‘Capitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse’: Yanis Varoufakis on extremism, Starmer, and the tyranny of big tech::In his new book, the maverick Greek economist says we are witnessing an epochal shift. At his island home, he argues it’s now the ‘fiefdoms’ of tech firms that shape us
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).
The original article contains 2,683 words, the summary contains 252 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
So the bot thinks this story is about his house and his wife, which isn’t surprising. The article is unbelievably florid, I couldn’t get through it.
Like seriously shut the fuck up about the setting in which you had the interview. Are these people paid by the word? And why does every phrase need to be couched three layers deep in entendre and negatives? Just say what you mean, ffs. Every time I felt like it was starting to get to the meat of the issue they got distracted talking about some completely unrelated bullshit.
EDIT: Don’t downvote the bot, people. It’s doing its best, it just doesn’t know how to deal with neoliberal slop. As a thinking person, I can barely deal with it.
Thanks for dealing with that frustration so that I don’t have to
I mean I didn’t get through it. It’s entirely possible the location of Atlantis is somewhere in that article, I wouldn’t know.
I think a lot of these articles have a required word count, because supposedly google doesn’t rank short articles well. A lot of journalism seems to be writing for bots rather than humans.
I’ve seen this writing style in many Swedish article I read but usually it’s kept short and interneting. If I wanted to know all about the interview setting and the imagery mattered to me, I would have watched a recording of it.