"Within our present oligarchic, exploitative, irrational, and inhuman world system, the rise of crypto applications will only make our society more oligarchic, more exploitative, more irrational, and more inhuman."
Despite the website name, a lot of good stuff in this!
The question is this: Is capitalism undergoing one more of its many metamorphoses, thus warranting nothing more than a new epithet, e.g. rentier capitalism, platform capitalism, hyper-capitalism or xxxxx-capitalism? Or are we witnessing a qualitative transformation of capitalism into a brand new exploitative mode of production?
Absolutely disagree. We are not witnessing a qualitative transformation into some non-capitalism or techno-feudalism or whatever. It's still capitalism. "Early adopters" collecting rents from property is part of the crisis of capitalism as it moves from free markets to monopolies and then the monopolies are forced apart by trust busting only to then become monopolies again. There is no stable ground in capitalism over longer terms, it's always churning, destroying itself, and recreating itself.
If Varoufakis was alive in the 50s, he would've called the New Deal a fundamental shift away from capitalism to bureaucratic management or something and then neoliberalism appearing a couple of decades later would have utterly confused him.
Absolutely disagree. We are not witnessing a qualitative transformation into some non-capitalism or techno-feudalism or whatever. It's still capitalism. "Early adopters" collecting rents from property is part of the crisis of capitalism as it moves from free markets to monopolies and then the monopolies are forced apart by trust busting only to then become monopolies again. There is no stable ground in capitalism over longer terms, it's always churning, destroying itself, and recreating itself.
If Varoufakis was alive in the 50s, he would've called the New Deal a fundamental shift away from capitalism to bureaucratic management or something and then neoliberalism appearing a couple of decades later would have utterly confused him.