Apple’s App Store created a class of unwaged laborers and vassal capitalists.

Evidence

The stroke of genius that unlocked cloud rent for Steve Jobs was his radical idea to invite ‘third-party developers’ to use free Apple software with which to produce applications for sale via the Apple Store. In one fell swoop Apple had created an army of unwaged labourers and vassal capitalists whose hard work yielded a host of capabilities available exclusively to iPhone owners in the form of thousands of desirable apps that Apple engineers could never have produced themselves in such variety or volume. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 475

Categorization

• XREF: This is the concrete microcosm of the reader’s core thesis: contractors and developers as vassals within a digital fief.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 475