Totally track with the fact that the eventual destination here isn’t capitalism, it’s actually worse than that…it’s fucking neofeudalism.
They don’t want to produce a better product than the competitors, they want to extract rents from anyone unlucky enough to need to use the tools or knowledge in their fiefdom, and they want to use those rents to buy up more tools and knowledge to charge rents on.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I mean, rent seeking is the best case scenario for a capitalist. You just insert yourself in the supply chain without much investment and get money for simply being in the chain.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
A lot of the recent movements in company structure have been away from selling things and toward rents (i.e. away from capitalism and toward neofeudalism). That is why everything has become a subscription service (even things that you used to pay once and be able to use as is until you wanted to “upgrade” like, for instance, Adobe Photoshop). AWS is another example of this.
Doctorow explains the difference in this clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-Tl6yIsCoY
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I see the nuance you are making now and I agree.
SaaS does feel like technofeudalism where you pay but don’t own shit, a bit like fiefs working in the field and giving wheat in exchange for a land that they don’t own.