The physical infrastructure of big tech is worthless without users’ free content

Evidence

Consider what cloud capital consists of: smart software, server farms, cell towers, thousands of miles of optic fibre. And yet all of this would be worthless without ‘content’. The most valuable part of the stock of cloud capital is not its physical components but rather the stories posted on Facebook, the videos uploaded to TikTok and YouTube, the photos on Instagram, the jokes and insults on Twitter, the reviews on Amazon or, simply, our movement through space, allowing our phones to alert Google Maps to the latest spot of traffic. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 333

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what ‘cloud capital’ actually consists of, with its core being user-generated content rather than infrastructure.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on attention economy and surveillance capitalism, and to Zuboff’s ‘behavioral surplus’ concept. — connects to: Digital capitalism profits from unpaid pleasurable user activity. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 197; Voluntary user content creation constitutes unpaid labor enriching platform owners — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 338; An idea is worthless without power to compel its adoption — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 614
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 333

Broader Connections

• Voluntary user content creation constitutes unpaid labor enriching platform owners #corroborates (0.90) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 338
• Digital capitalism profits from unpaid pleasurable user activity. #corroborates (0.85) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 197