Ive here. Since many, if not most, readers here tend to be techno-skeptics (“Why is something new better than something old enough to justify throwing away a valid project and paying for a premature replacement?”), skepticism of algorithms, Snooping equipment, and voice controls for low-difficulty activities like turning on lights and other terrain. Yanis Varoufakis describes how consumers who engage in intensive surveillance expose them to manipulation with far greater success than traditional marketers can achieve, thus creating a new breed for our new overlords (what Varoufakis calls cloudists) Created huge profit opportunities.

By Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister, co-founder of DieM25.Originally Posted in his website

Once upon a time, capital goods were just manufactured means of production. Robinson Crusoe salvage gear, farmer’s plow and blacksmith’s furnace help produce more catch, more food and shiny steel tools. Then, capitalism emerged, giving the owners of capital two new powers: the power to compel those without capital to work for wages, and the power to set the agenda in policy-making institutions. Today, however, a new form of capital is emerging, a new ruling class is being formed, and possibly even a new mode of production.

The beginning of this change was free commercial television. The shows themselves cannot be commoditized, so are used to grab the attention of viewers before being sold to advertisers. Sponsors of the program use their opportunity to get people’s attention to do something bold: use emotion (which has gotten rid of commodification) to accomplish the task of deepening… commodification.

The essence of what an advertiser does is in the lines of the fictional protagonist Don Draper in the 1960s advertising industry TV series “Mad Men.” Instructing his protégé Peggy how to think about the Hershey bars their company is touting, Draper captures the zeitgeist:

You don’t buy a Hershey bar for a few ounces of chocolate. You bought it to regain the feeling of being loved, and you knew it when your dad bought you one to mow the lawn.

The nostalgic mass commercialization that Draper alludes to marks a turning point in capitalism. Draper put his finger on a fundamental mutation in his DNA. Efficiently making what people want is no longer enough. People’s desire is itself a product that needs to be skillfully manufactured.

As soon as the fledgling internet was taken over by conglomerates that decided to commoditize it, the principles of advertising evolved into algorithmic systems that allowed targeting of specific people in a way that TV could not support. At first, algorithms, such as those used by Google, Amazon, and Netflix, identified groups of users with similar search patterns and preferences, grouping them together to complete searches, recommend books, or recommend movies. The breakthrough comes when algorithms are no longer passive.

Once algorithms can assess their own performance in real-time, they begin to behave like agents, monitoring the consequences of their own actions and reacting to them. They are influenced by the way people are affected. Before we know it, the task of instilling desire in our souls has taken over from Don and Peggy to Alexa and Siri. Those who question how real the threat to white-collar jobs is from artificial intelligence (AI) should ask themselves: What the hell did Alexa do?

On the surface, Alexa is a domestic mechanical servant that we can command to turn off the lights, order milk, remind us to call mom, and more. Of course, Alexa is just the front end of a huge cloud-based AI network, trained billions of times per minute by millions of users. It learns our preferences and habits as we chat on the phone, or move and do things about the house. As it gets to know us, it develops an uncanny ability to surprise us with good advice and ideas that appeal to us. Before we know it, the system has acquired a powerful force guiding our choices—directing us effectively.

Using a cloud-based Alexa-like device or app to play the role once occupied by Don Draper, we find ourselves in the most dialectical and infinite regression: we train algorithms to train us to serve the interests of their owners. The more we do this, the faster the algorithm learns how to help us train it to command us. Therefore, owners of this algorithm-based cloud-based command capital should have a term to distinguish them from traditional capitalists.

These “cloudists” are very different from the owners of traditional advertising agencies, whose ads can also convince us to buy things we neither need nor want. No matter how charming or inspiring their employees are, advertising agencies, like the fictional Sterling Cooper in Mad Men, sell their services to companies trying to sell us something. By contrast, cloudists have two new powers that set them apart from traditional services.

For one, clouders can earn huge rents from the manufacturers who convince us to buy their products, because the same command capital that makes us want those products is the foundation of the platforms (such as Amazon) that make those purchases. It’s as if Sterling Cooper is going to take over the market where it’s advertised. The cloudists are turning the traditional capitalists into a new vassal class, and they must pay tribute to them before they have a chance to sell to us.

Second, the same algorithms that guide our purchases also have the ability to implicitly and directly order us to produce new command capital for cloud operators. We do this every time we post a photo on Instagram, write a tweet, provide a review on an Amazon book, or just move around town so our phones feed Google Maps with congestion data.

It’s no wonder, then, that a new ruling class is emerging that includes the owners of a new form of cloud-based capital that commands us to replicate it outside of its own dedicated digital platform algorithmic realm and traditional product or labor markets. Capital None Everywhere, but capitalism is in decline. This is not a contradiction in an era when the owners of command capital wield disproportionate power over everyone, including traditional capitalists.