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.
You are totally right but that’s not what Yanis means by “cloud capitalism”, which is what I was referring to.
“Cloud capitalism” is about collecting fees for access to digital markets, collecting your personal data, monetising user content without paying creators, actual content of user-facing platforms like YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Facebok, not things you’re talking about: labour involved in building and mantaining the cloud, server as a commodity itself, labour involved in collecting and storing data. This is why the user I was replying to referenced “unpaid labor”, none of the things you mentioned are unpaid.
In https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-age-of-cloud-capital: