the smoke in terms of, are people really concerned about TikTok being an actual national security threat, or is it the cloud thiefs, if we can say it that way, domestically? Meaning companies like X, Facebook, Google, that are just telling the us government because of our lobbying laws and the fact that, you know, they spend a lot of money on making sure our government pays attention to them in general.
Is it just that they don't want to have the competitor here from China that has 170 million Americans eyeballs on there? And so that's what makes it difficult.
[00:20:30] Speaker A: To see what's true. You know, the Americans should be in their fee, not in this other fiefdom, essentially.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And so, and then the other thing, I think, that makes it possible is, number one, China's strength in general and its population. So if you look at companies like Alibaba, you know, and Tencent, I mean, when you have a population of a billion and a half people, I mean, if you create. If you close all that into your own population, I mean, you still have enough to create your own economy there. I mean, there's 8 billion people in the world. So a fifth of them being in China means China. If they were to really do this cloud thing and keep it closed, they'd always have a perpetual engine of people. And like you said, the fact that they are now going out, he made some very interesting observations, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine and our response to it and how that's changed the landscape. So for the first time in history, because of the way we sanctioned the russian central banks dollars, meaning they had hundreds of billions of dollars of us dollars that the treasury confiscated, it created distrust among certain other nations, which decided, hey, let's try out this chinese stuff. So you see a lot of, especially in Africa, I think is a majority, but there's some latin american, some middle eastern countries that are kind of starting to really flirt and go towards China.
[00:21:56] Speaker A: And using that, like their apparatus for. For executing payments, you know, up until you know, now a lot of the world used the apparatus that was set up by us companies to and then operates through dollars to initiate payments and so forth. But yeah, the, is it going to be, are you going to, if you're, if you're one, if you're in China, you know, you're not doing that? Or do you have an alternative? And this may push people towards that, but then also other nations are going to make that decision. Do you want to use a one base payment system or a dollar base payment system in terms of what's happening? So all, so all of those, it's creating this, you know, these choices, so to speak. The last thing I'll mention, there was one piece that we did not spell out previously is the actual idea of serfs. And this was a very interesting piece of the book as well. And that was just that. The serfs are, in his estimation, in his view, in this, the people who create more or less, who create content on these cloud path platforms, whether it be YouTube or whatever, for free. So in this instance, you and I are serfs, you know, because we're creating content that is presumably would have people spend time on YouTube within YouTube's algorithms being influenced and stuff like that, the way however YouTube wants to do it. And we're doing that. We're doing that for Google. And, you know, and so that that's our tax basically, or our, for the space that we get in the Google fiefdom, you know, is that we create this content and, you know, YouTube doesn't pay or Google doesn't pay, you know, out of Google coffers to have this stuff on there at all times, whether it be YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, you know, creators create stuff, upload it, and they're not compensated by the fiefdom. If they are compensated through advertising or whatever, that's not the actual fiefdom, that's compensating, that's other market participants that are just paying for the attention that's generated based on the content that was created. So that was another piece that I think just was worthwhile mentioning is just how.
[00:23:53] Speaker B: So let's, let's bring a real world example that would be like a serf or a peasant who's tilling the land with their rake and all that. But on the side, they're, they, they build handbags or something, right?
[00:24:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: So they're able to go sell at the market once every week when they get a day off on Sunday and they go make a little money there, but they're never really compensated for the work they're doing the six days a week on the landlord's land. Because the landlord's just saying, well, I'm just giving you a place to live and all that's your compensation. Just like here, our landlord being a YouTube, extrapolate out that to a Google. Google's telling you, and I, hey, we're giving you this nice platform and all that, so we don't. We don't owe you anything else. But when you and I want to go make compensation, we got to go work, go do something different to work, unless we are able to, on our own, begin to sell ads through something like this. So it creates that environment. I'm just saying this for the audience, that this is what creates the environment of a feudalistic system by our big tech firms.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: Yeah. Because without millions of people creating the content, then YouTube is of no value without, for Apple, you know, without millions of or however many thousands of programmers creating this apps for the app Store, the app store has very little value, you know, so it's the contributions of people. But again, you may make money from selling apps from Apple, but that's not money that Apple is paying you. That is money that consumers are paying Apple. And then you get a cut of that. Apple takes a cut as well. So the setup is not a traditional setup in that sense. Like, there is a rent a cloud rental that is being paid on any money generated through the crowd, through the cloud. And the cloud owner who benefits from the creation of this content isn't actually paying for the content. They don't pay anything from it. At most, they can give you a cut of money that's being made on the content. But they themselves, even though they greatly benefit, don't pay anything for it. So it's quite a great setup.
[00:25:53] Speaker B: Well, listen, that's what, to me, was fascinating just reading this book and then equating it to the markets. Like, okay, now it makes sense that just this small slice of the actual stock market, meaning companies represent on the stock market, have such a huge outsized gain in the last decade compared to the rest of the economy. And all these other companies like Philip Morris and Ford and McDonald's, traditional capitalist. I mean, if you look at. If you look at Coca Cola, it's got a market cap, meaning the total value is around 35 to 40 billion. And that company's been around for 150 years. I mean, so, so the idea that now Nvidia, which has only been around for, you know, maybe, maybe 1520 years, but. But really, this last five years is where it's really made. Its imprint is worth $3 trillion.
[00:26:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: Just like Zoom. I mean, this book really. Because I couldn't understand how all that.
[00:26:44] Speaker A: How that could be. Yeah.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: How could be.
[00:26:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: And based on your explanation just now, is great, because that definition of how Apple makes money, even though the app maker and the person purchasing the app, they're basically paying, you know, they're all in there doing the economic activity and apple just takes a fee. So it's, it's, this really says something about the idea of smart money on Wall street was really smart.
[00:27:07] Speaker A: Meaning.
[00:27:08] Speaker B: Yeah, the reason why all these stocks are high is because, you know, the smart money figured out ten years ago this is where it's going.
[00:27:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:13] Speaker B: And, and so, yeah, it's, it's. To me, that was the fascinating part, was like, okay, now I get why this sector of the market has been so attractive for the smart money, because this was the game all along, which is turning everyone into a renter.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Even when the quote unquote profits of the company didn't seem to justify what you were seeing from the stock performance or the market cap and so forth. But, yeah, it's because of the underlying change in the structure of the way this commerce was happening. Because, yeah, Coca Cola will still exist. It's not that capital. He called it terrestrial capital. It's not like these firms will cease to exist. It's that they are not the promise actor in the marketplace anymore. They are a subservient actor to the cloud capitalists. And that's the overall point when you're talking about his laying out of how techno feudalism has taken over, is that, yeah, they're still regular capitalist firms. But like you said, the biggest and the bad of those, baddest of those and oldest might be worth 35 billion. You got the tech firs. That'll be worth 3 trillion. And it's like, well, who's in charge there?
[00:28:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, but when you think about it, it's the ability. Like we're saying that we are all renters. So like me, I've got an iCloud, I'm an Apple product user. So for the last ten years, I probably have 20,000 photographs, videos, all that in my family and my pets and my vacations. And I'm paying, I think I'm paying 299 or $3.99 for, I think, 2300gb of space. And at some point I'll get a notice that says, hey, man, you know, you're almost out of space.
You know, pay us another $2 and we'll give you another 100 gigs. So from an individual standpoint, it's like, okay, well, that's worth it for me. It's not a lot of money on a monthly basis. $2, and I get to. I get to keep my cloud real estate, right? My. What would have otherwise taken up, literally, filing cabinets and drawers worth of space in my house. Now I can rent that cloud space from Apple if forever. Some reason someone else comes out with a better phone product, and I switched from an iPhone to some other company's phone, I really think there's a high probability I'll still be paying money to Apple, you know, 7810 bucks a month just for my cloud space. Because if Apple doesn't create an environment where I can easily move all those files, those hundreds of gigabytes, to the new company, which they probably won't, because they'll want to make sure they maintain my rent.
[00:29:36] Speaker A: Absent regulation and laws for regulation.
[00:29:39] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:29:39] Speaker A: Significant on the antitrust that the Justice Department then.
[00:29:42] Speaker B: Yeah, then. Then they have a setup now which.
[00:29:46] Speaker A: Will tie you to something else better.
[00:29:48] Speaker B: Comes along is unbeatable.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: The analogy of that is what happened. And this is where regulation comes in. The analogy is the telephone thing. You remember 20 years ago, your telephone number was wherever you had this, your service, and you couldn't simply, oh, okay, I'm going to switch service providers, so I'm going to. To leave. If you're like, oh, you leave, you're gonna lose your phone number. But that's where regulation came in and said, okay, well, no, no, no. You phone service providers, you guys gotta come up with some kind of protocol, some kind of way that I own my number or, you know, people own their number. If they wanna leave your service and go to another service with their number, you have to have a way for them to do that. And so, yeah, absent regulation, though, that wouldn't have happened in the same way here. What you're talking about. Absent regulation, there won't be some. There won't be. The tech companies have no incentive to create some interface to allow you to own your stuff. You don't.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: You.
[00:30:39] Speaker A: You basically have access to it. They kind of own it. You know, possession is nine tenths of the law in terms of that stuff. And so they. They have it, and you pay money to. So you can go look at it. But, yeah, and so ideally, what you'll have is whether it be through antitrust litigation and settlements and so forth or otherwise regulation, the regulators, again, they're always going to become second or ideally, they'll come second. But they come along and say, okay, hold up some of this stuff. We need to rein in whether you own your data that you upload or whether you own data about your behavior. And you can say, hey, you've stored all this information about my behavior.
I want to download it, I want you to delete it. Can you do that? Or do they own that perpetually? So all of that type of regulation and so forth would ideally be forthcoming. But now, with these participants having so much power in the marketplace, particularly over the power over, through algorithms, behavior modification, what you see, what you focus on, what your reality is based on, your focus being your reality is like, well, can regulation even get a handle on this kind of stuff anymore? Or because they have a line into everyone's brain directly and they know exactly what triggers everyone and so forth, are they going to be able to keep us perpetually distracted and, you know, like, like not being able to put 1ft in front of the other to get from point a to point b? From a regulatory standpoint, that, and that's going to be the open question when it comes to just looking at how we ourselves interact with this tech environment through the cloud space.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: And again, that's one, I think they beat the regulators.
[00:32:10] Speaker A: Well, that's, that typically happens until they, like, they beat the regulators, beat the right, until they overreach, and then the public kind of reacts. But that's the historical way. Before they had a way to continually distract and keep the public off.
[00:32:22] Speaker B: Now it's a little bit different. It's interesting. Yeah. Where it goes. One of the things I wanted to point out, which was interesting for what the book kind of brought to my mind and made me realize I had never thought of some of the things domestically in the United States mirroring some of this, these economic models. So the idea of feudalism and serfs and peasants, really, I started thinking about like the first, you know, call it 70 years of the 20th century, from about 1900 to 1970, the idea of a sharecropper in the south was no different than a peasant or serf back in the, in the old european feudalist days.
[00:32:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:56] Speaker B: Which to your point, at the beginning of this conversation, allowed for the southern economies in the United States up until, let's say, I'll just use 1970 as a cut off to have much less market based economies, because you did have the sharecroppers, the serfs, tilling the land, who were stuck there. You had the landlord who then maybe paid the vig either to the state or to some developer or some higher up. There wasn't a lot of room for others in this mix.
[00:33:29] Speaker A: And also, it led to feudalism is notoriously poor for innovation and for, you know, like, development and so forth. So it led to the south not being a place where a lot of that would happen. That's what I was gonna say was missing.
[00:33:43] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's what I was gonna say, that the United States is a nation. I don't know if this is unique, but I would say it's probably rare that in one country you actually had these two totally separate systems of economies. You had capitalism in the north and the west, and in the south, you had feudalism. And it's. And it's just. Yeah, so, I mean, until reading this book, I didn't realize that dynamic is pretty interesting.
[00:34:04] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, I want to close this up, but one thing I'll mention here is what this really illustrates is that it seems like there are only a few ways of tried and true kind of setups to organize our activity as humans. You know, whether it be from an economic or a government standpoint. Like, we tend to gravitate towards certain types of forms of organizing, and those forms, you know, can, can evolve or meta, you know, have, have a metamorphosis based on the current technological environment or environment, the environment in general that they're, they're deployed in. But it doesn't seem like there are endless ways, basically, for us to do all this stuff. You know, like there, there's, you have your strong, with government, you have your strongman approach, and, you know, like, hey, let's, let's beat up on the people who we don't like. Or you have a more collaborative approach, which is like, hey, let's try to build a system and lift all boats. From an economic standpoint, you have more exploitative systems. You have systems that try to give people, that give people the more exploitative systems. You get no stake in the game. You're just here, you're just a cog versus some that try to give people incentives and stakes in the games and so forth, and that may lead to more dinosaurs. What we're seeing here is that, and this is kind of the point of the term techno feudalism, is that from, you go from feudalism to capitalism, and then right now it's kind of returning to more of a feudal form, albeit one that's different in certain ways, but it's still something that's, that's not, that's not looking, um, you know, from a pure, it's looking to exploit rents, I should say, more than profits in a capitalist sense. So it's not like it went into something completely different. It's just went to something that was, was there before but in a different way.
[00:35:52] Speaker B: Yep. Let's see how it plays out.
[00:35:54] Speaker A: Yeah. That's what we get to do. So, but no, so we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of call. Like I see it. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it. Tell us what you think. Check out the book. It's a very interesting book. And until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:36:06] Speaker B: I am Tunde Okana.
[00:36:08] Speaker A: All right. We'll talk to you next time.
