Cloud capital required the prior privatisation of the internet commons

Evidence

Capitalism surfaced when owners of capital goods (steam engines, machine tools, spinning jennies, telegraph poles, etc.) acquired the power to command people and nations – powers that far exceeded, for the first time, those of landowners. It was a Great Transformation made possible by the prior privatisation of common lands. Same with cloud capital. To acquire its even greater powers to command, it too required the prior privatisation of another crucial commons: Internet One. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 357

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Parallels the enclosure-of-the-commons analysis in Polanyi’s Great Transformation and the reader’s earlier reading on land privatisation.
• SEED: Article angle: the internet commons enclosure as the 21st-century Great Transformation, mirroring the land enclosures that birthed capitalism.

Related

• Platform power required the prior privatization of the Internet commons (similarity 0.93)
• Cloud capital made humanity work for free or a pittance (similarity 0.84)
• Cloud capital’s physicality and commanding power do not distinguish it from earlier capital forms (similarity 0.83)
• Platform power required political commons-plunder before any invention (similarity 0.83)
• Cloud capital’s historic step was automating the command of humans, not replacing them (similarity 0.81)
• Traditional capitalists have become vassals to cloud capital’s feudal overlords (similarity 0.81)
• Enclosing common lands converted capital into a commanding power that subordinated the old aristocracy. (similarity 0.80)
• Cloud capital uniquely combines attention-holding, free labour and privatised transaction spaces (similarity 0.80)
• Cloud capital has displaced markets and profit from the center of the economy (similarity 0.80)
• A new form of capital with unprecedented commanding power now dominates the world (similarity 0.79)
• Modern power transferred from land ownership to capital ownership. (similarity 0.79)
• The cloud centralizes data ownership in corporations that earlier internet models distributed. (similarity 0.79)
• The enclosures, not the steam engine, caused the Great Transformation (similarity 0.79)
• Capital itself, mutated into cloud capital, has killed capitalism (similarity 0.79)
• Cloud capital reproduces itself without waged labour, unlike all prior capital. (similarity 0.79)