WeChat’s in-app payments give Tencent a total view of Chinese users’ lives

Evidence

The key here is the seamless integration of communication, entertainment, ecommerce, foreign investments and much else with online financial services: the portal to cloud rent. As I write this sentence, WeChat, the mobile messaging app belonging to Tencent, has transmitted 38 billion messages in a single day. Its users did not have to exit the WeChat app to make a payment. While streaming music, scrolling social media, messaging their families, they are able to use the same app to send money to anyone in China, as well as to any of the millions outside of China who have downloaded WeChat and opened a yuan account with any number of China’s banks. … With this great leap into financial services, China’s cloudalists acquired a 360-degree view of their users’ social and financial life. If cloud capital is a produced means of behaviour modification, Chinese cloudalists have accumulated cloud capital beyond the wildest dreams of their Silicon Valley competitors who, by comparison, enjoy far less power per capita to accumulate cloud rent. American Big Tech has been doing what it can to catch up. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 580

Categorization

• SHARE: The 38-billion-messages-in-a-day and all-in-one-app specifics are a nerdy, shareable data point for anyone following China’s platform economy.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 580