Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOR4wuiPeEQ
TLDR: Hank Green independently discovers "Techno-Feudalism" and says he has not heard anyone else talking about this. Get Yanis Varoufakis on the phone with this liberal NOW!
For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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Hank: Would you add that people feel Donald Trump will keep the economy rolling, whatever the cost, as one of these pillars?
Kyla: He'll keep the stock market rolling, whatever the cost. And that's not always reliant on the economy doing well. Yes, absolutely. I think people in finance are relying on him being ruthless to keep the stock market up. But I think they're getting sick of the tariff stuff. Trump always chickens out. He announces major tariffs, the market sells off, and he backs down. I don't know how much more power he has with that stance, especially internationally. If the EU doesn't want to buy US Treasuries, we're in trouble. They own a lot of them, and that's how we fund our national spending.
Hank: Are the tax breaks a part of this? Are rich people able to spend more because they have more from tax breaks?
Kyla: Yeah. They're pretty successful at bending the tax law to their will already. But yes, fewer taxes means more to spend.
Hank: As a high earner, I see that money from my investments doesn't get taxed a lot. I've asked progressive billionaires, "Why do I pay lower taxes on money I don't work for?" They say, "The risk." But labor is a risk, too! Choosing a company to work for is a risk. Companies go out of business, they can lay you off. There's risk everywhere. I don't understand why capital gains should be taxed at a lower rate. Am I being incentivized to stop creating value and just look at Robinhood all day?
Kyla: Yes, you are. There was a good article in the FT that said we have become a place of shareholder rights over civic rights. The taxation system encapsulates that. It doesn't incentivize the right things, especially with all the financial nihilism and people not trusting that a job will do them any good, so they just go and sports gamble and do prediction markets.
Hank: Every lane you go down has a sad note these days. But I have a lot of hope. Where does your hope come from?
Kyla: I've been traveling the country for my book, and I meet people in all these cities who are working really hard on these problems. How do you make a better world? A lot of that happens at the local level. We focus on federal problems because they're so big, but what people are doing in local communities is very important. You just have to believe in those people right now and that they'll pull us through.
Hank: Speaking from a place of privilege, I do think it's much more interesting to be out here making value than moving dollars around. For those with more money, if there are ways for you to be in the mix, be in the mix. And if there are ways for your money to be in the mix, not just sitting in accounts propping up an overvalued stock market, try to get it out there doing good. Pick a number, and get the rest of it out there. There's so much good that can be done.
There are lessons to learn from the robber barons, like Carnegie with his libraries. Henry Ford knew that if he had happy workers, he'd have a happy company and a more successful product. They thought about the relationship between employer and employee, and rich person and community, a lot differently. They saw the connections and what they could do to build that up, which made everyone better off in the end. There are a lot of people with enough money to start a little business doing something interesting, but they can make more money investing in a REIT or private equity. So they outsource the work, stress, and ethics of running a company to someone who will be ruthless. But boy...
Kyla: It's interesting. There was a Supreme Court case in 1919, Henry Ford vs. Dodge Brothers, that ruled a company's first interest should be to shareholders rather than to customers and the community. I think that's where everything went wrong. It's important to think beyond the shareholder. There are many stakeholders that are not shareholders.
Hank: Kyla, you're an economist, a writer, and you do great work making sense of markets and power in our economy. Check out her book, In This Economy. Thank you for talking through this with me.
Kyla: Thank you.
To be fair to Hank, he says "progressive billionaires" sarcastically, with scare quotes. But to be unfair to Hank, if you are asking billionaires to explain the economy to you, then you are just asking to be lied to. It's like asking Bernie Madoff how index funds work.
There's this guy Charles Ponzi who was telling me about a great investment opportunity.
There's literally one and it was a guy interviewed on Yasha Levine's podcast and he was maybe just a millionaire? I can't remember, but he was born into wealth and hates his family and stuff. I think they put him into rehab and boarding schools and stuff. He was still some kind of Trotskyist/ultra if I recall though.
Edit: I can't find it. He did it anonymously I remember so maybe he deleted it from the internet later.
Was it Fergie Chambers?
Yeah, I think so. Searched and searched but couldn't find it until you mentioned the name.
https://www.nefariousrussians.com/p/class-traitors-with-fergie-chambers
Yeah, I thought it'd be him. He's a character to say the least. I don't know if he still runs that since I read he moved to Tunisia, but he had a group called the ''Berkshire Communists'', with a community gym and shit like that.
I hate it when libs get so close yet somehow always remain so far away from actually getting it.
If the "wealth" (the money-form of surplus-value) disappears, the capitalist's ability to consume, and thus the demand for articles of consumption, contracts.
The thing that they miss, for those playing along at home, is that they confuse "real wealth" with "Fictitious Capital". The "wealth" bound by the stock market is not real, material wealth (factories, food, machinery). It is what Marx would call "fictitious capital", claims on future surplus value.
For only a moment in his rant does Hank mention that maybe some things shouldn't be handled by a market, and that is almost an admission that markets are not a well functioning device for all things. Yet, even though he can acknowledge this reality, he can't seem to see the greater disorder within the mode of production. Production itself is not organized to meet social needs, but, it must be organized around something!
Like everything with Marx, things are standing on their head. It is not primarily a crisis of consumer demand, but a crisis of capital exchanging with capital. It begins when the reproduction process is interrupted, which then affects everything else, including the "feelings" of the wealthy.
Hank says the loop happens because "people get conservative." Kyla mentions the "concern people would stop spending." Marx would argue this is backwards. It is not collective psychology that drives the crisis, but the objective laws of capital that impose themselves on people's consciousness. The "conservative" feeling is the subjective reflection of the objective impossibility to sell. The capitalist doesn't feel like not spending; they cannot spend because the money has not returned. As Marx explains, the basic circuit:
If the final sale (C'-M') fails, the capitalist cannot convert money into a new commodity (M-C) to continue production. The "feeling" of being conservative is just the surface manifestation of this objective rupture in the metabolic process of capital.
And we should remember here. AI is at the end of this process, not the beginning of this process. AI is the product, the commodity being sold. The data centers, racks, cooling systems, power plants, microchips, transistors, you name it, every little detail that goes into spinning up new data centers is where the M-C P C'-M' is. M-C is building the components for the Datacenters, P is the production process of building the data centers C'-M' is the production of the AI systems, the training, and the web services and tools provided to consumers, and the rents they charge for you to use it.
There is a second wave of this crisis though, which they have not even broached, which is, what happens when you finally build all these data centers? What happens when you've spent all this money and converted it in to fixed capital, displaced all this variable capital, and created nothing in return? We know that these models are not as useful as their makers claim they are, that they are not as useful or create the kind of productivity gains they say they do. This situation isn't like having a lot full of cars you didn't sell. Cars, at least, have some kind of function as they exist, even if they sit in the lot. Data centers though? These are highly specialized number crunching warehouses.
So who can say. We might be able to pick their rotting bloated carcass clean of memory chips in the near future.
Looking forward to being a microchip-scavenger in the cyberpunk future of 2032
late response but I wanted to say thanks for this comment. I appreciate it when people who know theory take the time to explain it with the context of whats going on now or what people are saying now
I appreciate it! It's the kind of thing that of you don't use it you'll forget it.
It's like when you see a rabid frothing fascist do a decent analysis of capitalism and class society only to fuck up the landing by going "and the people behind it all are the jews"