WHY AMAZON IS THE NEW SOVIET UNION

December 08, 2025

Dear Reader,

The Magnificent Seven—Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla—everyone's talking about them. Trillion-dollar valuations. AI investments that'll either save us or destroy us.

But you're missing the real story.

Capitalism is dead.

And a new type of capital killed it.

The Old Fantasy: Free Markets and Competition

Listen up. In the beginning, capitalism ran on competition. Adam Smith sold us a fantasy: bakers, brewers, butchers competing so hard they barely made enough to survive. That competition gave us bread, ale, and meat. Free markets.

Then came the robber barons.

Big Business. Monopolies. And another fantasy was born to justify them. Joseph Schumpeter—former Austrian finance minister turned American prophet—preached the new gospel: competitive markets can't deliver progress. You need monopolies to fuel growth. You need concentrated power to fund R&D, build new machines, create innovation.

Think Henry Ford's Model-T. Think Apple's iPhone.

Should we worry about monopolies? Schumpeter said no. These giants get fat and lazy. Eventually some upstart takes them down. Toyota toppled General Motors. Circle of life.

When Winners Started Killing Markets

Then Peter Thiel said something that changed everything.

"Competition is for losers!"

Edison and Ford would've agreed. But Thiel meant something else. Something bigger.

Today's winners don't just kill the competition.

They kill the market itself.

They replace it with cloud fiefs—digital domains that have none of the advantages liberals and neoliberals praise in free markets. The Magnificent Seven, plus Thiel's Palantir, revived something we thought died with the Soviet Union: economic planning systems that match buyers and sellers outside anything resembling a market.

Gosplan 2.0: Soviet Planning on Steroids

Remember Gosplan?

The Soviet State Planning Committee. Engine room of their command economy. Its job? Match supply and demand—oil, steel, cement, food, clothes—without using market prices. Prices got assigned to achieve political objectives, not balance markets.

Gosplan died December 26, 1991, when the red flag came down.

But it's back.

Where?

In Jeff Bezos's Amazon. In Peter Thiel's Palantir. In every Big Tech platform pretending to be a market.

How Amazon's Algorithm Replaced the Free Market

Think I'm crazy? Let me show you.

You visit Amazon. The moment you click that link, you exit the marketplace. You enter pristine isolation. Just you and Bezos's algorithm.

No friends. No strangers. No actual shopping experience.

You type "espresso machines." The algorithm matches you with vendors. But here's the trick: it started working months, even years, earlier.

Every search. Every purchase. Every click. Every review.

You trained it to know you. It won your trust with book recommendations, music suggestions, film picks. Now you're in a hurry. Your espresso machine broke. You'll choose from the top results it gives you.

The algorithm knows your spending pattern.

It guides you to the machine with the highest price you'll pay. Amazon collects up to 40% the moment you click purchase. Extortion. But the machine's makers tolerate it. Why? Because if they don't, they disappear from search results.

As AI improves, this manipulation increases.

That's why Big Tech valuations are exploding.

This is Gosplan. Privately owned. Capitalist in name only. Super high-tech. Amazon's software matches you with vendors. Bans you from talking to sellers. Blocks you from seeing what other buyers do—unless it serves Amazon's purposes.

The price you pay?

It follows your match with a seller. It doesn't equilibrate supply and demand. It maximizes Bezos's cloud rents.

Amazon prices work like Gosplan, not like any farmers' market you've ever seen. Soviet leaders would kick themselves if they saw Silicon Valley. American capitalists perfected their model. Complete with surveillance that makes the KGB look amateur.

Cloud Capital: The Weapon the Soviets Never Had

Why did Gosplan fail?

It lacked Big Tech's secret weapon: cloud capital.

Algorithms. Data centers. Fiber optic cables. Working as one integrated network. Training you to train it. You give your data. Cloud capital learns to input desires into your mind. Then it sells you stuff within its privately owned Gosplan.

The Difference Between Edison and Bezos

But wait—isn't Bezos just like Edison?

No.

The difference is gigantic.

Edison's capital was productive. It produced cars, electricity, and turbines. Real things.

Bezos's cloud capital produces nothing.

Except power. Power to trap us in his cloud fief. Power to squeeze traditional producers for cloud rents. Power to turn us—the users—into unpaid laborers.

Every click enhances cloud capital's power.

Every like. Every review.

Free labor.

Welcome to Technofeudalism

An old Trotskyite once told me the Soviet Union created industrial feudalism in socialism's name. His insight applies today to Big Tech.

Amazon's trading process mimics Gosplan. But the rents Amazon, Uber, Airbnb charge actual producers? Those are like the ground rents landed gentry charged their vassals.

Cloud rents.

Technofeudalism.

The Soviet Union generated feudalism in socialism's name. Silicon Valley generates feudalism in capitalism's name. In the name of free markets.

When Governments Become Vassals

The parallel extends to the state.

The USSR promised a workers' paradise. The USA promised a haven for capitalist producers. Both lied.

As cloud capital concentrates into fewer hands, states become dependent on corporate tech lords. Governments outsource core functions—archives, health data, military software—to rented cloud infrastructure.

They lease back their own operational capacity.

From Amazon Web Services. From Microsoft. From Google.

This dependency enables a new dimension of technofeudal power.

The Soviet Union was industrial feudalism pretending to be a workers' state. The United States today? A technofeudal state. With repercussions across health services, education, tax offices, borders, battlefields.

In Ukraine and Gaza, cloud capital extends its reach.

Amazon's AI tool Rekognition? Used by law enforcement. By ICE.

Palantir's surveillance software? Runs on Amazon's cloud.

Through Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google provide the Israeli military with advanced cloud and AI capabilities. AI-driven targeting in Gaza. Minimal human oversight.

The Invisible Hand Becomes an Algorithmic Fist

Let's return to those early monopolists.

The robber barons produced things.

The new tech lords produce a new social order.

They replaced the invisible hand of the market with the visible, algorithmic fist of the cloudalist.

Free-market enthusiasts have nothing to celebrate.

But it takes courage to face reality. Pro-Soviet Marxists stayed in denial about the Soviet experiment's failure for years after 1991. Today, free-market ideologues refuse to see that capitalism created a form of capital—cloud capital—that replaced markets with something from the Soviet past.

In the process, it killed capitalism.

You're a Serf Now

Wake up.

You're not a customer anymore.

You're a serf in a cloud fief.

And every click you make tightens the chains.

Me? I've said it forever. 

Don't chase stocks. Build assets. Real ones. 

Gold. Silver. Real estate. Bitcoin. 

Escape the rat race. Don't feed the cloud. Learn finance. 

See the game. Play smart. Or get played.

Kiyosaki Unsensored

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