Cloud Rent & Techno-Feudalism
Varoufakis's concept (explicitly cited and endorsed by Žižek): mega-digital corporations function as feudal lords controlling the commons through which all economic activity flows.
In his words 2
“Capitalism has brought itself down and it's been replaced by something far worse, not by socialism. The Left does not want to listen to that.”45:20 Yanis Varoufakis & Slavoj Zizek | Festival INDIGO 2021 · techno-feudalism has replaced capitalism
“NFT is a crazy attempt to introduce artificial scarcity into a domain where everything in principle could have been for free, free-floating.”56:32 GTAA Season 3 Episode 29: The Return of Slavoj Zizek · NFTs as artificial scarcity
The stories that teach it
the jokes and anecdotes he reaches for when he works in this idea, ranked by how many of its talks they turn up in; each card is one story, with every retelling on its page
Bill Gates as rent-extractor from general intellect
Gates became the world's richest person not through standard Marxist exploitation of workers (who are actually better paid than average) but by charging rent for access to the digital space, the internet commons, that we all share.
Native Americans prefer 'Indians'
A Native American man in Missoula, Montana told Žižek he prefers 'Indian' over 'Native American' because 'at least that is a monument to white man's stupidity', and proceeded to demolish the left-liberal image of indigenous people as ecologically holistic, saying they burned m…
coffee without cream / coffee without milk
A customer orders coffee without cream; the waiter says they have no cream but can offer coffee without milk. Even though the result is identical, the absent supplement matters, Hegelian negativity in a joke.
Niels Bohr's horseshoe
Niels Bohr had a horseshoe on his country-house door; when a scientist friend asked why a scientist would keep a superstitious charm, Bohr answered 'I was told it works even if you don't believe in it', Žižek's model for ideology today.
V for Vendetta morning after
In the final scene of V for Vendetta thousands of unarmed Londoners march on parliament and the people take over; Žižek says he would sell his mother into slavery to see Part 2, what happens the day after the victory.
Kurosawa's Hamlet
Kurosawa's 1961 Japanese corporate-setting adaptation of Hamlet (The Bad Sleep Well) is the best cinema version of Hamlet precisely because it transposes it to a totally different cultural context, proving the work's universal greatness.
Where it comes up 91
119 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there