Because y’all shouldn’t fall for this moralistic and anachronistic nonsense. The rentier bourgeoisie controls the servers and data centres (vulgarly called “cloud”) like they did before with the railways, the shipping infrastructure, the airlines, energy, the production and redistribution of oil and gasoline, and even other forms of communications infrastructure.
Reframing the rentier bourgeoisie as some new unique stage of development beyond capitalism (and smuggling in liberal moralisms about “fiefdoms” and “feudal lords”) is just yet another European attempt at reframing the current regressive nature of capitalism as not-capitalism in order to defend the status quo as a “democracy” at risk.
And this author doesn’t even get into Imperialism in his critique.
Please read this with the intentions of maintaining this as illuminative disagreement rather than another inane internet argument
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