by logicprog | 2025-12-28 00:11:08+00:00
I don't disagree with Varoufakis necessarily on his technofeudalism hypothesis, but he makes several claims in this video that are just completely false as far as I can tell, and that annoys me, so I'm just going to do my best to respond to them here as a sort of vent LOL.

1. He claims that Google and Facebook and the like only spend 1% of their revenue paying their employees and that therefore any money that goes to them sort of stays out of the circular economy. As far as I can tell, there are absolutely no sources to back this up available online, not from Google's official reporting, nor from any third-party calculations anyone has made. He himself just states the number but doesn't explain how or where he got it from, and in my search I haven't found a case where he cites it either. All I can really find is that Google's operating expenses are around $261 billion as of this year[1], and their revenue was $385[2] — and since operating expenses are usually at least substantially payroll, it's hard to tell.

2. Then he brings up the idea that someone's Tesla was remotely deactivated. This was debunked[3]

3. Finally, he brings up this idea that Tesla's sell your user dated Amazon. This is at least roundly contradicted by their privacy policy, and when according to the Mozilla foundation there's no evidence of Tesla ever selling driver data to a third party[4] (although they've been very, shall we say, uncareful about it in at least two instances, but those don't resemble anything like what he's claiming). One random user on a Tesla owners forum got freaked out because they saw the car ascending data to what they thought was Amazon, but when they checked on the IP addresses, it became clear it was using just sending information 2-AWS servers, which are almost certainly run and owned by Tesla, not Amazon[5]

4. He argues that Volkswagen electric cars can't compete with Teslas because Volkswagen cars don't have access to cloud capital, which he says gives Tesla an advantage based on 3., where basically he says that they make most of their money selling data to third parties. But given that there's absolutely no evidence of that anywhere and it's actually against their own legally binding privacy policy that I feel like his entire argument crumbles because it becomes very unclear how Tesla is benefiting from cloud capital in a way Volkswagen it is not, since according to the Mozilla Foundation, Volkswagen not only gathers much more data about you, but actually actively sells it to third parties for advertising purposes, which they openly admit[6].

[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/ope...
[2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve...
[3]: https://www.theverge.com/tesla/757594/tesla-cybertruck-deact...
[4]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/tesl...
[5]: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/uploaded-data-to-ama...
[6]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/volk...

"What does VW say they can do with this vast treasure trove of personal information, car data, and inferences they collect on you? Well, they use it to make more money, of course. Because selling cars isn't a big enough business these days, now, your personal information is another gold mine for all car companies to tap into. And tap into it they do. VW says they can use it for their own personalized and targeted advertising purposes or those or their affiliates, business partners, or other third parties. They can share it with third parties who can use it for the commercial purpose of marketing their products and services to you. They also say they can use or disclose your de-identified data for "any purpose." "