Because y’all shouldn’t fall for this moralistic and anachronistic nonsense. The rentier bourgeoisie controls the servers and data centres (vulgarly called “cloud”) like they did before with the railways, the shipping infrastructure, the airlines, energy, the production and redistribution of oil and gasoline, and even other forms of communications infrastructure.
Reframing the rentier bourgeoisie as some new unique stage of development beyond capitalism (and smuggling in liberal moralisms about “fiefdoms” and “feudal lords”) is just yet another European attempt at reframing the current regressive nature of capitalism as not-capitalism in order to defend the status quo as a “democracy” at risk.
And this author doesn’t even get into Imperialism in his critique.
This is extremely eurocentric or rather Global North centric. There is no value (in the Marxist sense) in the “cloud”. Real value is still created by workers mining minerals that go into CPUs, harvesting cotton, assembling smartphones, making sneakers in sweatshops etc.
The value of their labour is extracted by Western firms selling their products. Much of it is transferred to non productive employees in the Global North, influencers, content creators, marketing and PR people, you name it.
For Marxists, the fact that money flows to those people and not the ones making all the hardware necessary for their “content”, doesn’t mean influencers are actually more productive than sweatshop workers.
All the talk about technofeudalism, post-industrial economy, etc is only possible because the real production is removed from our sight (in the Global North) so it’s easy to forget most of the world is still physically toiling to make all our shit.
This is just wrong, there is a vast amount of dead and living labour involved in building and mantaining the cloud (data centers), every single piece of hardware in a server is a commodity itself, just like the software required does not develop itself. In order for them to have no value, they would literally need to pop out of nature. Same goes for data, there is a lot of dead and living labour involved in collecting and storing data, even if computers have made it infinitely easier to reproduce and distribute data than before. A single byte of data or row in a table is insignificant and near worthless, but we are talking about trillions of bytes of data handled by data centers, it’s qualitatively different.
This does not mean i agree with Yanis, i dislike the man and his kind with every molecule of my body, but disregarding data is frankly absurd.