An everything app charges vendors rent and extracts free labor from users

Evidence

What did he mean by an ‘everything app’? He meant nothing less than a gateway to technofeudalism, one that would allow him to attract users’ attention, modify their consumer behaviour, extract free labour from them as cloud serfs and, last but not least, charge vendors cloud rent for selling them their wares. Unlike the owners of Amazon, Google, Alibaba, Facebook, TikTok and Tencent, Musk did not own anything capable of evolving into an ‘everything app’ and had no way of creating one from scratch. Only one such interface belonged to no other mogul or hyper-corporation and was, therefore, available for purchase: Twitter. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 513

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives a precise functional definition of the ‘everything app’ as the gateway that converts users into cloud serfs and charges vendors cloud rent.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 513
• XREF: connects to: Free digital services are paid for by users’ attention.; Platforms extract data as a form of unpaid payment from users — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 128; Platforms extract free labor from users in exchange for recognition and perks (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• Voluntary user content creation constitutes unpaid labor enriching platform owners #corroborates (0.92) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 338
• Users freely did unpaid labor that increased Facebook’s own value #exemplifies (0.90) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1011
• Platform users become unpaid servants who train algorithms. #exemplifies (0.90)
• Digital capitalism profits from unpaid pleasurable user activity. #corroborates (0.88) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 197
• Sharing-economy platforms fuse data extraction with labor at unprecedented scale #expands (0.85)
• Cloud capital is physical networked machinery plus unwaged user labor #corroborates (0.85) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 850
• The internet functions as a factory producing the self as commodity #corroborates (0.82) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 18
• Platform ‘gamified’ labor substitutes token payments and rankings for wages #expands (0.80) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 1034
• Platforms extract pay through secret rules to keep workers compliant #expands (0.78) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 1000
• Digital assistants convert inner life into calculable behavioral surplus for others’ profit #expands (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 796
• Renting cloud infrastructure yields data extraction alongside rental income #corroborates (0.75) — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 60
• Zero marginal costs force platforms to extract rent rather than earn profit #expands (0.72) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 999