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,

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or if you prefer to hear us on a podcast, just go to your favourite podcasting app

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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.

We must not forget.

Interoperability, you mentioned interoperability a number of times

and of course, you've done a lot of great work on that

and you told me - it was before I went to China a few months ago-

and I checked that you were right,

the Chinese are imposing interoperability

the Europeans could impose interoperability

and they're not doing it

and they will never do it because you know what?

Well there is no way they would do it, zero probability.

I mean these people, the ones representing

the balance of power in the European Parliament today

because they are utterly in the pocket

of Wall Street on the one hand and Silicon Valley on the other.

They simply do not have the capacity.

Let me put it this way.

One of the great powers of cloud capital is that it can poison the conversation.

This is something that Elon Musk tries to do single-handedly,

going back to our original theme today of that particular gentleman.

Once you poison the conversation, you can't really create the political discourse

which is necessary to underpin the legislative work

that is necessary in order to introduce interoperability.

I am becoming, even though I am libertarian to my bone,

as a Libertarian Marxist to confuse people,

to my bone, without creating a protective shield

within which to grow your own publicly owned cloud capital.

Unless you can do that and therefore create

an alternative Facebook, an alternative X,

an alternative Uber for that matter,

that is owned by the municipality

and combines Airbnb and Uber but in a way that the algorithm is primed

in favor of the well-being of the people who live there not in favor of the owners,

the private equity that owns Uber or Airbnb.

Unless you do that, your powers to regulate will wane, or will never be used.

[Mehran] Thank you Yanis

and as I hand it back to you Cory if I may.

[Cory] Yeah, I agree that developing a domestic capacity is critical.

I want to say that the European Union is already doing

some interop mandates, right?

The Digital Markets Act has got this end-to-end encrypted messaging mandate.

It's not where I would have started with the DMA,

but the DMA is like: there's enforcement action underway.

There are firms that have made their

representations about how they're going to comply with the rule.

The rule is enforced.

I mean we'll see how much they

thumb their nose at the rule

and their final implementations

and whether they face any retribution for doing so.

I agree that Ireland is a basket case

and I think that it illustrates one of the real problems with federalism broadly.

Having grown up in Canada and now living in the United States

and having lived in Europe for some years, federalism works well but fails badly.

The problem of federalism is that small states

don't want to be in the federation unless they have a relative

degree of autonomy,

but then they don't have the power to resist

outside actors who want them to sell golden passports

or create crime havens in the way that Ireland has,

where you just draw down corporate enforcement.

Because it's not just tech enforcement that is light in Ireland, right?

As you point out, it's tax enforcement is the start of it,

but they're also lax on privacy, they're lax on labor rights,

they're lax on all things where the jurisdiction for enforcement starts there.

The DMA and the DSA are quite interesting in that they both bypass the Irish court.

So the first port of call for enforcing DMA and DSA

violations is the European Court of Justice,

which is a wildly imperfect entity, but it's not the Irish data commissioner.

The Irish data commissioner, to a first approximation,

doesn't get out of bed.

And when they do, they spend most of the day

in their pajamas eating breakfast cereal and watching cartoons, right?

Ireland is the place where privacy cases go to die.

That's not true of the ECJ.

The ECJ has got lots of problems, but it's not that problem.

And when big privacy cases go before the ECJ,

the ECJ takes big bites out of big tech firms.

And so, I think there's some reason,

there's an ember there that we should be trying to fan into a coal.

I don't mean that to say that we've solved the problem.

I mean to say that we have something going on that

is quite interesting.

And the other thing that's interesting about it

is that it's not being driven by the lawmakers themselves, right?

There is no lobby for antitrust.

There's no one who's got billions of dollars

who's spending money to inveigle the world's governments

into breaking up corporations or limiting their corporate power.

This is like an indigenous phenomenon

that is arising spontaneously out of lawmakers and their constituents

because of where we are.

There is this law in finance,

anything that can't go on forever eventually stops: Stein's law.

There are phenomena that are underway

in the world that are long run phenomena that date back to neoliberalism

and Reagan and Cole and Thatcher that have run out of runway.

And I take your point from Technofeudalism,

I think actually the most sharp and important point in Technofeudalism,

which is that Marxists can be right,

that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction,

but that the thing that succeeds capitalism, might be feudalism.

I think that's a that's an extremely important point

that I think has been lost on a lot of Leftists

as they've been awaiting capitalism's implosion

is that it might leave behind something even worse.

I congratulate you for it.

There's lots to love about that book

but that part is something I return to over and over again.

But we are at this kind of end stage

of a certain kind of economic arrangement

as can be witnessed by

the spontaneous eruption among lawmakers and their constituents

of policies unprecedented in two generations

that are squarely aimed at tackling corporate power

even as there are other policies that are squarely aimed at increasing it.

I don't want to pretend

that what we've seen is a fully erect primate striding the land.

What we have is a lungfish, right?

We have seen the evolution from

a kind of slime creature living in the water

into something that can hesitantly walk on the land, sometimes.

And what it turns into next is, I would like to think up for grabs.

It's the thing that I find most hopeful

in the sense that I think this movement against corporate power,

which cuts across certain political boundaries,

which cuts across certain geographic boundaries,

and cuts across certain ideological boundaries

in ways that we haven't seen in a long time.

I think the last time I spent as much time as I do now

with people who identify as Right-wingers

was during the Solidarność campaign,

where I would show up at protests in favor of Polish trade unionists

and be marching alongside hardcore Reaganite Republicans

who supported Lech Walesa and Solidarność because they were anti-Soviet

and not because they were pro-worker, right?

We're at this very strange juncture

and it is a thing that we should be seizing a hold of

and that we should be doing as much as we can with

without mistaking it for the thing that is the final stage

of the tool that we're going to need

to dismantle capitalism.

In terms of developing that domestic capacity,

domestic cloud infrastructure and so on,

I think that the beauty of Interop

is that it produces a kind of intermediate stage

between being stuck on Amazon's cloud

and being able to have your own cloud

or to play Amazon's cloud off against

a more distributed architecture or whatever.

In the sens of that if you can, on the one hand,

withdraw Amazon's right to sue you

for reverse engineering and hacking its services to set people free,

and on the other hand, produce policies that nominally at least,

force Amazon to do some interoperability,

that between those two things,

you can do stuff like say: okay well, we're not going to

dismantle Amazon's cloud today, right?

We don't have those data centers,

we don't have that infrastructure,

we don't have that code written,

but what we are going to do, is we're going to use a combination

of law and policy to make it a one-click venture

to move from Amazon's cloud to Google's cloud to Microsoft's cloud.

That's not great, it's far from ideal.

But all of those firms will behave better

if they're worried about losing their customers' business.

And as they behave better, they will be weaker

in terms of their cutthroat capacity to influence law and policy,

which will open space for better law and policy,

for more labor organizing, for all these other things.

It's a way to slide from one state to another

and it doesn't require that we have a complete program

that takes us in a step change

from us all being cloud serfs

to us having a cooperative cloud infrastructure tomorrow.

[Mehran] On that note, Cory,

if I can ask you and also, many people on the chat

are asking for something that goes in this direction.

We are going a little bit over time,

I hope that's okay.

Is there anything in terms of actionable solutions

that we could leave people with?

What is the thing that really scares the shit out of these tech companies

that doesn't depend on higher powers

stepping in and taking their toys away or making life difficult for them?

What would you get people to do after watching this?

Are there campaigns that are interesting?

Are there specific weak spots that can be targeted?

Are there organizations that are worth supporting

that go in the direction of reining in the unbridled power of big tech?

[Cory] I don't think there's much individuals can do, I'm sorry to say.

I think that these are policy problems, they're macro-economic problems.

Forming tech unions, supporting tech unions,

supporting tech unions as part of a revitalized labor market,

that's all very important.

It's something every worker

and everyone who thinks about a better future should be involved with.

In terms of the one weird trick,

like, if I could wave a wand

and make Margrethe Vestager create a new policy,

I would create service level net neutrality.

So we have net neutrality at the carrier level,

like your ISP has to give you the bits that you ask for.

You click on a link and your ISP is obliged legally

to grab whatever data is on the other end of that link

and give it to you as fast as it can.

And this is in contrast with the idea that

your carrier might slow down certain services

and prioritize others and charge people money for access to you.

Say: Oh you know, somewhere in Brussels, there's a guy who wants to watch Netflix

we're going to make YouTube faster than Netflix

unless Netflix outbids YouTube for premium carriage.

That's obviously a thing that gives an enormous amount

of market structuring power to these infrastructure companies,

these these internet companies.

i think we need this at the service layer.

I think we should have a rule

that says that every intermediary, as a matter of law,

should be required to deliver the things that you ask for

as efficiently and as quickly as possible.

And so by that I mean,

if there's a thing in Google search index

that is the most responsive to your query,

they should be legally obliged to deliver it.

If there's a person who's subscribed to a feed of yours

on a social media platform,

then when you post, that person should see it.

And if you subscribe to someone, then when they post, you should see it.

I think that if you send an email to someone

and it goes into spam and they drag it out of spam,

that the service should be obliged to never put it back into spam

without having to be charged for premium carriage

or a special arrangement or verification or what have you.

This sounds like a very crude idea, very simple idea.

What it does, is it eliminates almost all of the rent-seeking opportunities

that the platforms currently enjoy.

It takes Amazon's $38 billion a year arrangement

where they charge for search result placement

to put not the best product match that you have,

but the one that's bid the most at the top of your search results.

The first link on Amazon on average is 29% more expensive

than the best match for a query.

That top row is 25% more expensive

and you have to go 17 places down on average

to get to the best match for your query.

So what you're doing is, you're immediately shifting money

from platform owners to platform users.

But the best part of this, is it's a highly administratable remedy, right?

If you want to figure out whether or not someone is violating this rule,

all you have to do

is send a message and see if it's delivered by the person on the other side,

do a search and see if the best result comes up.

So rather than having these fact-intensive tribunals

where you depose the engineers for Facebook

to figure out whether or not they've done all they can

to fight harassment or some other thing

that we've decided we want them to do to behave better.

We have these bright line tests that we can look at very easily

and that third parties can examine very easily.

You don't have to wait for a lawmaker to do it.

And if we create private rights of action here,

where people who are aggrieved can sue

and extract exemplary damages from platforms

who violate this rule,

then what you create is a system that has multiple kinds of enforcers,

public and private, where the enforcement burden is very low

and where the penalties are very high,

that strikes directly at the kind of power that platforms have

to attack platform users, both business customers and end users.

So that's my very wonky answer, but I think it's a good one.

I think it's a very straightforward one.

[Mehran] Thank you very much for that, Cory.

And as we have gone over time,

I will hand the floor over to Yanis, if you can close us, Yanis.

[Yanis] Well, it's been a delight sharing this platform with Cory.

Thank you, Mehran.

Thank you to everyone who has been watching.

I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you, Cory.

You know, Margrethe Vestager, whom you obviously appreciate,

she's been fired.

And she's been fired at the behest of Big Tech.

And the gentleman that has replaced her

is also there at the behest of Big Tech

in order not to continue anything that annoys them.

So anyway, let me make the point that,

just to answer the question of...

or actually giving an example of what we can do.

As Cory said, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen,

the reason why we have an urgent need for democratic politics

is that on the basis of voluntarism

and individual action, nothing is going to change.

No progressive move is going to be completed, even if it is attempted.

This is not a question of scratching each other's backs

and doing things to ameliorate our personal ego

or the pain that we feel for living in a world that is grossly irrational

and wastes so many opportunities that we have as humanity.

This is why we need democratic politics, right?

And an example of that, which in a way,

combines traditional forms of political action,

of trade union activity with big tech

and a large and very necessary dose of transnationalism or internationalism

is the campaign of the Progressive International:

#MakeAmazonPay

It's been running now for a few years.

It is a pilot program.

The idea of Make Amazon Pay was initially

to try to create a rolling strike

which is transnational and aims at one of these big tech companies,

in this particular case Amazon.

It starts with the first light of day during Black Friday

in warehouses in Vietnam and then moves to Bangladesh,

to India, to Germany, to New Jersey and finishes off in Seattle.

If we manage to combine these rolling strikes of Amazon workers

with a campaign of solidarity like, for instance,

don't visit amazon.com at all for one day,

which is no skin off your nose, literally and metaphorically.

And then, use this as a pilot scheme for rolling strikes

and combined strikes against big tech targets

in combination with particular demands

on our lawmakers for changing the rules

under which these companies can extract so much,

so much value without actually producing anything,

except the power by which to extract those rents from us.

That I think is a good way of ending the night

by providing an example of what can be done as opposed to hopelessness.

[Mehran] Thank you, Yanis.

And thank you, Cory.

Thanks to you guys out there.

[Cory] Thank you.

[Mehran] That was a lot of fun.

I know we went over time,

but I personally learned a lot

and judging from the very vibrant conversation in the chat,

you guys did too.

Everybody please go to back Cory's new novel with the Kickstarter campaign.

There's a link in the YouTube description and also in the chat.

If anybody would like to support DiEM25, we have no big backers.

Simply go to DiEM25.org/support.

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and we will see you at the same time.