Please read this with the intentions of maintaining this as illuminative disagreement rather than another inane internet argument

Historically, serfs are bound to the land, produce collectively for their own consumption and are "taxed absolute authority over that land, secures it through his own personal militia, and neither party significantly engages in commerce for their social reproduction.

I think we can agree that all of these criteria are confirmed with my initial point except taxation.

Ex. your data is bound to the service provider, users produce content collectively for their own consumption, a private militia via security teams, and that users and the corporation do not use commerce for social reproduction (at least from each other in this case)

Imho, I’d argue that the taxation is in the form of attention, which is also commodified by the corporation to sell targeted ads as per your point about surveillance capitalism

Respectfully, I think you’re missing a great deal of labor value in the cloud.

One branch is the developers who are creating the cloud infrastructure and the algorithms that keep us hooked, the other branch is us as users (or serfs more accurately) who are training these algorithms endlessly via social media consumption

I don’t know if you’re in the tech industry or have exposure to the level of engineering as well as the value of processed data harvested from users, but the massive valuation of tech companies in Western stock markets vs the rest of the society should be a reasonable indicator

Both of these forms of labor power create the underlying value of cloud capital (as well as the all of the upstream workers, but they are not novel forms of value to your point)

Secondly, there seems to be a meaningful incongruence regarding influencers. I think we agree that their form of labor pales in comparison to the other labor inputs noted above.

Technofeudalism isn’t concerned with influencers at all, and it’s a red herring to suggest so imho

But to your closing point, while I agree this comes from a global north perspective, its consequences are universal in that serfs from the global South are tilling the land of cloud capitalism for free just as much as folks from the global north

…Are we following the same economist?

Yanis has been very clear that this stage of capitalism could still be considered capitalism, but he’s specifically meaning this period as technofeudal because the relationship of worker to the mode of production has meaningfully shifted with the owners of cloud capital

Say what you will about capitalists owning the railroads, utilities, etc., I and most people reading this don’t work for these companies for free and therefore give these companies egregious valuations

The workers under cloud capitalism (the other name for this shift) are better described serfs as they are not wage labor and will never be

Also the plot of Before Sunset 🏆