Fuck off with this bullshit. What we have is just more capitalism. We asked to get it good and hard, and we got it good and hard.

He cites examples like the gig economy as if those aren’t the purest, most unbridled expressions of capitalism; the total destruction of workers rights, the absolute commodification of labour, all driven by and and for venture capital firms that don’t even give a flying fuck about the viability of the model as long as their returns are good.

People crying that “this isn’t capitalism anymore” are deluded idiots. They lived their lives in a fantasy of how capitalism worked, because they were able to safely isolate themselves from its harms, and now that it’s been so thoroughly unshackled - by the continued destruction of any kind of social welfare or workers rights that might have had a moderating effect - that they can’t ignore the harm anymore they’re pretending to themselves that what they’re championed all their lives was something different.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

What could be more delightful than a trip to Greece to meet Yanis Varoufakis, the charismatic leftwing firebrand who tried to stick it to the man, AKA the IMF, EU and entire global financial order?

The house is where Varoufakis and his wife, landscape artist Danae Stratou, live, year round since the pandemic, but in August 2023 at the end of a summer of heatwaves and extreme weather conditions across the world, it feels more than a little apocalyptic.

Stratou and Varoufakis are a striking couple, as glamorous as their house, a cool, luminous space featuring poured concrete and big glass windows overlooking a perfect rectangle of blue pool.

“I have no issues with luxury,” he says at one point, which is just as well because the entire scene would give the Daily Mail a conniption, especially since Aegina seems to be Greece’s equivalent of Martha’s Vineyard, home to a highly networked artistic and political elite.

I’d messaged a bunch of people to ask them what they would ask Varoufakis, including McNamee, and precised the book to him – that two pivotal events have transformed the global economy: 1) the privatisation of the internet by America and China’s big tech companies; and 2) western governments’ and central banks’ responses to the 2008 great financial crisis, when they unleashed a tidal wave of cash.

This encouraged business models that promised world-changing outcomes, even if they were completely unrealistic and/or hostile to the public interest (eg the gig economy, self-driving cars, crypto, metaverse, AI).

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Some folks just cannot deal with labels. Like we’d have to taboo all the words before they figure out what they really believe.