Digital imperialism

The real reason big tech sucks

It is not a great secret to anyone watching this that the digital world is run by a small handful of companies. And you're probably plenty aware of all the things they're up to. It's inescapable, really. Every other tech news headline is about some company getting fined hundreds of millions by the EU or getting involved in a class-action lawsuit.

But what is the driving force behind this? Is there really something pushing seemingly every tech startup into becoming self-serving giants?

As it turns out, yeah. But it probably isn't what you may think at first glance.

The empire

Technofeudalism is a word often used to describe the current model by which the digital¹ world operates. The interpretation that the tech giants are feudal lords who extort the peasantry for rent and payment to use their land so they can make money. This term was popularised by Yanis Varoufakis in his book of the same name.

This, really, is an excellent way of getting around saying capitalism sucks. But that's all that it is: a workaround to avoid talking about the problem. It's a nice little term people throw around when they don't want to offend the liberals, or, dare I say, give socialism any merit whatsoever.²

Technofeudalism is not a thing. It is not the end of capitalism, but the product of it, the latest in the stage of the empires building themselves up to make as much money as possible without limit. Pretending otherwise only serves to legitimise the emperors of today.

Over a hundred years ago, a Russian wrote about the system that has shaped the world since the 18th century. You may have heard of him. And he had a phrase for it: imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism.

Now, I'm not going to do a lecture on what Lenin said in 1916, since the book is out there, but the general idea is that capitalism follows a cycle. It does not stay domestic for long. Once it has monopolised and flooded the stock exchange, it must export and embed itself abroad or else it will die. Then it goes on to use the ludicrous profits to placate its own population.³

Sound familiar?

Thirty years ago, in 1996, the server hosting market was a chaotic mess and nobody would have held more than maybe five percent of the market.⁴ Now, today, just three companies hold nearly two thirds of all cloud compute⁵. And one of them started out as a bookstore!

The largest tech companies have all ventured out far beyond their namesake product. Google isn't just a search engine. Amazon doesn't just sell things online. Microsoft makes more than Windows. Or, look at anything Samsung does. They build up data centres in Ireland and lithium mines in Bolivia and cables across the Atlantic to feed their headquarters. The geography of the tech giant is the same as the geography of the empire. Calling this a feudal lord is much akin to labelling the VOC a particularly aggressive farmer. For something marketed as cloud computing, they sure do plunder a lot of the earth.

The state also plays a role. In imperialism, it always has. The VOC wasn't a private company going rouge in Indonesia. It was an arm of the Dutch state used as a proxy to bring the riches of South East Asia back to Amsterdam. It was allowed to wage its own wars with its own army and used that to invade the kingdoms within what is now Indonesia.

Now, though the tech giants may not maintain a standing army, they are certainly propped up by the state at every turn. Since 2000, Amazon been given nearly 12 billion in subsidies by the US government.⁶ South Korea built the chaebol system directly to the benefit of Samsung, SK, and LG. American tech firms lobby Congress with approximately $226,000 every day to pardon themselves from scrutiny.⁷

Varoufakis says in his book:

[Amazon] is no market town. It is not even some form of hyper-capitalist digital market. Even the ugliest of markets are meeting places where people can interact and exchange information reasonably freely. In fact, it's even worse than a totally monopolised market – there, at least, the buyers can talk to each other, form associations, perhaps organise a consumer boycott to force the monopolist to reduce a price or to improve a quality.⁸

In everyday language, this means that Jeff Bezos is not a capitalist because you can't boycott him.

Anyone with an inkling of economic theory would know this is complete nonsense. As was established above and will be established below, there can be no such thing as a free market. This control - where Amazon owns the dirt you walk and the air you breathe, is precisely what a free market produces. It's not like private property doesn't exist in capitalism, after all.

Nor can the consumers banded together fight the monopolist. The idea of voting with your wallet falls flat when faced with the reality that the labourer and the capitalist are not, and have never been, equals. This longing for a return to a now-lost "free", "peaceful", and "honest" competition in market is a fantasy.

It is so often an excuse from the labour aristocracy and the petty-bourgeoisie, liberals and social democrats, who have never had to face material coercion from the capitalist or the emperor or the cartelist. For the average labourer, they are technically free to quit their job in protest of the company, but are thus just as equally free to starve.

You'd at least know who your lords and vassals were under feudalism. Sundar Pichai has no hope of knowing the Congolese children that mine the cobalt that go into Pixel batteries. And there's a good chance you don't know who he is, either. He's been the CEO of Google since 2015.

Cartel economics

Let's take a historical note here:

Cartels come to an agreement on the terms of sale, dates of payment, etc. They divide the markets among themselves. They fix the quantity of goods to be produced. They fix prices. They divide the profits among the various enterprises, etc.

Lenin here was describing the cartels of the 1900s. But there's arguably more egregious ones of the 21st century.

The stock exchange drives a lot of these companies. If you look at virtually any public company, it becomes much apparent. This had always been a problem since as you may know capitalism predates the 1990s. Famously back in the 2000s there was the dot-com bubble, wiping nearly 80% off the stock market. But there's plenty examples today and they have seem to only be getting more extravagant. Meta throwing 71 billion into the metaverse⁹, Uber keeping consumer costs artificially low with investment money before using their duopoly¹⁰, or, well, the entire AI industry.¹¹

This has happened so often that we have a word for it: enshittification. And it's an inevitability we will face as long as this digital imperialism keeps going on. This is also why federation is so important, but I'll get to that later.

Now, supposedly they're in competition, but this really is just a farce. They all have investments in eachother. Two companies make all the world's x86 processors. Three make all the world's RAM. Even back then, Microsoft invested 150 million into Apple when it was weeks from bankruptcy to stop being broken up.¹²

Of course, this also extends to their monopolies. Anyone who has dabbled in the world of gaming or of programming knows that these companies buy up everything that could possibly pose a threat and or make them bucket loads of cash. The list is endless. If you're watching this on your Android phone or perhaps on your computer with an AMD graphics card, you're getting it through technology that was bought out. And this is decorated under heaps of euphemisms. "Innovating together" really just means that someone was hurting their bottom line and they solved it in the only way they know how: by throwing money at it.

And this is why computers have been so expensive lately. Though AI is in part to blame for why they're so damn expensive today as everyone pins the blame on, these companies have been the major driving force behind it. AI doesn't even use consumer grade electronics! There's no reason for them to be expensive other than price gouging!

And we know this has happened because it's happened before, by the way. At least three antitrust lawsuits have been filed against the memory cartel.¹³¹⁴¹⁵

This doesn't just harm the consumer, of course. It is much worse for anyone who works for these companies. The cartel fixes prices sure, but they also fix working conditions. No-poach agreements were colluded with these "competitors" throughout the 21st century to stagnate wages despite them gaining ever higher profits year after year.¹⁶

The factory where your phone or computer was manufactured in is not owned by the cartel. Silicon Valley executives may push non-compete clauses on to their engineers, but their work is put together in massive factory complexes.

Foxconn exists because the cartel don't want to be held responsible for what happens inside the factories. This is obviously not good for their image and hurt their bottom line. So instead they bid out to whoever can offer the cheapest chips. By labelling these as third-party contractors, the cartel absolves itself from any consequences of the factory. It lets executives preach about diversity and inclusion and not think about the sweat and oftentimes blood that built their phones and laptops.

Software liberalism

An often-discussed "solution" to this is the world of free and open-source. GPL, MIT, Apache, and the likes. And we must give merit where it is due. Linux is by every metric superior to Windows. We would be living in a worse world had it not been for Stallman getting ticked off by corporations and inventing free software.

It holds that there are a set of four, unalienable rights that must be upheld, and that the developer should hold no control over the user. It mentions:

• The freedom to run the program as you wish,
• The freedom to study how the program works,
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others,
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.¹⁷

On first glance, it seems reasonable. Do not be deceived, however, for it is no solution.

It's a step in the right direction, but still nowhere near freeing users and developers from the clutches of the giants. It's even been appropriated by them. Microsoft claims to love open source on their GitHub, and yet keeps pumping out the same locked down garbage year after year. GitHub itself is proprietary, you know!

This is very much a liberal approach to imperialism. It's a real grievance of the system that has been misguided, moulded, and twisted into the FSF. This wholesale rejection of all that doesn't adhere to these four freedoms on the grounds that they infringe upon the user.

This free software fanaticism is counterproductive and in many ways mirrors the infighting of every political group ever. Proprietary software doesn't mean it's out to get you. This script was written in the proprietary Obsidian markdown editor, because it's nice to use and doesn't get in your way. But I am supposed to abandon Obsidian simply because it doesn't let me freely inspect its code. Quite a silly way of thinking, really.

Oftentimes it is the developer getting screwed over. Corporations love free labour, after all. Giving them a free pass to up and take your crap is counterproductive to the supposed defence of the commons that free and open source software claim to do.

Nowhere is this contradiction of freedom and extraction more apparent than in the case of Redis. They learnt about these problems the hard way.

Originally, Redis was licensed under the BSD, an open source license that lets anyone do pretty much anything with it. Amazon took advantage of this and began offering Redis on AWS without contributing anything back to it, while making all the profits. The tragedy of the commons showed itself in yet another way, through code that allowed itself to be unregulated and freely taken.

Eventually, Redis was forced into relicensing itself under more restrictive terms, making it forbidden to host it without a commercial agreement.¹⁸

Personally I think Redis was in every right to do this. But, naturally, the free software community was pissed off by this, even though they were at zero expense and generally were not the target of these restrictions. Thus Redis was forked into Valkey, which was identical in all ways except that it did not have these new limitations.

Now what was the motive behind Valkey? Two things.

First off, as mentioned before, the free and open source community really hates anything that doesn't honour the four freedoms. Second off, and more importantly, just look at the contributors behind it. It included contributors from Alibaba, Amazon, Ericsson, Google, Huawei, and Tencent, and released under the Linux Foundation.¹⁹

The Linux Foundation is maybe the most egregious case of co-option of the commons, by the way. They do support the Linux kernel, which is great, but just take one look at the website and, you'll quickly find that every tech giant you've heard of and some you haven't are in it.²⁰ Did you also know Ikea is in it?

The well-versed of software development among you may talk about the AGPL, on how it prevents proprietary code from propagating through the network. This is so often used as a defence of free software in the modern world that Stallman had to write an article about it.²¹

But when was that an issue here? The problem had nothing to do with access to the source code or the freedoms to change them. It was that the tech giant was doing what it did best - stealing someone else's work and extracting nearly all the value from it.

Some solutions

Well, the solution is to throw out capitalism!

Of course this isn't happening for a hot minute. The methods of the empire have been entrenched for centuries and it will take some time for it to be overthrown. But I'm not a doomer, and chances are you aren't either. So the real question should be, what is to be done, right now?

Federation

Federation is a type of social platform where the servers are distributed through multiple hosts. It is what the internet was always meant to be. Email is federated, so why not everything else?

If you use Reddit, move to Lemmy. If you use Discord, move to Spacebar. If you use Twitter, move to Mastodon. With federation your data will always be with you. If your instance goes down or turns to a direction you don't like, you can jump to another one just fine. Start your own instance even, if you can.

Make your own place

A website is one of the best ways to resist the centralisation of the internet. With your own site, you cannot be censored, deplatformed, or shadowbanned. It's your corner of the internet, as the saying goes.

Web hosting is extremely cheap these days. You can get a web server for as little as one dollar a month. Or even NeoCities, which is completely free. Don't use Google Sites or Squarespace, because that's just moving the problem somewhere else. And please, make it more than a glorified title card.

Licensing

Copyright is an extension of private property; therefore we must get rid of it. But we need to be careful in how we get rid of it. It's already been stated why the GPL is no good, and we cannot fight the emperors with the belief all are equal.

Actually, I've written my own licence with these things in mind. You should definitely use it, because it's awesome and stuff. Works for all things, too.²². For more infromation read the addendum Left Copyleft.

The world is at its most interconnected today. This is true for information and goods. The laptop I am writing this script on in Ireland was designed in the United States and manufactured in Taiwan. It is also true for problems. They will persist as long as capitalism, unfettered and unrestricted, continues to exist in this world. Only through its overthrowing will it stop.

There is a naivety in saying that you can simply pressure and demand openness and freedom. This historically has not worked, and it's even less possible today with the highest level of power concentration in history. One cannot fight capital with capital.

But we will get there eventually. And until then, these things must be kept in mind.

Footnotes