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- Begging you to listen to this man
There are very few economists I trust (Alison Pennington is one). After an absolutely ripping speech at the National Press Club this week, Yanis Varoufakis is another. Most of the problems we’re facing today are intertwined to the point that it’s difficult to talk about solving a single issue and impossible to figure out how back to trace the problem. Listening to Varoufakis’ perspective was a huge unlock for me. If you have an hour to spare this week, I implore you to listen to the whole thing (both his speech and the Q&A session after) – here’s the link. I’ll do my best to summarise the key takeaways, but it won’t be as good!
Before we get into the summary, I want to gently push back if you feel this is a ‘boring’ topic, too dense, complicated, or not as interesting as when I write about things in the cultural zeitgeist. Our subscribers and Zee Feed’s audience is overwhelmingly young women. It’s most important that us girlies do not get left out of education on the big systems that dictate our lives and determine how the future will unfold. It matters that we understand this!
Having said that, if you really can’t get into the NPC setting, Varoufakis has also been on a bunch of podcasts in the past couple of weeks that are more conversational. You can also read a transcript of his speech here.
3 takeaways from Yanis Varoufakis’ at the National Press Club:
1. The GFC killed capitalism, and created technofuedalism
The foundation of the hot hell we’re living in now is the 2008 GFC which effectively killed capitalism. To stop global economic collapse, the central banks of the G7 countries injected $35 trillion dollars into their economies. This money was used to create seven American tech giants: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. Varoufakis say for every $10 that went into the creation of Facebook, $9 came from the central bank.
If capitalism is dead, what replaced it? Technofeudalism, a system where power does not come from wealth but from the ownership of ‘cloud capital’ (which also dictates the flow of wealth). He defines cloud capital as “the automated means of behavioural modification living inside our phones, apps, tablets and laptops. Consider the six things this cloud capital (which one encounters in Amazon or Alibaba) does all at once: 1. It grabs our attention. 2. It manufactures our desires. 3. It sells to us, directly, outside any actual markets, that which will satiate the desires it made us have. 4. It drives and monitors waged labour inside the workplaces. 5. It elicits massive free labour from us, its cloud-serfs. 6. It provides the potential of blending seamlessly all that with free, digital payments.”
“So, the issue is not what AI will do to us in the future but what cloud capital has already done to us… In which countries is cloud capital concentrated? In the United States and in China. Nowhere else.”
2. The new Cold War is a cloud-capital race between the U.S and China
Varoufakis was the former Finance Minister of Greece, and he says that Australia needs to be as concerned about this problem as Europe already is. Both Australia and Europe are completely underpowered in the race to build cloud capital – we’re like the fastest kids at high school lining up against Usain Bolt. Too slow, too late.
What we are is pawns in the “new cold war” between the U.S. and China, both fighting to hold the most cloud capital. We’re watching this play out right now with the U.S. House of Reps passing a bill to force ByteDance to sell TikTok or be banned in America. It’s about the U.S. wanting control of any platform that facilitates those six elements of cloud capital, and for that all to be conducted entirely in U.S. dollars.
3. Australia needs to do 4 things to survive
Varoufakis did not come here just to point out problems and then dip – he brought the solutions too! And they are not generalised, these are the things Australia specifically needs to do:
Follow the international trend and create our own Green New Deal, which means shifting the economic away from being so reliant on fossil fuel exports and property/land value. The new economy would work like this: solar/wind power produced → green hydrogen which powers → production of green copper, green nickel, green cobalt and green steel → exported to China and South East Asia for manufacturing.
Correct the reasons why it’s “so dismal to be young in Australia” (tell ‘em, king), specifically: restructure the tax system to fund free higher education, end negative gearing & capital gains exemptions on real estate, and invest in social housing.
Create public-owned cloud capital to allow us to transact in digital Australian dollars via a fee-free account with the Reserve Bank, paying interest at RBA’s rate instead of the inflated rate of the private banks. Any private tech companies that want to operate in Australia would have to do so off this publicly-owned cloud systems, paying ‘rent’ or license fees which would become government revenue. Paul Karp from the Guardian asked Varoufakis about this in the Q&A, and the answer really helped me understand how this could work – it's at the 41:41 timestamp (linked here).
Tell the U.S. to get stuffed. Ok, he didn’t say that exactly, it was more like: “Australia must restore a reputation tainted by blindly following America… [It] has a duty to de-escalate the New Cold War, which can only be done if Australia ends its servility to a United States’ actively creating the threats that they then make us pay through the nose to protect us from.” That includes standing up to the U.S. on Israel, being a genuine intermediary between the U.S. and China, and demanding they free Julian Assange. “American powerbrokers will appreciate such an Australia better – in the same way you appreciate better a friend who tells you when you are wrong compared to a yesman who never opposes you directly but whinges behind your back.
Good stuff on Zee Feed rn:
This article got 10x our normal amount of traffic on Monday. We so often ask women and marginalised people to use their platforms to speak on bigger issues, but this very rich man makes a movie about the ethical question of war and doesn’t say a peep? Shameful. CLICK HERE TO READ.
Smart stuff on the Internet 💭
All the stuff I found on the web that made me think, smile, or have an ‘aha!’ moment. Spend your Sunday reading them – you'll be better off for it:
I’m a public school teacher. Here’s why private schools shouldn’t exist on Crikey
"In a debate about the value of VCE in my Year 12 English class last week, one student asked me if ‘a 40 here is really worth the same as a 40 at a private school in Melbourne’. The truth is that it’s worth so much more when it’s been fought for so much harder, but there aren’t the structures in place for us to see that… Simply reallocating funding to be more equitable will not address the class segregation corroding Australia’s school system.”
A Different, Messier World on The Drift
“It’s great, as some scholars have argued, that we have a technology like the internet to discover our identities and help others do the same. But identity does not create art, family, or activism. Queerness is, or could be, a practice based in connection, one diametrically opposed to the loneliness of American life. Online, queerness is often no more than a word, one that does little to change our ever-more-isolating circumstances.”
What’s the Price of a Childhood Turned Into Content? on Cosmopolitan
Foresta Latifi’s journalism on family vloggers/child influencers will be looked back on as some of the most important for digital and labor rights. “Vanessa, who requested anonymity to speak freely about her family dynamics, says she helped create content for huge companies like Huggies and Hasbro when her mom landed endorsement deals. When she began menstruating, her mother had her do sponsored posts for sanitary pads. ‘It was so mortifying. I just felt like I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out.’”