Technofeudalism
What Killed Capitalism
Yanis Varoufakis
Having read it
★★★★★
Just brilliant. An insightful and informative read about this twenty-first century world we all live in, mostly as cloud serfs to and for a few vassals but certainly the (Big Tech) cloudalists that seem to own most of the present and possibly all of our future. Society is renting its way to being a dictatorship monopolised by greed and apparent convenience in the spirit of thinking it’s freer, more individual and empowering but ironically seems much more socialist in that everyone is actually just a serf to the grand scheme(s) of a few, very-high-rollers.
The Great Transformation, from feudalism to capitalism, was predicated on the usurpation of rent by profit as the driving force of our socio-economic system. That was why the word capitalism proved so much more useful and insightful than a term like market feudalism. It is this fundamental fact – that we have entered a socio-economic system powered not by profit but by rent – that demands we use a new term to describe it. To think of it as hyper-capitalism or rentier capitalism would be to miss this essential, defining principle. And to reflect the return of rent to its central role, I can think of no better name than technofeudalism.
The author has written it as a good explainer to his father and recounts a few experiences throughout that tell of family views and experiences that provide realism and good justifications for its spirit and honesty in putting forward that this new tech-led world is actually a poor substitute to even capitalism itself. Plus, the socialist angle you may think is put forward as the worthy opposite and solution to the problem is not, as stated, the answer.
Despite the views though, it has spirit and hope and some of the ideas and suggested approaches to ending technofeudalism are pretty good: decentralisation of many systems and institutions and using the very tech we have individually against the big, faceless cloud is a good starting point, like unified (and global) do-not-use days, to show citizens think rather than just behave as serfs, giving them free data and then being beholden to the algorithm and human instinct to continue that approach. Some of the talk around crypto and its tech could, I thought, be more useful for giving a lifetime’s safe access and ownership of each citizen’s own data (including things like personal health and financial details maybe) that users can then choose to give away to tech when they want to or need to, so they remain fully in control of their individual data rather than beholden to anonymous tech at many levels that profits from and even misuese and mistreats that power when we just accept terms and conditions to get the next thing we think we need. (Surely that approach would be a better use of crypto tech than it just existing as a form of stateless money?)
Anyway, the author’s suggestion of one central bank to look after individuals’ and businesses’ money more carefully and sensibly (essentially through good and simple frameworks that cut out the need for endless variations on a theme) to end the gambling that happens around capital by the many players that develop and likely don’t even know how things work just so they look effective and important to justify their existence and remit in an economy and generally make obscene profits on things that don’t even exist.
Importantly, the book assists the conversations society needs to have about these things rather be a passive recipient of it all, despite our political institutions not really being able to play outside their box and develop and action real, genuine change.
Otherwise, what with the current commodification of our attention, we are on our way to a dystopia of our own making and it won’t be as simple as just taking the plug out to end it.
In short, technofeudalism is condemned to exhibit a dynamic doom-loop more volatile and explosive than even that of capitalism.
A good passage
It is in the nature of financiers to gamble with the money clients ask them to process on their behalf, even if they only get to handle it for a few minutes. That’s how they turn a profit. Their only constraints are the alertness of their clients and the occasional snoopings of a financial regulator. That’s why complexity is the financiers’ friend – for it allows them to disguise cynical gambles as smart financial products. Is it any wonder, then, that from the start financiers loved computers? As described in the previous chapter, from the late 1970s onwards bankers shrouded their debt-fuelled bets in layers of computer-generated complexity that made the gargantuan risks invisible and their own profits correspondingly vast. By the early 1980s, the financial derivatives on offer were built on algorithms so complex that even their creators stood zero chance of fully comprehending them.
A second good passage
It is in our human nature to be vulnerable to anyone, or anything, that seems to understand us better than we do ourselves. In fact, we may be even more vulnerable to algorithms we know to be mindless than we are to real persons, because we are more easily lulled into a false sense of security. We pretend Alexa is a person because we are not used to conversing with machines – the experience would otherwise be embarrassing or uncanny. But the fact that we know Alexa is not a person is how we come to terms with its intense knowledge of us, which would otherwise be offputtingly creepy or scary. At that precise moment, when we relate to it as if it were a person while we know it is not, we are at our most vulnerable – ready to fall into the trap of thinking of Alexa as our own Pandora-like mechanical serf. Alas, Alexa is no serf. It is, rather, a piece of cloud-based command capital which is turning you into a serf, with your aid and by means of your own unpaid labour, in order to further enrich its owners.
A third good passage
Possessive individualism has always been detrimental to mental health. Technofeudalism made things infinitely worse when it demolished the fence that used to provide the liberal individual with a refuge from the market. Cloud capital has shattered the individual into fragments of data, an identity comprised of choices as expressed by clicks, which its algorithms are able to manipulate. It has produced individuals who are not so much possessive as possessed, or rather persons incapable of being self-possessed. It has diminished our capacity to focus by co-opting our attention. We have not become weak-willed. No, our focus has been stolen.4 And because technofeudalism’s algorithms are known to reinforce patriarchy, stereotypes and pre-existing oppressions, those who are most vulnerable – girls, the mentally ill, the marginalised and, yes, the poor – suffer the outcome most.
If fascism taught us anything, it is our susceptibility to demonising stereotypes and the ugly attraction of emotions like righteousness, fear, envy and loathing that they arouse in us. In our technofeudal world, the internet brings the feared and loathed ‘other’ closer, right in your face. And because online violence seems bloodless and anodyne, we are more likely to respond to this ‘other’ online with taunting, inhuman language and bile. Bigotry is technofeudalism’s emotional compensation for the frustrations and anxieties we experience in relation to identity and focus. Comment moderators and hate-speech regulation can’t stop this because it is intrinsic to cloud capital, whose algorithms optimise for cloud rents, which flow more copiously from hatred and discontent.