Yesterday, I wrapped up my considerations on Businesses without Workers wondering if technofeudalism changed economic fundamentals to the extent that value extraction no longer depended on workers.

A lot of the modern business scene is indeed based on rent extraction, rather than production and extraction of value from labor. Businesses that operate in sufficiently concentrated markets may amass enough market power to extract value from customers and/or from suppliers. That's the basis for Enshittification.

ISTM that they might indeed be able to do away with workers.

They may retain capitalist practices of reinvesting profits to expand the capital, and even of hiring workers, while operating primarily like feudal lords, extracting rents from serfs around them.

AFAICT, a lot of proprietary software businesses have operated in this regime: their products have zero marginal cost (making a copy costs next to nothing), so even if they hire workers and actually produce something the markets value, their focus on selling licenses makes it a rent-based business.

Publishers of artworks (books, songs, movies, games) also operate in markets whose products have zero marginal cost, so as much as they hire various kinds of workers to participate in the productions, they typically don't sell their products: their incomes amount to rents.

Social networks and other online advertisement businesses don't even charge for the use of the platforms they build: they rent ad space.

Uberized businesses and e-commerce aggregators (from app stores to retail marketplaces) are intermediaries that extract rent from the relationship between various sorts of "independent enterpreneurs" and paying customers. I don't see that these lines of business produce anything of significant value. They may hire workers to build their intermediation platforms, but their income is pretty much pure rent extraction.

Financial businesses have long operated without producing anything, only extracting rent, and they're by far the largest sector in worldwide economy.

So it looks like there may indeed be plenty of room for workerless businesses to thrive without extracting value from workers, provided that they operate under feudal rent extraction practices.

The question that remains in my mind is whether the businesses that are looking to replace workers with LLMs that can't do their jobs understand that they should be prepared to operate like feudal lords, or they're capitalists who don't understand capitalism, and are being fooled by larger capitalists (or by feudal lords?).

I almost pity the fooled capitalists.

So blong,