Yanis Varoufakis appeared on the Keen On podcast with Andrew Keen to talk about his new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. It is an interesting conversation but I found an answer that Varoufakis gave to be bleak when thinking of how society is structured around these digital platforms. When he speaks of digital fiefdoms, he means platforms like Amazon and Facebook.

Within the digital fiefdoms of the 21st century, you are not even a subject. You are certainly not a citizen but you're not even a subject. You are only a resource and an asset to be stripped by the owner. In other words, you have even fewer rights under technofeudalism that you would have had under feudalism. At least under feudalism you could petition your lord and be heard occasionally. Today, this is simply impossible. You enter one of these digital fiefdoms and the algorithm, on behalf of the owner, is matching you to individuals whether they are sellers or other users in a manner which maximizes the rent extractive capacity of the owner of the algorithm. And that's it. You are not a citizen. You are not a subject. You are little bit like in The Matrix, the movie, humans who had been turned into batteries or solar panels providing energy and heat to the system. In this case, the system being cloud capital.

What killed capitalism? Yanis Varoufakis' murder mystery about the death of capitalism and our descent into "techno feudalism"

This is a discussion between Mike Masnick of Techdirt and Professor Andy Przybylski from the University of Oxford about research Przybylski has done about the effects of social media on children, mental health and video games and the effects of Facebook on well-being.

https://soundcloud.com/techdirt/social-media-mental-health

In short, he didn't find a lot of evidence supporting the claims that social media and video games had a negative impact on people's well-being.

It is a good conversation to listen to and consider in the light of the increased scrutiny that the tech industry is under. The tech industry has escaped scrutiny for too long but there are times when bad regulation is worse than no regulation. There is a danger of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction.

I want to see better regulations drafted when considering the best available evidence. A major problem is that the data required to perform this research is locked within servers owned by the companies who aren't really incentivised to allow academics to use it, especially if they feel it could impact them negatively. There is need of a transparent process to give researchers the access they need while also protecting the sensitive data that the companies should be protecting.

While reading Kashmir Hill's profile of Mike Masnick I was reminded of the series she did on "Life Without the Tech Giants" while she was working for Gizmodo in 2019.

It was eye opening to see how much of the digital infrastructure runs through such a small number of companies. Sometimes there is no alternative as their services have been embedded into business and government systems and can't be avoided.

I remember being surprised at how many services ran through AWS. I thought someone with the size of Netflix would be running their own infrastructure.

I'd be interested to see how many services are being run through the 3 largest cloud providers today: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

The series is still worth reading and viewing today.

• Life Without the Tech Giants
• I Tried to Block Amazon From My Life. It Was Impossible
• I Cut Facebook Out of My Life. Surprisingly, I Missed It
• I Cut Google Out Of My Life. It Screwed Up Everything
• I Cut Microsoft Out of My Life—or So I Thought
• I Cut Apple Out of My Life. It Was Devastating
• I Cut the 'Big Five' Tech Giants From My Life. It Was Hell