Featured Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash
Hi everyone!
Let's do some super fun imagining...
I know you've had a good idea for a t-shirt design or logo. Something funny or cool... you've told people and they all think it'd be awesome.
Now, imagine you actually do it. You go old-school, you buy a bunch of blank shirts, you get a screen paint thingy and you make a bunch of them while listening to podcasts. It's great.
Source
You give them to friends, you set up a table at a market and everyone seems to really like them.... so you list them on Amazon.com and they really start to move. You don't make as much as when you sell them at markets, but you're killing it in quantity. You're making money, Amazon is making money, it's all going so well.
Except... it went too well.
Overnight your orders drop off a cliff... they're suddenly zero.
You check your Amazon listing... it all looks the same. You search for your listing and you can't find it... but you can find an extremely similar shirt sold by Amazon directly and their listing is right up the top with a Recommended star.
Your business is dead. Why did you finance a brand new car?
This is a thing that Amazon does, especially if an item is generic or cheaply sourced and they can do it because they own the selling platform, all the data, the algorithm AND they can position their own stuff right at the top. Amazon also owns stake in unofficial sellers like Cloudtail and Appario Retail which it can also position above competitors.
Personally, I've never really dealt with physical products... but I do know about applications. One application I've been working on for 4 years is just straight up banned by Meta and I don't know why.
I can't write a post on Threads, Instagram or Facebook and include the URL - it just won't post. I can't include URLs to blog posts from the application or anything.
When I've tried to resolve the problem, Meta has said the link is against posting guidelines, but reading through the guidelines, I honestly can't tell what the issue is. There is no way to get in touch with support staff, there's no way to resolve the situation, it's just banned forever and there's nothing I can do about it.
This is exactly why decentralized platforms like the Hive blockchain, the Fediverse, Interledger's Payment Protocol and a bunch of other decentralized solutions are so important.
One of the best ways to make money, is to find your company in a monopoly. You can create a monopoly by getting regulations to help you out (Meta lobbying against Tik Tok), or by reducing your prices to starve out new entrants and then raise your prices again when they're out or by dividing up regions with your competitors.
Having a monopoly is one thing, but when you own the actual marketplace AND you're competing with merchants, that's not a monopoly, that's you playing in 3 dimensions while everyone else is stuck in 2.
A phrase was coined in former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s 2023 book Technofeudalism. I haven't read the book myself, but I've listened to him talk and the concept definitely describes this exact situation...
What is feudalism?
Back in medieval Europe when there were Kings and Queens and Lords and Ladies and castles and roaming armies, normal people didn't own land. You would grow your crops and give a portion of your harvest to the Lord of the area.
You could earn coins from selling surplus crops (ie, not what you gave to the Lord or needed to survive) and spend those coins at the local market on tools, clothes, things you couldn't make, etc.
Normally you'd give about half your crops to the Lord.
This paid for the rent of the land your crops were on, but also protection from bandits, armies, etc - you'd be funding the Lord's lifestyle as well as all the soldiers in the Lord's employ. The Lords got their lands from the Kings/Queens, who weren't voted in. You basically got no say in anything. You worked the land, hoped your Lord wasn't a jerk and hoped no armies came through.
I saw as a kid Monty Python and the Holy Grail but I really should watch it again now that I might actually understand things.
Are we in a technofeudalism society?
Yes.
Apple requiring 30% of in-app payments is a great example. HP requiring users to pay a monthly fee to use the printers and ink they already bought is such an amazingly dystopian example....
Not only do platforms and algorithms affect our businesses and income - but they heavily influence our politics too.
News organizations used to be funded by advertising.
Unfortunately, Google and social media platforms have inserted themselves between the audience and the news orgs and have taken all that advertising money for themselves - and control what that audience sees and doesn't see.
It's easy to platform misinformation, billionaires are happy to fund it, advertisers might even support it, while rigorous journalism can only survive behind paywalls. Lies are free but we have to pay for the truth.
It's going to get worse
I really loved Coffeezilla's series of videos on an underage gambling problem:
Video 1 - Underage casinos
Video 2 - The battle between casinos
Video 3 - Valve the games company
One thing that really stood out to me though, was in the 3rd video, Coffeezilla tells us that Valve was found by regulators in Washington State where they reside to be using loopholes to encourage underage gambling, but the state didn't have the resources to take them to court.
There's now (apparently) a world-wide underage gambling problem because one US state lacked enforcement resources.
Corporations are bigger than some governments... they can lobby governments to change the rules in their favour, ignore the rules, pay meaningless fines, donate to politicians who'll gut funding for enforcement agencies, cut off countries that oppose them, destroy competitors with regulation and disregard any lives destroyed as long as market share grows.
How do we defeat Technofuedalism?
By using and supporting alternative options even if they're not quite as convenient or a little more expensive - and to use decentralized platforms where possible.
It's the age old problem... if we don't use it, we lose it.
The Hive blockchain is a great example, it relies on 21 different Witnesses, but there is hundreds of backups. Hopefully they're not all hosting their servers on, say, AWS. There are multiple front end applications so if one has a Cloudflare issue, there are alternatives.
While Web3 solutions have been rife with scams, the general idea of interacting with sites with just a digital wallet instead of creating an ID on each one individually is very appealing (as long as you take very good care of your wallets).
Try not to be too dependent on any one platform - decentralize your own activities too.
Specifically look to support politicians or political parties that aren't funded by lobby groups and that might be willing to support people over corporations.
The last thing we want is having all of our decisions determined by a handful of companies.
What do you think? Is this something you've been thinking about or is it not on your radar at all? Do you think it's a problem for you?
Thanks for reading!
Also shared with my blog : https://lifebe.com.au/opinion/how-to-defeat-technofeudalism/