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lol Yanis is def making the rounds cuz of his new book. He also talked about this on Adam Conover’s podcast, Factually a few weeks ago.
iirc he’s saying that we’re at the point where some of the richest people have moved from owning the means to actually produce things to providing platforms for exchanging goods for money to happen on, while basically charging rent. He compares it to feudalism in that a company like Amazon or Apple with its app store are feudal lords who come in and collect money off of each transaction made by the “serfs” (people who sell and buy things on these markets), basically in exchange for being allowed to list. And increasingly, its getting harder and harder to do business without dealing with one of these tech giants. I think he mentioned how WeChat is another good example of this in China, where they’re involved in like everything
ya middlemen is a good term for it. I don’t think that it really needs an entirely separate branding from capitalism, but idk i guess that also makes for an eye catching headline.
I agree that governments have the tools to deal with these kinds of things. It’s just getting them to actually do something about it that’s beneficial to us as average people is the tough part lol.