Ground rent predates capitalism and is payment beyond what motivates land leasing

Evidence

Ground Rent predates capitalism and comes close to (though it does not coincide with) the everyday use of the word ‘rent’: any payment for leasing land over and above the minimum (which may tend to zero) that would be necessary to motivate its owner to lease it. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 802

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ground rent, the historical anchor for what the book argues platforms replicate as digital rent.
• XREF: The key definitional bridge the book will use to argue platforms act like feudal landlords. — connects to: Rent survived capitalism’s golden age embedded within its genome. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 469; Economic rent is defined as payment exceeding a commodity’s exchange value — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 800
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 802