E105: Musk’s Move Into Politics: Yanis Varoufakis and Cory Doctorow on Fighting Billionaire Control

[Mehran] Hello.
hello, hello and welcome.

I'm Mehran Khalili.

We are DiEM25, a radical political
movement for Europe.

And this is another live discussion
featuring subversive ideas

you won't hear anywhere else.

And tonight, we're talking Elon Musk,
the world's richest human.

Yes, Musk is now reshaping
politics in troubling ways,

using his vast wealth and control over
technology to influence elections

and public discourse.

Two years ago, he bought
X, formerly Twitter,

placing himself at the centre
of the news via his own account,

the largest on the platform,

but it wasn't until last year that
Musk got deeply involved in politics,

jumping around on stage
with Donald Trump
and injecting more than
a quarter of a billion dollars

into the man's campaign
to help to get him elected.

Musk has now, in recent weeks,

been throwing grenades into
Europe's political mainstream,

supporting an anti-migrant,
hardline nationalist party

in Germany ahead of
elections there,

and calling for the resignation
of the British Prime Minister.

So all of this highlights the alarming
intersection of tech and political power.

So how did we get here?

I mean, wealthy elites have always

shaped public discourse and policy,

but why does it feel now,

like we've broken through
to a fresh level of hell?

And of course, the question
we always ask here on DiEM TV,

how can we push back against it?

To answer these questions, we've got
two people that have coined the terms

that we often use to describe
the mess that we're in,

technofeudalism, cloud capital,
and then shitification.

And that's, of course, our own
Yanis Varoufakis.

And I'm delighted to welcome to
DiEMTV for the first time,

Cory Doctorow,
the science fiction author,

activist, and journalist,
and DiEM25 member.
And of course, we have you,
you out there.
If you've got thoughts, comments, rants,

something that you really think
should be said in this debate

then put it in the YouTube chat
and we'll put it to our panel.
Some very quick housekeeping,

if you'd like to hit the bell there
on YouTube, the bell icon,

you won't miss any of our new videos,

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and you'll find our podcast there.

Let's kick it off with Cory.

Cory, how did we get here?

[Cory] Well, I'll tell you how I got here,

my first encounter with Elon Musk.

So I had a friend and colleague who's a
science fiction writer named Iain Banks,

who is a legendary
socialist science fiction writer.

And one day on Twitter,
I saw a tweet from Elon Musk

saying he considered
himself a Utopian socialist

in the mold of Iain Banks.
And Iain had died not that long before,

and I said, I knew Iain, and he was
an ardent trade unionist

and he would not
have been happy about

being identified with
a man who's in trouble

with the National Labor Relations Board
for virulent union busting.

And Musk came back and he said:

Well the thing is that in Iain Banks's
famous culture novels

there are no trade unions

and that's why I think I can
consider myself in his mold.

And I said: You know,
with all due respect

Iain Banks culture novels
are set in a future

where faster than light ships

that hold a trillion people

and are piloted by galactic scale super
intelligences roam the galaxy,

the fact that there's no
trade unions in that world

tells us nothing about whether
they need to be here.

And he said: Well, if Banks
could have seen

the degree of automation in a Tesla factory,

he would have not expected me
to unionize my factories either.

And I said: You know, again,

there is a world of difference
between faster than light travel

and eking out marginal gains
in the production of cars.

And then, he blocked me and
called me an enemy of humanity.

He is one of these guys that,
as a science fiction writer,

you run into as immortalized in
that great tweet,

you know, as a science fiction writer,

I've written a novel about
the torment nexus

so that you don't
create the torment nexus.

Tech bro, I have created
the torment nexus.

As William Gibson always says:

Cyberpunk was a warning,
not a suggestion.

Whenever I think about Musk,

I feel some personal responsibility

because there is a kind
of cadre of tech billionaires

who've read our dystopias and
mistaken them for business plans.

I always come back to this great
quote from A Fish Called Wanda:

Aristotle was not Belgian,

the principle of Buddhism is
not every man for himself,

the London Underground
is not a political movement,

these are all mistakes,
I looked them up.

When I hear Elon Musk
talk about his views

and how they connect to
world historical phenomena,

to the literature he's metabolized,

to the ideologies he claims to espouse,

most notably free speech absolutism,

something I have some connection to

given my long association with
speech fights on the internet

through the Electronic
Frontier Foundation,

I think of him as being
one of these people

who has absorbed just enough of
things that are kind of in his orbit,

that he can deploy them tactically

to justify what is the
ultimate view of Musk,

which is Wilhoit's view
of conservatives,

that conservatism has one tenet,

that there are in-groups whom
the law protects but does not bind,

and out-groups whom the law binds
but does not protect.

And I think that is Muskism
in a nutshell there.

[Mehran] Thank you very much
for that explanation of Musk.
Before I hand the floor over to Yanis,

are there any I mean, in terms of
looking at the aggregation

and the consolidation of power

that big tech has got
to this point where

we're in this situation
today with Musk,

can you take us, like,
give us a lightning speed,

because it's shifted a lot
in the last eight years as well.

So if you can give us that background
just to bring us up to speed to 2025?

[Cory] I think like Trump, Musk is best
understood as a result and not a cause.

That there's a kind of sociopathic
billionaire shaped hole in the world,

someone who can inveigle
sweetheart government contracts,

someone who is better at PR
than he is at engineering,

someone who is capable
of abusing the law

to force people who actually invented
things that he subsequently bought,

to describe him as the inventor
is part of his myth building.

Musk has bought everything
successful he's done,

from SpaceX to Tesla to Donald Trump,
another thing he's recently purchased,

and he nevertheless
characterizes himself

in the tradition of all these tech
billionaires is a self-made man.

When we decided that we
would no longer enforce policies

that prohibit predatory acquisitions,

that prohibit lock-in,

that give a special advantage to
incumbents over new entrants,

we created a kind of
winner-take-all lottery

where whatever mediocrity
scrambled to the top of the heap,

you know, stabbing people in the back
on their way most quickly,

could then convert that to
a durable advantage.

The difference now,
between now and then,

is not that in the old days
when tech was better,

that we had better people leading it.

It was that they faced more constraint.

They had to worry about
competitors because

our policies promoting competition were
not yet completely destroyed.

They had to worry about regulators

because they hadn't fully captured
the regulatory apparatus.

They had to worry about
their workers leaving because

tech workers were then
the princes of labor,

people whose labor was
in such short demand

and whose skills were were
so hard to find in the market

that they could just tell their
bosses to 'F' off
whenever their bosses asked them to do things

and they had to contend with
wonderful nature of digital technology

which is that new technologies
can always be plugged into old ones

so when when Mark Zuckerberg
started Facebook,

he had this billionaire problem.

His billionaire problem
was called Rupert Murdoch,

who owned another
service called MySpace.

Everyone who wanted social media
was already on MySpace,

and it was a big lift to ask people

to leave all their friends behind
and go to Facebook.

Rather than make them ask that,
he just gave them a bot,

and you logged into Facebook,

you gave it your MySpace

login and password.

The bot would go to MySpace
several times a day,

scrape all the messages waiting for you,

come back to your Facebook account,
put them in your Facebook inbox.

and then, you could reply to them and it
would send them back to MySpace.

You didn't have to worry about that.

That interoperability was
kind of par for the course

with technology and it gave new market
entrants enormous advantage

over big established incumbents.

In the memorable phrase of Jeff Bezos:
our margin is my opportunity.

If HP is selling $10,000 a gallon ink,

that's an opportunity for someone
who wants to sell $100 a gallon ink

because people will jump on that offer.

What we've done in the years since is
we've made IP laws so expansive

that it not only allows
these large incumbents

to ignore regulation
when it comes to privacy,

labor protections, consumer rights,

but also to wield regulation
against new market entrants

and shut them down,
stop them from taking advantage

of that latent power of technology.

So you combine these four changes,

the drawdown of competition,
the capture of regulators,

the deployment of regulation in the
form of IP against new market entrance

and the gutting of labor
power for tech workers.

We've seen it's now over 400,000
tech layoffs in the last 24 months

in the United States alone

and you've got a place
where people who

are no better than they
used to be, and no worse

can simply act on their worst nature

without facing any
constraint or consequence

so that you unleash the id
of someone like Elon Musk

someone who has
no principles except for

these kind of weird Muskist kind of
every man for himself and me first

principles without any constraint
and with unlimited access

to a capital market fattened on
quantitative easing and huge bailouts

and you get what we have now,

you get this weird,
manifestly unfit, paranoid

ultimately very stupid man, who's become
extremely important to our politics.

[Mehran] Thank you, Cory.

Yanis, you've heard
Cory's diagnosis.

What's your take?

[Yanis] It's so good to be
hearing and listening to Corey,

because so far, for a while now, we've
been reading each other's books,

we have been endorsing each other,
promoting each other's books.

It's very good to actually be,

even if it's only in two dimensions,
through the medium of cloud capital.

It's great, Corey, to be
on the same timeline

and not just exchanging
text messages.

Look, the only reason why we're
talking about Elon Musk

and not Jeff Bezos or Zuckerberg

presently is because
he has become

the de facto vice president
of the United States.
He purchased a very cushy position in the administration.

It was an amazing, an astonishing investment
for a couple of hundred millions,

a couple of hundred billions,
actually more.

I don't think there is a
better return to one's dollar

than what he has already achieved.

Okay, so this is why
we're talking about him.

I personally don't care at all, if he
writes an op-ed in Die Welt

about his support of the AfD.

I believe in free speech.

If he wants to support
poor excuses for human nature

in the German elections,
let him do it.

Personally, I don't think
this is what is worrying.

It's not just him, of course.

There is a gentleman that
you all know, Peter Thiel,

that he has also engaged with himself.

These people who have joined the
Trump campaign relatively early on.

Peter Thiel supplied the
actual vice president, right?

It was a former employee
of Peter Thiel.

All these things are perfectly legitimate
reasons to feel sick in the stomach.

when you have men, the
brolicarchy of tremendous wealth

with a very sordid history.

Don't forget the way that they've been
treating the mothers of their children,

trying to impoverish them
through the courts,

the way they've been endorsing
books that are justifying torture

and laugh at the notion of human rights,

the zillions that they are
making from government

and milking that particular procurement,

the manner in which they are targeting
any government program

which doesn't enrich them,

but it does something little
in order to assist the poor.

This is all nauseating stuff.

More recently, we saw Giorgia
Meloni, the Italian Prime Minister,

visiting Miami and having
a little tête-à-tête with Elon Musk.

I can tell you that one of the reasons
why Elon Musk is so enamored of her

and doesn't want her
to be deposed unlike

Nigel Farage that for some reason,
suddenly he's in his bad books.

He wants, instead of giving
him 100 million pounds,

he wants to depose him from the
leadership of the reform UK party.

The reason is that Meloni has effectively

offered him the opportunity of having
the Italian state move away from IRIS-II,

the satellite network that the
European Union was planning to

create in competition with Starlink.

That is a reason to
be extremely worried

when you have such deals
being concocted in Mar-a-Lago

between the Italian neo-fascist
Prime Minister and Elon Musk.

I don't need to add
any adjectives to him.

But, having said all that, and let me
just add one more thing,

He's not a free speech absolutist,

he's an absolutist, he's a totalitarian,

but that doesn't mean he
cares about free speech

unless it is his own free speech.

Supposedly, he's supporting
Tommy Robinson's free speech,

and the fact that Tommy Robinson
is in prison for contempt of court,

for actually lying about
a refugee, a Syrian refugee,

in court and outside of court.

But, when Julian Assange was rotting,

rotting in the Belmarsh
High Security Prison,

Elon Musk said not one word,
because for him,

a man who is convicted of nothing

should rot in prison if he goes against
the interests of the CIA, of the NSA,

of the Pentagon, and of Elon Musk.

So give it a rest, Elon.
You don't give a damn about freedom of
speech and freedom of expression,

especially for the free press.

But the point of...

Now I'm going to play, to
some extent, devil's advocate

in actually arguing that we need to ask
ourselves what is really new about this?

Because many people are pretending
that what is happening with Musk,

with Thiel, and with the other members
of the Brotherhood of the Old Brolicarchy,

that this is something really new.

Well, is it?

Is it really new?

I mean, yes, but not for the
reasons that most journalists

of the liberal establishment
press tell us.

John D. Rockefeller, he headed a dynasty
that makes Musk look an amateur.

Henry Ford, he bought newspapers

and canvassed and effectively forced
municipalities to rip out tramways

and to replace them with

Ford automobiles and buses.

Thomas Edison electrocuted famously,
an elephant at Coney Island

just to demonstrate that Westinghouse's

direct current electricity was dangerous,

sorry, alternating current was dangerous,
whereas Edison's direct current wasn't.

Big business has always enjoyed a revolving
door kind of relationship with government.

Remember that Bill Clinton appointed
Rubin, the CEO of Goldman Sachs,

to the to the treasury, as
his treasury finance minister,

in order effectively
to remove all and every

shackle that was, since the 1930s,
holding back Goldman Sachs

from effectively committing the crimes
that they committed immediately after
the Clinton administration
allowed them to do this.
And then, Obama brings the same person back in,

in order to bail out the same banks

after 2008 collapse
that these bankers had created.

So we have to keep all this in mind.

But here's how we can
complete this long thought.

There is one thing which is new

and that is the new form of capital
that these people actually possess.

Everybody knows that
I call it cloud capital.

It's not a produced means of production.

It's a produced means of
behavioral modification.

It's effectively a new hyper weapon,

which these broligarchs, these
cloudalists, as I call them,

or technofeudal barons or lords,
they possess, which, a Henry Ford,

a Thomas Edison, a Westinghouse,
a Rockefeller didn't.

Unless we understand
the manner in which

this new form of capital,
which I call cloud capital,

operates, and the way
that it usurps markets,

it replaces them,
it replaces profit with rent,

it effectively turns capital,
cloud capital, into a gigantic parasite,

which is a hundred times,
a million times bigger than

the organism on which
it is parasitic.

The organism is traditional capitalism

and of course, the labor force

and, of course, the surplus value
that these workers produce.

We need to understand that,
because this new hyper weapon

of the lords of big tech, of the Musks
of the world, not just Musk, Gates, Google,

don't forget them, right?
Even though they are Democrats,
they've always been in this game

and they're already in the inner circle
of Trump or they will be very soon.

It is important to hone in
on the political economy

of the phenomenon of which Musk
is simply an epiphenomenon.

[Mehran] Thank you, Yanis.

Before I hand the floor
back to you, Cory,

a couple of questions and
comments from the chat.

Subradeep says: 'Musk is the
face of right-wing extremism.

His extension of support for British
anti-immigrant parties is a clear sign.'

Kirk Doherty says: 'An open market system
should be open to everybody

without regulations to stop these rich
boys from monopolising markets.

When I was a kid, monopolies were
broken up, now they're not.

Sandoz says: 'Musk bought Twitter
specifically to be able to

use his power to control the narrative,
he's a real life Bond villain.

And Anonymous Friend notes that:

'It's a menace to U.S.
national security state,

to allow someone
to get this wealthy.'

Cory, hand it back to you,
and you'll turn it to Yanis.

[Cory] Sure yeah, I think that it's important to
understand what Musk is actually doing.

So Yanis used the phrase,
behavior modification

and there's different ways of people
deploying that phrase when they

describe how tech works.

I think some of them
are quite useful.

Like, if you're a tech guy
and you understand that

people have certain activities
that are non-discretionary,

like being enmeshed in a community
or dealing with government services

or your employer, or if your
kid is going to school

and they have to use certain services,
then how you use the technology

does indeed modify
people's behavior, right?

You do in fact, force people to conduct
their affairs in certain ways

and I think that is what we talk about
when we talk about the risks of monopoly.

Historically, the case against monopoly

which, has been around
for a very long time.

People have argued about
this for a very long time.

Historically, the case for that
has been that

if the state does not regulate firms
to prevent them from getting too big,

then the firms themselves
become regulators.

They get to decide who
enters the market,

they get to decide how people
conduct their lives, and so on.

If the only way you're going to get
broadband out in the countryside

is with Elon Musk because Musk
has convinced governments

not to pull fiber out to
low-density communities,

which is a thing that he's
currently embarked upon.

It's an echo of something
he did previously,

which was to have this
kind of fake high-speed train

between San Francisco and LA

that he promised but never built

after building this
ridiculous demonstration,

which is a tiny tunnel in Las Vegas that
goes from a hotel to a convention center.

He said, soon we'll build a version
of this that's much larger

and it'll be evacuated
so it'll be frictionless

and we'll send Tesla's through it so fast
that no one will ever need the train.

And so then you starve the state
of investment in public transit

and you get to sell cars
in the same way

where we're seeing a drawdown
of investment in fiber

in places where Starlink
is very successful,

notably in Ontario where I'm from
in Canada, there's been a lot of this,

and this is coming as a result of Musk
wanting to control our behavior, right?

If he's the only game in town, when
you want to get on the internet,

and we all have to get on the internet,

that's where our bank is,
and our family is,

and our job is, and our kid's school is,

and how we interact with politics
and civics and so on,

then you have to do it through Musk.

And so if Musk makes choices
about which services are available

or which ones are prioritized
and which ones are downranked

or how the services build and
whether upload is billed at a higher rate

than download so you can
consume but not participate.

That's structuring private behavior.

It's a very powerful form
of behavior modification.

But there's another form
of behavior modification

that tech bros like to claim,

and it goes back to this
science fictional conceit,

which is that tech bros take
this warmed over, Skinnerian

behavior modification psychology,

and they declare that they can combine
it with big data and automated processes;

these days they just say with AI

and that they can use that to
bypass your critical faculties

to make you do
whatever they want.

And this is a very self-serving claim,
especially if you're selling ads, right?

If your pitch to the advertisers
is the reason you should to pay

a 40% premium to
advertise on my service

is that I built a functional mind
control ray using big data,

then that's a very great pitch.
But, everyone who's ever claimed
to have built a mind control ray

was lying to themselves
or everyone else.

It was true of Rasputin,
it was true of Mesmer,

it was true of the CIA with MKUltra,
it's true of pickup artists

and people who believe in
neuro-linguistic programming.

It's all junk.

Whatever behavior mod you get
out of a new kind of trick,

quickly regresses to the mean,

the era in which 99 cents does not
automatically equal a dollar

is long behind us, but there was
a time when you could sell someone

something for 99 cents
and they didn't realize that

you were selling them
something for a dollar.

And so these tricks regress
to the mean very quickly

and yet, you have these claims
that are quite extraordinary

being made by tech bros and sometimes
being echoed by their own critics.

This is a thing the scholar at Virginia
Tech, Lee Vinsel, calls Crit-a-Hype,

where you repeat the hype claims.

So we saw a lot of this with Musk
and his claims about automation.

Musk knows that his audience
of business leaders is insatiably

horny for firing workers

and replacing them with
machines who don't talk back.

And that's why Musk has
put so much energy

into pretending to
have built a robot.

Three years ago, he put a guy
in a robot costume on stage

and had that robot dance around on stage
and declared it to be a robot.

Last year, he put a
remote-controlled robot on stage

that was being controlled by workers
in an off-site location

and lied and said that it was
an autonomous robot bartender

that would soon make
every bartender obsolete.

These claims can be repeated
in critical ways that are useful

and in critical ways that
are useless or harmful.

So we can say usefully,
it's quite shameful

that Musk and his
audience of business leaders

hate workers and don't want to pay them

and would like to discipline
them with automation

and suppress their wages.

We can say that it's ridiculous

that they put on these
absurd demos

where they're just using this
kind of Potemkin technology.

Those are good and useful criticisms,
because they strike at the root of

how Musk is raising money and
converting money to power.

But then, there's a harmful criticism,

a criticism that's self-defeating,

which is to say, Musk has
got a mind control ray

because he owns Twitter,

or Musk is going to make labor obsolete
because he's got functional robots,

or Musk is going to put all the
taxi drivers out of business

because he's invented
a full self-driving car.

Musk has promised
a full self-driving car

within 12 months every year
since 2014, like clockwork.

He does not have a
full self-driving car.

He is not likely to have a full
self-driving car anytime soon.

If we point out that he's lying in order
to suck in naive investors

and to feed a hype cycle

that is hostile to workers
and human thriving,

we do good work in
countering Musk's power,

but, if we repeat his self-serving
lies as criticism, right?

If we say Musk is a sorcerer
who's got autonomous robots,

a super intelligent AI,
a self-driving car,

all of the things that
he claims that he's got,

which he manifestly
doesn't have,

we help him sell stock
in his enterprises.

We help him land more cushy,
no-bid government contracts.

We help him hold back
the public transit investment,

broadband investment,
all of these other things.

A good example of this
would actually just be

understanding the
limitations of Starlink.

So Starlink, it is a revolutionary technology in many ways,

and there are certainly
applications for it.

No one's ever gonna
put a fiber optic cable

on a ship in the middle
of the Pacific Ocean.

That's a place where having a
satellite constellation be very useful,

but the idea that Starlink can ever
compete with hardline internet,

let alone fiber, is absurd.

We're talking about a technology
whose maximum speed,

if you are the sole user of it,

is one one-millionth of the maximum
speed of a single strand of fiber,

but unlike fiber, you
can't add to that speed.

You can put lots of strands
of fiber in the same conduit,

and unlike fiber, every time
someone joins your Starlink cluster,

one of your neighbors on Starlink,

your speed drops in half.

The idea that we can
just somehow solve this

by 'innovating', is like the idea that we can
somehow solve the traffic problem

by innovating with self driving cars.

Geometry hates cars.

There is no number of self-driving cars
you can add that will reduce traffic

in the same way that there's no number
of spectrum sharing satellite transceivers

that can reduce the congestion
on the only electromagnetic spectrum

in the universe that
we have accessible to us.

And so it's really important to focus

on the material reality
of what he's delivering

and to contrast that with
what he's claiming to deliver

and to focus our a criticism on
the things that make him poorer

and weaker and not the things
that help him sell more nonsense.

[Mehran] Thank you Cory.

Yanis, as I hand it over to you, just to
tee it up on the same topic,

Sasha from the chat says: 'I get that AI
and digital cloud technologies are scary,

but do we actually believe it's something
entirely new and that much more effective

at modifying behavior than TV
and traditional media used to be?'

[Yanis] Yes, absolutely.

But first let me also say that:
you see, Musk has succeeded

in making us talk about him

and not talk about Jeff Bezos,

who is a far more scary figure for me
and a greater menace to the world.

And not just him, right?

But Thiel, Google and so on,
Zuckerberg, what happened?

Have we forgotten about Zuckerberg
and Cambridge Analytica

and Facebook and all that
and Instagram?

So he succeeded.

One of the reasons why he
bought Twitter was because

he didn't have that
much cloud capital.

They were producing
all type of terrestrial capital,

even if some of it went up in space.

Let me now answer our viewer's point,

which I think goes to the heart of it,

and it also connects with another question

that we had in the chat on YouTube.

Is it any different to a monopoly?

Is this different to standard
monopoly capitalism?

Why can't we regulate Big Tech in the way
that Roosevelt regulated and broke up

Standard Oil and
Rockefeller's enterprises.

There is a difference.

The difference is that from where
I'm standing, take Amazon for instance,

it's not a monopoly, folks.

It's not even a marketplace.

It is a trading platform
on which you will find

hundreds of thousands at every
moment in time of buyers and sellers.

But it is not a market.

Because a market requires a degree
of decentralization, even a monopoly.

Imagine you go into a shopping
mall which is owned by one person

and that person owns all the shops,
controls everything that is there,

the advertising, everything.

At least you and I you know,
you Cory, me, Mehran,

we can walk around together and
we can actually talk about it.

We can even organize a little consumer
boycott between the three of us saying

we're not going to buy from that bastard
who owns the shopping mall, right?

But when you're in Amazon,
you can't talk to one another.

Every communication, every sale,
every offer, every post is regulated

by a centrally planned algorithm
that belongs to Jeff Bezos.

So essentially, this is not a market.

It's a trading place which is controlled,

which as I've written before,
and Cory knows that I like to make this point,

it is the wet dream of the Soviet planners,

of Gosplan, of the Ministry
of Economic Planning.

Because what was the Ministry
of Economic Planning, Gosplan,

trying to do under the Soviet Union,
especially after 1956?

They were trying to replace the market,

especially after they got rid of the
new economic policy of Lenin and so on.

They wanted to replace the market
with a bureaucratic system,

a cybernetic kind of algorithmic
process,

by which to match individual consumers

with individual producers, or with
factories, or with farmers.

And saying to the factory that made shoes,

we want so many shoes, color black,
these sizes, at these prices.

And then match these shoes
with the demand from the consumers.

Okay, to replace the market.

Now this is exactly, exactly what
the algorithm of Amazon does.

The difference is that under
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,

at least there were some pretence,
that this was done for the purposes

of maximizing social welfare.

Whereas in the case of Amazon,
it's not even a secret.

The algorithm is optimized
for one purpose:

to maximize the likelihood
that Jeff Bezos will extract

the maximum rent from each transaction

and the maximum amount of free labor
from each one of us

who posts and reviews and does stuff on
Amazon.com, right?

So this is not a monopoly.
I call it a cloud thiefdom.

You can call it a digital thiefdom or a
digital platform which is feudal in nature

because this guy
doesn't produce anything

of the stuff that you buy on Amazon.

He simply charges a rent

for every economic activity
that is happening on that.

I call it a cloud rent in order to
distinguish it from a ground rent.

Because the cloud rent, unlike in feudalism,

requires in order to materialize,
it requires a lot of capital.

But it's a cloud capital form.

It is of the algorithm type
which modifies what we do.

Cory is right: they will
never succeed, thankfully...

Thankfully, they will never
succeed in brainwashing us,

in making me want to buy a coffee
machine if I don't like coffee.

They will never be able to do that.

But they can modify my behavior
regarding my priorities.

If I want to buy an electric bicycle,

I may buy much, much
earlier than I would have.

And I will buy it from a vendor that
the algorithm chooses for me

for the purpose of maximizing
the cloud rent of Jeff Bezos.

Now, that is a unique power and
one that you cannot regulate

in a way that the Teddy Roosevelt

administration utilized
in order to regulate.

So we need something
very, very different here,

unless we find ways of
socializing the algorithm

and changing property
rights of the algorithm,

I don't believe we can do very much

in the standard New Deal, social
democratic European manner.

[Mehran] Thank you, Yanis.

There's lots of people on the chat
who are clamoring for solutions to

some of the problems
that we're talking about.

We will get to that in a minute.

But before I do, since we talk politics
and this is a political topic, Yanis,

while you still have the floor,
I would just like to focus a little on

Musk's recent interventions
in European politics.

And if you can draw for us, what
is it about European politics?

Is European politics uniquely
vulnerable to this kind of influence?

Is there something new
that's happening here or not?

Is this just the same old billionaires'
influencing politics as always?

[Yanis] Well, we need to separate Musk's
reasons for doing what he's doing,

which I don't understand,
I have to admit.

I think that the guy is probably
on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

I think that he may need some
therapy for his own purposes.

If you remember the great movie
Citizen Kane, when Kane starts losing it

and he wants to be not only
the great distributor of news,

but he also wants
to be president.

He wants to be senator
or whatever it is.

The only thing he didn't
want to become at some point

was archbishop or, the pope.

So there is paranoia.

But I don't care what, I'm not in
the business of minding Musk's soul.

But the point you are raising,
Mehran, is central.

It's the reason why DiEM25 exists,
because Europe is bunk.

We created DiEM25 because in
2015-2016 it became absolutely obvious,

evident, self-evident that it is a faulty
political and economic design,

especially after we created
the common currency.

We have effectively created
the circumstances

that will maximize the magnitude and
depth of economic crisis,

of social crisis, of political crisis,

while at the same time removing
all the shock absorbers,

the social programs and
the social support programs

that would ameliorate this crisis.

And the result is, we were saying,
remember, back in 2015, 2016,

that Europe will either democratize, or
by 2025, and thus the 25 in DiEM25,

this whole thing called the European Union
is going to start disintegrating

with immense political, social,
ethical, of course technological costs.

And this is what is happening.

So you know, in Europe now,
there is no government in Germany,

there is no government in France.

The Austrian government has
just not even convened.

Holland has a government
which they can't be proud of,

with the Geert Wilders party effectively
having the prime ministership.

Italy is in the hands of a neo-fascist.

The greatest hope of the liberal
establishment, Emmanuel Macron,

is effectively a lame duck
facing an early retirement.

And the most interesting thing is that

the greatest, if you want,
organizational mind in Europe

from the establishment point
of view, Mario Draghi,

the former head of the
European Central Bank

and former Italian Prime Minister,

who came out with a proposal
which is interesting.

I mean, at least it's a sensible,
rational, bourgeois, liberal proposal

for what needs be done in Europe,

that he was paid millions in order to
produce by European taxpayers.

He tabled that proposal a few months ago
and it's already in the dustbin.

It's already been confined
to the dustbin of history

by the leaders of Europe.

So that I think explains why any Musk
around the world,

any sort of deranged ultra-rightist

with a smidgen of power can
poke fun at the Europeans.

It is absurd that it is an issue that
Musk wrote and op-ed in Die Welt.

Who cares?

And the only reason why we care is
because we feel so insecure

as a result of having allowed
the European Union effectively to

become non-viable and a clear
and present danger for humanity,

not just for Europeans, but we are
the stupid continent

that is going to play a very significant
role in destabilizing the globe.

[Mehran] Thank you Yanis.

Cory, your take on that please.

[Cory] So I'm slightly more
optimistic about Europe

maybe because I'm the regretful
holder of a British passport

and so I keenly feel the loss of
my European-ness

and have done for many years.

I think that if we want to think
about the underlying motivations,

the political economy of how and why
people fight monopolies

and then the nuts and bolts of
how monopolies get fought,

look at the historic examples and
some contemporary examples,

there are some important differences,
Yanis, as you say,

between the trust-busting fights
of the Gilded Age

and the early part of the 20th century,
going after Rockefeller and so on.

And some of them cut against
using the tools that we had before, right?

I think you've enumerated them well.

But some of those differences
actually cut in favor of doing

monopoly enforcement
in today's world.

So one would be the globalized
nature of tech platforms.

This is weirdly enough,
a kind of advantage

or can be turned to advantage
by regulators

and an example of that pretty recently
is that the United Kingdom chartered

in I believe 2019 the
largest technical unit

of any competition
regulator in the world,

something called the Digital Markets Unit
at the Competition and Markets Authority.

They hired 70 engineers on
full-time government salaries

to do really deep in-depth investigations

of the monopolization
tactics of large tech firms.

This is an order of magnitude
more technologists per capita

than any other competition
regulator in the world,

and there was meant to be secondary

legislation to give them
enforcement powers

that they could use in combination
with all this technical expertise,

and that secondary legislation
just died on the order paper,

year after year until late last year,

not because of any particular
animus, I'll get to that in a second,

among regulators against antitrust,

but just because the UK has been
in such a shambles, right?

They just have government
after government,

proroguing after proroguing,
no confidence votes and so on.

And so they just couldn't pass

legislation that was
ultimately uncontroversial

because I believe
the digital markets units'

enforcement powers were,
if not unanimous, at least broadly

bipartisan within the British Parliament
when they were finally given.

So you have this giant unit

with lots of engineers doing
these really deep dives

into the scam of tech.

So they did this big
report on ad tech,

they did another report
on platform economies,

they did another report on mobile
economies and mobile devices,

which they couldn't
do anything with.

400 pages of exquisitely
researched market studies

compelled from firms using investigatory
powers that could force firms to explain

how they worked on penalty of perjury,

nothing they could do with them.

But across the channel, you have
the European Commission,

which has enormous enforcement
powers and almost no engineers.

And so, they were able
to pick up these reports

and use them both as the basis for some
very successful enforcement actions,

taking, I believe it was
billions out of Apple

for the mobile payments abuse,

but also as the basis for the Digital
Markets Act and the Digital Services Act.

And it didn't end there.

So it turns out that the
same scam that Apple

and Google and Facebook
and Twitter

and all these other companies,

the same scams they pull
in the United Kingdom,

they're not just identical
in the European Union,

they're identical in every
country in the world.
And so Japan and South Korea

translated the European
case against Apple

that had been so successful

and brought it in Japan and South Korea

and won more judgments against
Apple in both of those territories.

There is no reason that
countries in the Global South

whose economies have been raided
by these big tech platforms

couldn't pick up the ball
and do this again.

I mean Nigeria has a lot
of tech experience,

they could very easily
bring a similar kind of case

using the exhibits
and the arguments that

have already won in
all these other courts,

and they could not only take
hundreds of millions of dollars back

out of Apple, Google, and Facebook

that these companies
looted from their economies,

they could also open the space
for an indigenous tech sector

by coming down on these firms.

So this is an area of hope.

This is not a thing you could
have done against Rockefeller.

I mean, Rockefeller had an
empire that spanned the globe.

He had a huge German operation, but
the German operation was sui generis.

He was not doing in Germany
what he did in America.

It's true that once they
weakened his empire in America,

they reduced his power
to resist German enforcers,

but they could not just copy and paste
an American case against Rockefeller.

In terms of the other
advantage that Europe has,

and I think lawmakers have more
broadly around the world,

especially outside of the United States,

it's that the people who
live in those countries

don't view these tech companies
as domestic success stories.

They see them as foreign
exploitative entities.

There is great political will

for taking down American tech giants

in Europe, in Canada, in
South Korea, in Japan, and so on.

I mean, once you've had
your own tech sector destroyed,

both by the forces of history and by
the predatory conduct of these firms,

There's no reason not to tackle them.

You know, if Margrethe Vestager

was going after a still vibrant
European tech sector,

if she was attacking Nokia, Ericsson,
Deutsche Telekom, and Olivetti,

she would have real trouble
in the European Parliament.

But no matter how
many times Nick Clegg

kind of slimed his way into Brussels

and said: Facebook is here
to defend European cyberspace

from Chinese communism.

Nobody believed him, right?

They understood that
his 4 million a year

was being paid to him so that
he could open European markets

to an American firm.

And so there is great
political will for doing this.

And unlike other things that
there might be political will for

like turning away refugees or eroding
the welfare state or what have you,

these things actually improve
your economy, right?

On the one hand, there's the cash that
you just extract from these firms,

and that's the reason that so many
American, red state, conservative,

Attorneys General have
gone after companies

like Google and Facebook and so on.

It's because if your path to
electoral victory in say, Texas

is to promise never to have taxes,
but at the same time,

Texans expect to have roads,

you need to find some
money from somewhere.

And so rather than taxing billionaires,
you can attack woke big tech companies

on the coasts and hit them for
hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is true in Europe.

It's true in the Global South.

It's true anywhere you want
to extract money from them.

But it's also good because it
incubates a domestic tech sector.

There's nothing about tech
that is uniquely American,

and indeed the fact that Americans are
setting tech policy for the world

is bad for the world.
There are unique local reasons
to regulate tech in certain ways,

to build tech in certain ways.

The idea that the thing that works for

bros in Menlo Park is ideally
adapted for people everywhere else

is not just theoretically false,
but provably false.

Like in West Africa, the widest
used messaging tool

is not WhatsApp, it's a
thing called GB WhatsApp,

which is an illegal interoperable WhatsApp

alternative interface that was
developed by open source hackers

on the battlefields of Syria to adapt
WhatsApp to their own uses.

And then it's spread around the globe
and has become the West African

go-to version of WhatsApp

because there's just locally appropriate
ways to design a messaging protocol

that are not uppermost in the
minds of bros in Menlo Park

when they're designing it.

So this is good policy.

It's policy that is popular,
that the public likes,

that puts money into the public coffers,

that is relatively straightforward
to enforce

compared to the historic
contours of antitrust

when we had to build a case
against giant firms in every country.

Now we can build the case
collaboratively across multiple countries

and they deserve it, right?

It makes the world a better place!

So i have some optimism
here for Europeans

not because I think
European lawmakers are good

or virtuous or competent

but because I think that the
circumstances are right

for venal, flawed, incompetent,
regulators to do lots of good things.

[Mehran] Thank you Cory.

Yanis, if we were all lobbying the EU
in the way that Cory proposed,

do you think they're likely
to go for it?

[Yanis] I would never lobby
the EU ever again.

I think it's a lost cause.

You know, I have a very sorry
and long experience of that.

I think they are a lost cause.

To plug your book, Cory.

[Cory] Oh, yeah, lost cause,
a great sci-fi.

[Yanis] You should read it, folks.

[Cory] I have a copy of that
around here somewhere.

[Yanis] There you are.

[Yanis] Along with, what was it,
Radicalized,

which was a very prescient novel regarding
the killing of the, what's his name,

the health insurance executive.

[Cory] Yeah, the sociopath.

[Yanis] Just plugging a
couple of books by Cory.

[Cory] Thank you.

[Yanis] Brilliant books, Cory,
well done.

Because, Cory is not just a
political economist and theorist

of the internet and
shitification and all that,

but he's a great novelist as well.

And he keeps writing, and he
keeps churning them out.

I've only produced one.

And I don't think I will
produce another one.

[Cory] This one comes out
on February 15th.

Yeah, this is the third
Martin Hench book.

And there's a Kickstarter
to pre-order it right now.

It's from Macmillan, but these
Kickstarters are really helpful.

I launched it about an hour ago,
maybe two hours now,

and it is, where is it sitting at?

I think about $30,000,
so it's doing quite well.

I can paste the URL
into the chat here.

[Yanis] We'll put it on our site.

But let me now slightly disagree
with you about Europe in particular.

Before disagreeing, I will agree that,
we need to be very hopeful

on the prospects of what I call
techno rebellions

of using technologies in the ways
that you have already outlined

in order to counter the exorbitant power
of what I call a cloud capital.

There's no doubt about that.

It's already happening in Africa,

it's already happening in various
places in the United States,

but it's only the very beginning.

We cannot be triumphalists
about that because it's only

tiny little chinks in
the armor of big tech.

On the question of Europe,
you will allow me to say that,

yes, I see your point, that Brussels
should go all out against Silicon Valley.

Because we didn't do in
Europe what the Chinese did.

The Chinese erected a huge Chinese
wall and they created their own.

We don't have our own.

We have zero European cloud capital.

Even the cloud capital that emerges in
Europe very quickly becomes Americanized

like Volt, for instance, it is
gobbled up by Silicon Valley.

So they could, they
have the knowledge,

they have the bureaucracy,
the bureaucrats,

they have the lawyers, they have the
legal power to make a serious dent

in the armor of Silicon Valley,
but they don't do it.

I was just looking at the numbers, Amazon
made 55 billion euros in revenues

last year in 2024, across
the European Union.

He paid zero tax, precisely zero tax

through the Dutch double sandwich with
Ireland and Caribbean islands and so on.

So they could have
put an end to that.

There's no doubt that

some of the people in Brussels
wanted to put an end to that.

Margrethe Vestager whom you mentioned
before, tried to put an end to that.

She lost every single case
in the European courts.

Every single case she has lost.

And the money that has
been extracted from Apple,

the 16 billion, which the Irish
government did not want to take,

they were forced to take,
has already been set aside.

I don't know whether
you know that,

not in order to build housing
for the homeless in Ireland,

and Ireland is a very rich country
these days because of big tech,

because of the tax breaks and so on,
but it has a very serious social crisis,

social care crisis,
housing crisis and so on.

Instead of using that money

that they were forced to take
by the European Union,

they are setting it aside in order to
create electricity generation capacities

for the big tech
on behalf of big tech.

So that is an absolute
catastrophe in Europe.

And, but more broadly, Cory,
I'd love to say that if you don't

own your own cloud capital,
you're doomed.

Your powers to enforce
and to regulate will wane.

And don't forget that, yes, this is
what we are trying to do as DiEM25.

We're trying to harvest the anger,

the rage of Europeans against

this kind of peasantry in which they
have been reduced to by Silicon Valley.

We try to utilize it
in order to give it creative

ways of expressing itself

through policy, through serious thinking,
not through just blatant anger.

But, at the very same time,

there is a very large, silent, idiotic
majority out there in Europe,

let's be honest about that,
who don't give a damn.

For whom Google is
like the air they breathe.

And if you say anything to
them about regulating Google,

they say they will go and
fight on Google's side.