Cloud capital made humanity work for free or a pittance

Evidence

Assuming, wrongly, that capitalism’s only serious threat was the rise of organised labour, I missed completely the epic transformation of our times: how the privatisation of the internet commons, aided by the 2008 crisis that led central banks to open the floodgates of state money, would beget a new, super-powerful type of capital. How this cloud capital would spawn a new ruling class. How revolutionary that new ruling class would prove, leveraging its cloud capital to make almost the whole of humanity work for them, either for free or for a pittance – including many capitalists. And, crucially, what a backward step all that would prove in the grander scheme of emancipating humanity and the planet from exploitation. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 444

Categorization

• XREF: Central to the reader’s platform-capitalism thesis; the ‘capitalists also work for cloudalists’ point complicates the standard class picture. — connects to: Capital itself, mutated into cloud capital, has killed capitalism — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 12; Technofeudalism displaces capitalism by substituting cloud capital for terrestrial capital. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 849; Cloud capital is physical networked machinery plus unwaged user labor — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 850 (+15 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 444

Broader Connections

• Cloud capital functions as a produced means of behaviour modification. #expands (0.78) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 655
• Cloud capital shatters individuals into manipulable fragments of data #expands (0.75) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 660