Unpaid cloud-serf labor shrinks aggregate demand and deepens economic crises

Evidence

Think of those billions of cloud serfs who are, at this very moment, putting so much time and energy into building up someone else’s cloud capital. Their unpaid labour produces extractive power and cloud rent for very few cloudalists, money that will never re-enter the wider circulation of income, while earning them no income themselves. Allow me to describe this as the shrinking of the global value base. Add to this the wage squeeze that cloud capital also imposes on waged workers, as it increasingly turns them into cloud proles. The result is a substantial reduction in the incomes that the masses can mobilise to buy commodities. This secular drop in effective, or aggregate, demand means more and deeper economic crises. To use an ecological metaphor, capitalists and workers are experiencing something akin to the shrinking of their habitat, pushing endangered species into greater peril, while suffering more frequent extreme weather events. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 639

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Marx’s falling rate of profit and underconsumptionist crisis theory — the ‘shrinking value base’ is a rentier-flavored restatement of the paupérisation problem. — connects to: Gig-economy liberation rhetoric masks new and deeper labor exploitation — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 225; Cloud capital is physical networked machinery plus unwaged user labor — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 850; Cloud capital’s key innovation is self-reproduction through unpaid user labor — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 319 (+5 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 639

Broader Connections

• Cloud capital made humanity work for free or a pittance #qualifies (0.85) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 444
• Users rather than paid employees produce cloud capital outside markets #exemplifies (0.80) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 334
• Social media participation constitutes unpaid labor from which platforms extract value #exemplifies (0.80) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 505