Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

by Yanis Varoufakis

In a revelatory and pathbreaking work, the #1 international bestselling economist opens our eyes to the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world.

In a revelatory and pathbreaking work, the #1 international bestselling economist opens our eyes to the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world . . .

“The Thucydides of our time.” — Jeffrey Sachs

Big tech has replaced capitalism's twin pillars—markets and profit—with its platforms and rents. With every click and scroll, we labor like serfs to increase its power.

Welcome to technofeudalism . . .

Perhaps we were too distracted by the pandemic, or the endless financial crises, or the rise of TikTok. But under cover of them all, a new and more exploitative system has been taking hold. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies after the crash of 2008 went to big tech instead. With it they funded the construction of their private cloud fiefdoms and privatized the internet.

Technofeudalism says Yanis Varoufakis, is the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world, and is the greatest current threat to the liberal individual, to our efforts to avert climate catastrophe — and to democracy itself. It also lies behind the new geopolitical tensions, especially the New Cold War between the United States and China.

Drawing on stories from Greek myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men , Varoufakis explains this revolutionary how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power, and, ultimately, what it will take overthrow it.

Genres: Nonfiction, Economics, Politics, History, Technology, Philosophy, Audiobook

304 pages, Paperback

Published February 13, 2024

About the author

Ioannis "Yanis" Varoufakis is a Greek-Australian economist and politician. A former academic, he has been Secretary-General of MeRA25, a left-wing political party, since he founded it in 2018. A former member of Syriza, he served as Minister of Finance from January to July 2015 under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

Reviews

[The Conspiracy is Capitalism · Rating 5 out of 5]

2023’s masterpiece maps out the unexpected demise of “Capitalism”…

Preamble:
--Let us not get stuck on surface labels (which social media seems to amplify into binary "agree"/"disagree" divisiveness) and forget to dive into the substance (where there is much to synthesize).
--After all, how can a single term (even “capitalism”) encapsulate the contradictory mess of the real world (without many asterisks noting contradictions)?
…Instead, I treat these concepts as lenses to view the world. Think of the difference between a microscope’s lens and a telescope’s lens. Each starts with certain assumptions (and limitations) which allows each to focus more clearly on certain observations. Depending on our questions, some lenses are indeed more useful than others. The challenge is to remember each lens’ assumptions when we try to synthesize the specific observations into a totality.
--So, let us use the “Technofeudalism” lens and see what we can (and cannot) observe (i.e. from the history of capitalism to today’s New Cold War on China/war in Ukraine/Musk buying Twitter, etc.)…

Highlights:

1) ”Historical materialism”: a lens for human history:
--It is a crime that so much of “history” is taught as a series of names/dates/events, missing the forest for the trees (on systems not being merely the sum of its parts, see: Thinking in Systems: A Primer). No wonder there is so much confusion with “human nature”, culture, and social change.
--The gist of the “historical materialist” lens is to start with:
i) Material conditions needed for human reproduction,
ii) How humans relate to such material conditions to produce their needs, and the resulting class relations/political bargaining powers (which is reflected in culture, i.e. the stories that narrate our value system).
…For more, see "What is Politics"? video series; start from the beginning, and note episodes:
-"6. Political Anthropology: When Communism Works and Why"
-"7. The Origins of Male Dominance and Hierarchy; what David Graeber and Jordan Peterson get wrong"
-"7.1 Material Conditions: Why You Can't Eliminate Sexism or Patriarchy by Changing Culture"
-"8. Materialism vs. Idealism: How Social Change Happens"
--Varoufakis applies “historical materialism” using insights he received from his parents, which he later found in Marx’s works. In particular, a historical materialist lens views history as a process. Why process (i.e. change)? Why didn’t humans just figure out an optimal means of material conditions relationships and stick with it?
…Along with the variations and changes in material conditions and class conflict, we find another key concept that plagues Marx: contradictions. Marx’s empiricist critics can say this is a black-box cop-out (i.e. how can we prove you wrong when you can say both yes and no?). But these empiricist critics are themselves plagued with quantification bias, by missing the importance of what they cannot quantify. Varoufakis found his father’s contractionary views of technology in Marx [emphases added]:

In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.

--Varoufakis’ father leans more on materialism in conceptualizing how human history sped up through its relations with technology: stone, then bronze, then iron. Varoufakis later pairs this by emphasizing the social (class/political bargaining power) side [emphases added]:

I speculated about what would have happened had James Watt invented the steam engine in ancient Egypt:

The most he could have expected is that the ruler of Egypt would have been impressed and placed one or more of his engines in his palace, demonstrating to visitors and underlings how ingenious his Empire was.

My point was that the reason the steam engine changed the world, rather than ending up a showpiece in some ruler’s landscaped garden, was the epic raid on the common lands that had preceded its invention: the enclosures [see later].

2) Feudalism to Capitalism:
--The aforementioned “Enclosures” are key in Polanyi’s “great transformation” from feudalism to capitalism, by creating the 3 peculiar capitalist markets of land/labour/money:
i) land: privatization of Common lands (the “Enclsoures”) aimed to use these lands to produce commodities (i.e. wool) for the global market (the new source of wealth/power, rather than feudal lords merely sitting on land), thus creating the land market
ii) labour: the dispossessed serfs became the labour market.
iii) money: proto-capitalists in the wool industry started with credit/debt from the money market. Under capitalism, finance precedes production.
…See Varoufakis’ Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails.
--Varoufakis reminds us of this prior transition [emphases added]:

As consecutive mutations multiply the variants of an organism until, at some point, a brand-new species appears, so technological change proceeds within a social system until, suddenly, the system has been transformed into something quite distinct, though that doesn’t mean that all of the materials out of which the system is built – capital, labour, money – have necessarily changed. […]

Suppose we were living in the 1770s [First Industrial Revolution], as the first steam engines began driving the water pumps that kept the mines dry and turning the wheels of William Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’. […] we would not be wrong to speak of an emergent ‘industrial feudalism’ or ‘market feudalism’. Technically, we would be correct.

In the 1770s, and for at least another century, wherever one looked one saw feudalism. Feudal lords dominated rural areas, owned the freehold titles of most city blocks, commanded armies and navies, and presided over parliamentary committees and government bodies. Even in the 1840s, as Marx and Engels were writing their manifesto in response to the worldwide effects of the capitalist class, most production was still taking place under the auspices of the old feudalist class, the landed gentry. Land ownership remained the main source of political authority and rent continued to be more powerful than profit, especially in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars [1803-1815] when landlords regained the upper hand over capitalists by banning grain imports with their Corn Laws [1815-1846].

And yet something critically important would have been lost if those who forged the language of that era had been reluctant to ditch the word feudalism, choosing to call the nascent system not capitalism but industrial or market feudalism. By boldly calling it capitalism, a century before capital had fully dominated our societies, they opened humanity’s eyes to the great transformation unfolding around them as it was happening.

3) “Capitalism”: volatility and contradictions:
--Varoufakis centers Adam Smith’s distinction between:
a) Profits: new wealth initiated by capital investments, which other capitalists can also initiate, thus profit is vulnerable to market competition over prices/quality.
b) Rent: privileged access to a fixed supply (the obvious example being nature’s resources, esp. land and fuel).
--Note: for profits, Smith focuses on the production of “real commodities”, where the rising wealth/power of the global market drove the "great transformation" from landlord feudalism to Industrial Capitalism. Classical liberal economics anticipated the latter, with the value system switching from land (feudal ownership) to labour (key input in commodity production; i.e. the Classical “labour theory of value”, focusing on reducing the cost of production, ex. the factory's “economies of scale”).
...However, there's an obvious growing contradiction that Varoufakis does not seem to emphasize. The rise of the global market (in “real commodities”) led to the creation of capitalism’s 3 peculiar markets (land/labour/money), which feature “fictitious commodities” (humans/nature/money) which are not “produced” (with a “cost of production” calculated by capitalists) simply to be bought/sold on markets. These 3 capitalist markets are particularly susceptible to rent-seeking!
i) land: ground rent
ii) labour: imperialist rent, unwaged care-work
iii) money: usury (interest)
--Note: Smith had a major contradiction in his works on the source of profit, between (a) capitalists employing their capital vs. (b) labourers doing the work (“labour theory of value”); Smith also conveniently assumed capitalists obtained their capital through hard work/savings (i.e. “primitive accumulation”, where primitive means “prior” and later critics assumed as “violent”), which Marx critiques in the last part (“Part 8: So-Called Primitive Accumulation”) of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 highlighting the violence of the enclosures/creation of capitalist property/markets (given Marx’s appreciation of class conflict).
--Varoufakis stresses how rent survived as a parasite, thus the driver (host) has been profit. Parasites require disguise, thus rent has tried to disguise itself as profits (ex. oil companies access/real estate ground rent/privatized utilities monopolies).
--Elsewhere, Varoufakis notes how steel was still rare in the First Industrial Revolution, and the primary material reliance was on slavery/colonialism. I would synthesize this observation with the profit vs. rent definitions given by Smith, as Classical (liberal) economics had major omissions:
i) imperialism (see: Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital and Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present),
ii) environment (see: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World; also, Jason W. Moore centers “cheap nature” in defining capitalism), and
iii) social reproduction/care-work (see: The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values).
…Thus, rent may be a parasite on profit, but profit is a parasite on all these “externalities” (beyond direct exploitation of wage labour); centering profit as the key driver of capitalism is useful in recognizing capitalist accounting, but we must also account for the externalities which capitalism requires to reproduce itself.
--By the Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914 WWI), steel becomes mass produced, and private bank money facilitates mass production. However, the capitalist contradiction of saturated markets (falling rate of profit/lack effective demand) led to imperialist rivalries leading to global industrial carnage (late 19th century Europe/WWI/WWII).

...See the comments below for the rest of the review:
"4) Capitalism’s mutations"
"5) Technofeudalism"

[Wick Welker · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are in an unprecedented era of post-capitalism feudalism

This is a stunning economic and geopolitical narrative about the current world order. It’s so convincing and well thought that I need to remind myself it is still a narrative and only a simulacrum of reality and not to get too carried away. I’m going to outline what Vourfakis’ thesis is in this book and it takes a bit to build to what techno feudalism is. Bear with and please read on because I think this is an extremely timely and important book right now. The main crux of this book is that the balance of power has tipped from profit makers controlling the world back to the rent-seekers which has fundamentally mutated (or destroyed?) capitalism. Let’s get into it.

Let’s just start with the post-WWII economy. America had all the gold from providing the resources for the war to Europe and had the upper hand in the postwar economy. The Bretton Woods conference mapped out a global plan where the US would export their extremely dynamic and robust manufacturing products to Western Europe and Japan. While the US maintained a huge surplus, they ensured that the dollar was used for all these global transactions with a guarantee of gold bullion convertibility. But then… the US lost its surplus from massive military spending especially during its global fight against communism. The author asserts that LBJ’s Great Society also lost the US surplus by bringing more goods into the country rather than exporting. The great irony is that the US succeeded in doing something very similar to what the USSR was trying to do: asert global control with a centrally planned economy. Yes. The US in the Breton Woods era was very much a centrally planned economy with price controls and colluding with corporate oligarchs to keep Wall Street in check with capital controls. Bretton Woods was a time of technocratic capitalism where profits were made from wage labor, advertisers became extremely good at crafting nostalgic products and selling the image of the middle class.

And then, the Nixon Shock.

Here’s what happened: once the US started to deficit spend they couldn’t keep going on the Bretton Woods deal because it was contingent on other countries sucking up its imports and ensuring the gold-dollar exchange. Only it didn’t have any surplus cash any more as manufacturing started to dwindle, monetary inflation rose by the Fed and public debt ballooned. This created problems for the Bretton Woods system because it was contingent on trusting that the US could convert any global dollar into gold. So what did Nixon do? He just canceled the whole thing. Yep. Basically unilaterally Nixon said “we’re not going to convert dollars for gold anymore” effectively making the dollar a free floating fiat currency. The Nixon Shock took the dollar from a very reliable IOU exchanged to gold to a speculative currency overnight. To maintain power after Bretton Woods, the dollar was perfectly positioned as the international reserve currency, supplanting the gold standard. The US then enjoyed the benefits over having a monopoly over the reserve currency of the world. That’s like owning a gold mine if there were still a gold standard. Instead of exporting goods, the US started exporting its dollar for German, Japanese, and Asian imports. And then, the foreign elite took those exact same dollars and invested them back into Wallstreet. This unleashed the age of financialized neoliberalism where the exotic financial products, American real estate and owning businesses became a sink for foreign investment dollars to return to their US motherland. This is what Varoufakis refers to as the Global Minotaur: international funds flow back to the US as tribute to the hegemony. China eventually joined the Global Minotaur as part of a “Dark Deal '' where US consumption was opened up to China to fuel their economy as long as China heavily invested back into Wall Street and US treasury bonds. This is one of the fundamental reasons Chinese had such accelerated industrialization.

Now let’s jump to the rise of tech giants for a moment. Apple invented a groundbreaking iphone that everyone suddenly owns and they opened it to third party apps, or other businesses to get exposed to customers. And then Apple simply charged third party apps around 30% commission for purchases. Think about that for a moment. 30. Percent. What Apple is doing is not capitalism, which seeks profits in open market competition. No, what Apple is doing is collecting rent. Google is doing the same thing with Android phones. Amazon, Facebook, Youtube, and Tiktok are also doing the same thing. They are all rent seekers. They create a tech cloud of captured attention of customers and rent that attention to capitalists. So the tech giants aren't capitalists at all—they’re cloudalists. Here’s the real messed up part: feudal lords have ground-rent where they make serfs till the land and then take a huge part of their product. With the cloudalists, they addict billions of people with behavior-modifying algorithms and draw them to create content that then attracts more users and more eyeballs to then charge rent for allowing access to businesses. So, the cloudalists have cloud serfs, but they provide their product to the cloud for free. Nothing like this has ever happened before. This is techno feudalism and it is the triumph of rent over profit. Profit is vulnerable to markets—rent is not. Rent flows from the privileged access to things in a fixed supply. Lots of rent seekers “profit wash” their rent to make it look like they have returns on their investments but they are not interested in profits—that’s a capitalist’s game. Cloudalist’s thrive on shareholder value even in the face of negative profits much like Amazon.

Elon Musk showed his hand a few months after he purchased Twitter. Yeah he talked about free speech absolution blah blah blah but he likely purchased it because being the richest man in the world wasn't enough: he wants to be a cloudalist, free of the shackles of capitalism and the state. It was clear what his intentions were when he wanted to make Twitter an “everything app” like so many successful cloudalist platforms in China.

That brings us to the right here and now in 2024. Biden put a halt on shipping advanced chips and chip making tools to China, Russia and Iran and blacklist Chinese chip designers. The goal is to limit China’s access to "advanced semiconductors that could fuel breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and sophisticated computers that are critical to (Chinese) military applications' ' according to Commerce Department Secretary Gina Raimondo. Under the guise of protecting national security against communism, the US would very much like to halt China’s technological advancement, but it’s not because of communism. According to Varoufakis, Biden has started a Cold War with China with this move because China clearly has the upper hand with their cloudalist dominance.

So now we live a very, very weird life. In America, we have two political parties: the alt-Right and Center. Instead of class struggle, we have identity politics where the labor class is now fractured into political identities who loathe one another. You have the left at civil war obsessed over the definition of gender, castigating privilege and fetishizing a hierarchy of oppression. It’s all very, very weird and counterproductive. On top of this, most people are now prodded, manipulated and exploited by the cloudalist’s to consume our attention and provide free content for their machine. This fracturing of yourself takes an enormous toll on mental health, especially of the young. Our communities are fractured, our families are fractured and even our personhood is atomized into a weird self-branding parody of ourselves to have on digital display.

Varoufakis doesn’t believe that the old class struggle thing is going to work. Organizing labor ect, may work on the capitalists, but it doesn’t work on the cloudalists. They’re far too powerful and removed for strikes and organization to have much impact. He offers some rather vague platitudes about using the cloud itself to mobilize action. Imagine if all Amazon workers didn’t show up to work and all customers didn’t open the app for 12 hours. The impact would be tremendous and haunting. I just don’t imagine something like this ever happening.

There is a lot more to say, but I’ll leave it at that. This book offers a chilling narrative for our current reality that I don’t think is too far off.

[Callum's Column · Rating 5 out of 5]

Capitalism's triumph with the conclusion of the Cold War was short-lived. According to Yanis Varoufakis, it has mutated into technofeudalism. Since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, Big Tech has come to influence almost every aspect of our lives and operate as modern feudal lords. We are serfs to the cloud system, giving uncompensated data that, in turn, involuntarily influences how we operate. Cloudist landlords also control capitalists, with organisations like Amazon, Apple, or Meta taking a cut if you want to sell your product on their cloudist land. This power is sustained by central banks and governments and is akin to a new insidious form of authoritarianism.

Published in 2023, this book deserves to become a seminal text in political economy. It is highly compelling and has changed the way I think about the world's contemporary economic structures. Varoufakis addresses the book to his father, a traditional Marxist who opposed Greek fascism and would have despaired that capitalism was not overthrown by the proletariat. The book is highly readable and uses clever analogies to Don Draper from Mad Men or Einstein's wave-particle duality to make sense of complicated economics. I would recommend reading this alongside Shoshana Zuboff's book, Surveillance Capitalism.

Varoufakis' Marxist sympathies skewed his geopolitical analyses. Like Lenin, he argues that 19th and early-twentieth century imperialism for new capital markets underpinned the Great War as the great powers sought control of finite resources. While having some theoretical credence, it is highly debatable, as it is both reductionist and deterministic. A similar Marxian analysis is applied to the current tensions between the US and China. The author stipulates that bans on Chinese tech result solely from China's potential to usurp American technofeudalism. Other structural or ideational considerations are ignored. Despite these shortcomings, this book remains a must-read.

[Kevin Carson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Every now and then..., he would speculate on how capitalism might, one day, end – and what would replace it. His wish was that it would not die with a bang, because bangs had a tendency to cull good people in awful numbers; that instead socialist islands might spring up spontaneously in our vast capitalist archipelago and that they would expand gradually, eventually forming whole continents on which technologically advanced commons would prevail."

A lot of useful material, but the techno-feudalist thesis is overstated IMO. It exaggerates the break between capitalism and its alleged techno-feudal successor, precisely because it exaggerates the sharpness of the transition between feudalism and capitalism. Far from rent being merely profit’s “feudal predecessor,” there has always been a large rentier component in capitalism, and it has always been used to extract passive incomes and to destroy productive capacity or impede the production of use-value. Even among classic industrial firms, in which physical means of production were owned by capitalists, an enormous share of profit consisted of Veblen’s “capitalized disserviceability.”
And despite Varoufakis’s framing of today’s economy — in which “owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots” are “vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital” — as a novelty, owners of physical capital long ago assumed that status in relation to finance capital, which had a similar extractive logic. Likewise, the increasing growth of “cloud serfdom” at the expense of wage labor, as a source of surplus extraction, is analogous to a similar phenomenon anticipated generations ago in Marxist analysis of monopoly capital: the extraction of profit from consumers by unequal exchange, rather than from workers in the production process.

After rereading:
In my opinion the technofeudal model greatly exaggerates the break with capitalism. Capitalism has always had a large element of rent extraction as a source of profit. Under 20th century monopoly capitalism in particular, a major share of profit was extracted from consumers via administered pricing, and the monopoly sector extracted rents from the competitive sector (to use Baran and Sweezy’s phrasing) in a way that bore some resemblance to Varoufakis’s “cloud fiefdoms.” And although a considerable share of capitalist profit has always come from controlling the conditions under which others are allowed to make and do things rather than actually making and doing things, it is especially true that for decades before the rise of cloud or platform capital, transnational corporations were already using patents to extract rents despite contracting out actual production to nominally independent industrial firms; it seems fair to call the latter vassal capital. So the domination of the capitalist economy by a rentier stratum superimposed on capitalist industrial firm, with the latter shifting a portion of their surplus value to the former, is somewhat less novel than Varoufakis implies.

[Cristóbal Angulo Rivero · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me ha jodido pero este libro me ha hecho sentir muchísimas cosas. Enfado, tristeza, esperanza... Y creo que es la primera vez que un puto libro de ensayo/análisis es capaz de esto.
No esperaba mucho después del primer capítulo, un poquito lachoso/Marian Rojas si me preguntan. Pero a partir de ahí, oh esta mierda se puso seria. La capacidad para traducir complejos conceptos a metáforas, a ejemplos de a pie, y sobre todo, a mojarse, a señalar con el dedo a los culpables y decir qué hicieron y cómo, diferencia a este libro de los demás.
En mi poca autoconsciencia, recuerdo, en el fondo de mi mente, la figura de Varoufakis como poco menos que el cazador que mató a la madre de Bambi (de aquellos tiempos también recuerdo a la Troika como unos salvadores, perdón, en mi casa mi padre solo ve cadenas... decentes) pero... me ha parecío un pana.
Lo que me ha jodido de todo es que... propone una alternativa que tiene mucho sentido, pero lo que no tengo es fe. No veo un camino viable. Es como cuando me manda un MD guarro una señora que está pa ponerle un piso a su nombre, me meto en su perfil y pone de ubicación Teruel. Es el castigo de Tántalo, viendo las frutas tan cerca, estando rodeado de agua, pero sin poder tomar de ninguna.
A cambio de un compromiso con la lectura (que por otra parte, creo que debería ser máximo cada vez que se lee ensayo, pero con booktok nunca se sabe) el tío te hace un mansplaining bien llevado de mecanismos, conceptos, organismos y dinámicas con las que acabas teniendo unas nociones más que básicas de los principales problemas. Con respecto a su contrapunto: no me interesa, este libro concuerda con mi visión, fatalista, de la situación. A diferencia de mí, él ha visto la luz al final del túnel, o la ha pintao a ver si cuela, porque por desgracia, pese a su esfuerzo, no creo que la sociedad misma esté a favor de su salvación.
Siento cómo me ha crecido el cerebro, sólo espero que no me crezca la cabeza más porque sino las voces de mi cabeza van a empezar a tener que llamarse por teléfono

[Mohamed Shams · Rating 1 out of 5]

I usually don’t have strong opinions and try to read books on their own terms. This one is pure and utter waste of time. I dropped it halfway through.

The only clever thing about this book is its title. The rest is a rumination by a layman on how big tech is really horrible. Nothing profound or clever or groundbreaking. This book is for you if you are angry/unhappy and want the emotional experience of joining the author in his unproductive rumination.

It is also full of totally random and unrelated ideas. Off the top of my head, the book talks about:

- Einstein and the dual nature of light
- Communism and Carl Marx
- The Communist Manifesto
- The struggles of the author’s parents
- Wallstreet, investment, the market failure of 2008, US domination of world economy
- Corporate America
- The Internet
- The Internet Protocol (TCP, SMTP)
- How algorithms work
- Neural Networks
- Reinforcement learning (he totally lost me there)
- Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos
- How Amazon exploits workers
- Amazon Mechanical Turk (why is this relevant here at all?)

How can the author talk about all of these unrelated topics with any level of confidence or authority? And why should I keep reading? He clearly lacks understanding of a lot of the fundamental ideas he discusses. His view on software and corporate America is very superficial and uninformed.

The ideas discussed here (at least in the first half of the book) do not tie together into any meaningful larger whole. Albeit perhaps that the author and his family do not like capitalism.

I may continue reading this book just for the sake of the time I invested in the first half.

[Michael Van · Rating 1 out of 5]

This entertaining book is problematic due to its obfuscation of other people's ideas. Varoufakis thinking is fundamentally dishonest and unfair especially towards female thinkers. The bibliography tells you everything. It has no real references and tricks you into believing Varoufakis is a highly original thinker (he is not). The only original thing about the book is its title. Clever word-play but that's about it.

It is clear that Varoufakis is influenced and has read Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism. Varoufakis pilfers ideas from her book but doesn't quote nor does he give her any credit. This is problematic in many ways. Zuboff is responsible for dusting of Marxism and applying it as a critical lens in today's debate around the rise of FAANG. Deliberately or not, by silencing his inspirators Varoufakis advances an anti-feminist agenda. This is applied hypocrisy.

On top of this Varoufakis sneakily applies postmodern deconstruction (a la Derrida) to revive classic Marxism. Marx does distinguish abstract from concrete labor and therefore exchange from use value, but never does Marx equate use value with Varoufakis' "experience value". Classical Marxism is reductionist at its core. One can not explain the world with just two concepts. Varoufakis knows this and redefines these concepts at will to escape the reductionist dilemma. Varoufakis uses words and introduces terminology that make no sense. Take "cloud capital" as an example. Varoufakis uses 10 different definitions stretching the meaning of the word and turning it into an empty signifier. Never does he actually say what cloud capital is or what cloudalist are... This is postmodern obfuscation, period. What is the motive behind this? Nobody knows.

The biggest problem is that Varoufakis is onto something. I really like how he (re)introduces the ideas around rent-seeking and interweaves them with technology and a perceived dead of capitalism. If only he'd talk more about the subscription economy and how digital copies of goods at zero marginal cost, break capitalism. Alas, Varoufakis just babbles - incoherently at times - and without referencing or giving credit where credit is due. What about AO Kruger? Didn't Kruger coin the term rent-seeking? Would you be surprised to learn she is female too?

[T · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edit in process*

Varoufakis makes a pretty good case for his view that competition has, in his views, ceased to be very important in the modern economy. But, he seems to massively underwrite agency, and just sideswipes away the fact that modern “cloudalist” technologies have actually competed to get where they are (essentially monopolies). No data brokers aren’t in control of our minds, and yes people choose to use technologies like TikTok and Facebook - because they do indeed have a use value to them.

Also, Varoufakis situates the rise of technofeudalism in the post-2008 world, with low interest rates and quantitative easing. But interest rates have been way up over the last 2 years, and modern democracies will challenge cloudalist monopolies when their dominance gets in the way of growth - which they seems to be doing.

Finally, for a socialist, Varoufakis’ proposals at the end seem pretty milquetoast. They’re all things that other economists have been mentioning, and don’t really seem radical enough to overthrow the supposed new mode of production.

[Andrew]

Hey there fellow cloud-serfs, here’s my unpaid serfly contribution to Goodreads. Please, Mr. Bezos, may I have some more?

I know I agree with Varoufakis in spirt, but do I agree that technofeudalism is something that is distinct from capitalism? Honestly, I’m not sure. Been going over that – his case is compelling, but maybe this is just another form of the grotesque and rent-seeking capitalism, like many others. Let me get back to you on whether or not I agree with Varoufakis’ thesis. But as to whether or not you should read this as a way of trying to understand our current quandary? Absofuckinglutely.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Varoufakis addresses Technofeudalism : What Killed Capitalism to his father as a response to the questions his father asked when faced with the internet in 1993: 'Now that computers spreak to each other, will this network make capitalism impossible to overthrow? Or might it finally reveal its Achilles heel?' Despite Varoufakis' wit and warmth, his conclusions are undoubtedly a total downer. He contends that capitalism is indeed being transformed and crowded out by the economic effects of the internet, but it's being replaced by something worse. To date the fullest description of this new economic form has been surveillance capitalism, coined by Shoshana Zuboff. Varousfakis argues that it is instead a new form of feudalism and helpfully summarises its structure and value flows as parasitic upon capitalism in figure 3 on page 234.

Although initially sceptical of how useful comparisons with feudalism could be, I came around to Varoufakis' idiodyncratic analysis if not his terminology. He builds on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power and Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by adding international financial and geopolitical factors. I found his discussion of quantitative easing and explanation for economic tensions between China and the US well-argued. Regarding the former, this passage from chapter 4 punched me right in the face:

Socialism for the financiers gave rise to another cluster of financial uber-lords to rival the cloudalists - three US companies with powers exceeding those of private equity all terrestrial capitalists put together: BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. These three firms, the Big Three as they are known in financial circles, effectively own American capitalism. No, I am not exaggerating.

[...] Together, the Big Three are the largest single shareholder in almost 90 percent of firms listed in the New York Stock Exchange, including Apple, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, General Electric, and Coca-Cola. [...] At the time of writing, BlackRock manages nearly $10 trillion in investments, Vanguard $8 trillion, and State Street $4 trillion.

[...] This could not have happened before 2008 because until then the ultra-rich simply did not have access to enough cash with which the Big Three could buy a significant chunk of the New York Stock Exchange. After 2008, however, central bank-sponsored socialism for the ultra-rich created more than enough money.

What the absolute fuck! I hadn't realised that hedge funds had consolidated to this deranged extent. On the geopolitical front, I wasn't previously aware of China's digital yuan project or how it could reshape financial flows, so found this very informative:

When you pay for your coffee or train ticket using a smartphone app or microchip-equipped debit card, these conventional digital payments go through the infrastructure of private banks. What China had created with digital money issued directly by a central bank, cutting out those middlemen, the private bankers. [...]

Before 2022, Chinese cloud finance and the digital yuan resembled a brand new road with little traffic. Why would the ultra-wealthy of the world direct money through a yuan-paved road, policed by the People's Bank of China, when they could use the existing, albeit bumpy, dollar-built superhighway? A good reason appeared soon after the first explosions over Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Mariupol: the [...] seizure by America of hundreds of billions of dollars belonging to Russia's central bank.

Blocked from the dollar superhighway, Russian money began to use the under-utilised, glistening Chinese alternative. And it was not just Russian money that chose this new route. Many wealthy non-Russians, too, felt reluctant to continue letting their money race down the dollar freeway. They began to question the wisdom of relying entirely on the kindness of Washington's dollar traffic-rangers, who could pull them over any time. Little by little, they began diversifying.

It's instructive to compare this book with Paul Mason's 2015 Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, which I reviewed at length in 2016. Of my comments, 'The thought experiment of what if all information really was freely available, somehow, really makes you aware of how many monopolies defend it at present (amazon, google, facebook, et al),' has aged well and, 'I agree with Mason that the current monopolistic situation is fragile and unsustainable,' really has not. Varoufakis admits that he too had techno-utopian hopes:

I fantasised groups of young designers forming co-operatives using industrial-scale 3D printers to create a variety of goods - from personalised cars to made-to-order refrigerators - at a cost that did not require mass production to stay low. Such co-operatives might, I hoped, steal an advantage over the General Motors and the General Electrics of the capitalist world - that, to use the language of economists, the economies of scale that underpin the power of General Motors and General Electric would be eradicated, activating a process that would at least deplete corporate power and might perhaps pave the way towards a decent non-capitalist future.

Cory Doctorow extrapolated this very scenario in his 2009 novel Makers (which I wasn't keen on); now he writes about platform enshittification (I love that term) on pluralistic.net and in books like The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. Everyone's utopian hopes have been crushed by technology becoming a force for monopolisation and rent-seeking. Looking back at my 2020 review of the 2017 book Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy, the economist authors were starting to grasp it back then:

We should consider the possibility that the true nature of intangible investment has changed. Maybe it conceals rent-seeking activities that superficially look like they increase productivity but actually do nothing of the sort.

This is precisely the point that Varoufakis is developing in Technofeudalism : What Killed Capitalism:

From the factory owners in America's Midwest to poets struggling to sell their latest anthology, from London Uber drivers to Indonesian street hawkers, all are now dependent upon some cloud fief for access to customers. [...] Looked at in totality, it becomes apparent that the world economy is lubricated less and less with profit and increasingly with cloud rent. And so a delightful antinomy of our era comes into focus: capitalist activity is growing within the same process of energetic capitalist accumulation that degrades capitalist profit and gradually replaces capital markets with cloud fiefs. In short, capitalism is withering as a result of burgeoning capitalist activity.

As ever, Varoufakis packs a lot into not many pages. He even makes time to summarise his prior book Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present, which I highly recommend. Unsurprisingly, Technofeudalism : What Killed Capitalism is a much more pessimistic read. Appendix 1, which explains his theory economics-textbook style, includes this painful sting in the tail:

Technofeudalism is synonymous with the universalisation of exploitation and with the shrinking of the value base (in proportion to the rise of cloud rent's share of all incomes). This dynamic accentuates the system's propensity to deeper and more frequent crises. As a result, the central banks that funded the initial accumulation of cloud capital will be forced perpetually to print more and more monies to replace the role that profits and wages used to play under capitalism. But this only helps cloud capital accumulate further (since cloudalists will always have a greater capacity than every other class to appropriate the printed central bank money). In short, technofeudalism is condemned to exhibit a dynamic doom-loop more volatile and exploitative than even that of capitalism.

It seems petty to quibble about terminology, but I wasn't keen on the terms 'cloud fief', 'cloudalists', 'cloud rent', etc. I can see their usefulness for now, but doubt they will stick longer term. Moreover, I think the emergent economic system we are currently living under deserves a genuinely new name rather incorporating that of a prior system. Referring to feudalism for explanatory purposes makes sense, but implies a return to the pre-capitalist world which is misleading. Ideally this new name will be more sophisticated than 'fuckery', which is all my brain could come up with. Perhaps the nomenclature will come from a language other than English.

It has taken me a while to review Technofeudalism : What Killed Capitalism as I found it profoundly depressing, in contrast to The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. This time, improved understanding made me feel worse about the state of the world rather than better. Moreover, I'm keenly aware that by posting a review on amazon-owned goodreads I am working as a cloudserf. Aren't we all! I recommend Technofeudalism : What Killed Capitalism, with the caveat that if you take it seriously you will feel very depressed afterwards.

[Bogdan]

Pseudomotto:

♪ I don't know my future after this weekend
And I don't want to ♪
Björk

Technomottos:

Thou shalt not work during Sabbath and – at least then! – shalt not touch any glass darkly

You will eat your bread by the sweat of your brow, but with a smiley on your face 😅…

We didn’t have to be forced nor had we to receive any mark on the forehead or on the right hand. Each one of us is a mark in the maze of an algorithm.

Polymotto:

First as tragedy, then as farce; then it ended, but it was broadcast as a reality show. And now we can stream it, scroll it, swipe it



Comrades! We are but serfs on this platform, we plough its field with our eyes and fingertips, we fertilise this ground with our gray matter, we sow the seeds of words from which crops of golden reviews grow, we pluck the likes; at harvest, we gather in small circles to husk together the corn of comments, but our hands are gentle, our words are civil—nobody makes dirty jokes nor smacks Maricica on her big, healthy butt as she passes by, the basket of shucked corn so saucily propped on her round hip. Nobody gets drunk on digital pálinka, slivovitz, or țuică—or maybe only one of us, sometimes; after a hard day’s work, it’s too dark to see each other, our discussions are silent, only the dry crackling of keys is heard in the night, but even that only by the one typing at the keyboard, alone, thinking that even crickets make more noise in warmer climates and are closer.

The empty belly gets the rustic bread baked in the blue light of the screen; we eat it in the pixeled sweat of our brow. Another week has passed, the body wants rest and comfort, the mind wants some distraction. We have earned our weekends well.

Oh, comrades, I called for you, I wanted to ask when we should raise our keyboards and charge against the feuds in the cloud. And how. But now I am also asking myself why. I just got so mellow writing.


—


I recommend buying Technofeudalism and, if possible, from a bookshop rather than Amazon. However, if buying this book is not an option, here it is, for free, in audiobook format, read by the author himself. Yanis Varoufakis is one of the most lucid voices of our times and, besides, he is very charismatic—which, fittingly, is a Greek word (χαρισματικός). Those reasons should be good enough for you to give him at least some of your spare time and attention while doing the dishes, driving or strolling and listen to his audiobook. As a conscious prole myself, I listen to it while working in a factory and am currently number 27 in line for a copy at the public library.

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Technofeudalism made a big splash when it came out a few years ago and pretty easy to see why. While quite ambitious, Varoufakis writes well and this digests pretty easily, especially as the format reads like a long letter to his father. Even if you do not agree with his main thesis, e.g., that capitalism has been fundamentally transformed into something new, Technofeudalism, with the rise of 'Cloud Capital', the deft walk through capitalism's history makes this refreshing.

So, what is Cloud Capital and how does it differ from regular capital? In classic economic terms, capital comprises two things: a means of production (a plow for example), but also a social relation among individuals; those who own capital can compel others to work for them. The industrial revolution transformed society as a new 'breed' of individuals, the capitalists, eventually wrested power from the landed elite. As Marx wrote, society increasingly became slotted into two camps: capitalists and workers.

Post Great Depression, Varoufakis argues capitalism morphed once again (and he is not alone in this). The rise of managerial capitalism along with the New Deal constituted what the author called technoproduction (a term Galbraith invented back in the 60s). The US produced and exported goods globally and under Bretton Woods, the dollar was a good as gold (literally). Once the US started running trade deficits, however, the globe's excess dollars did indeed come back for gold and in 1971, Nixon shut the gold window, which in the end, killed Bretton Woods. Regulations where pulled back on finance and the world entered a new capitalist phase. Essentially, the US sent dollars all over to buy imports, and those dollars came back to purchase US financial assets, like US Treasury bonds, stocks, etc.

Post 2008, Varoufakis sees yet another transformation. Central banks bailed out the failed banks with 'walls of money', but industrial/manufacturing firms did not pick up investment, buying back their own stocks, funding venture capital, private equity, and especially 'cloud' capitalist enterprises. Amazon built a new type of fief. Vendors would only sell goods on its terms (like Walmart) and fancy algorithms tailored the shopping experience while gathering your personal data. Add Facebook, other social media platforms, and taken together, these comprise cloud capital. Cloud capital does not produce goods and services, but simply extracts rent from the economy, just like finance in general. This is a short book, so if you are curious about the argument so far, check it out.

The potential reforms in the last few chapters are the real ambitious part. I agree with most of his proposals, but then, Varoufakis' politics are pretty similar to my own. Refreshing read and it does shed some needed light on the current conflict between China and the US (which Varoufakis argues to be between the two leading cloud capital states). 4 solid stars!

[BJ Lillis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to this on a road trip. It was perfect for driving—involved enough to hold my interest, intellectually rich but told like a story, and read by the author in an oddly relaxing Greek accent. (I do want to note that I listened in my guise as a civilian, not as an academic. I was on vacation. I haven’t critically evaluated the argument or considered Varoufakis’s sources.)

Okay, that out of the way: I’m not sure I fully buy it all, but honestly, I think anyone interested in contemporary economics, internet culture, or politics should at least consider Varoufakis’s theory. If nothing else, it’s cast a surprisingly long shadow. I see people referencing these ideas online fairly often—talking about how we’re all serfs again now. This book helped spread that language, and helps explain why it resonates.

Varoufakis’s theories are useful whether you ultimately agree with them or not, because, like all good historians or philosophers, he is not so much trying to prove he’s right as to show how his ideas illuminate something about the world. We aren’t supposed to believe or even agree, we’re just supposed to think. The ideas here have something to tell us whether we agree with them or not.

Among other things, the book offers a quick and dirty intro to Marxist materialism—the Marxism that’s less about communism and more about understanding capitalism. Then, Varoufakis develops a fascinating historico-mythological account of the global economy from 1945 to 2008. Again, I don’t know if I’m persuaded (if nothing else, I’d have had to read on paper for that!), but his ur-narrative is fascinating regardless. And Varoufakis’s idiosyncratic insistence on expressing key parts of his argument in terms of Greek mythology really kept me on my toes!

As for the real meat of the book, technofeudalism—are we all cloud serfs now, working tirelessly for our cloud lords? Maybe, maybe not, but we’re sure as hell doing a good job acting like we are!

[Alexandru · Rating 5 out of 5]

Capitalism killed capitalism. Hailing from a country that suffered for 50 years under communism I am not the biggest fan of socialism or even left wing policies. However, I have always enjoyed listening to Yanis Varoufakis' criticism of the current economic system.

The rise of big tech has brought with it massive changes in the world economy. Today there are two competing cloud powers the US and China. The cloud companies (Google, Meta, Amazon, Baidu etc.) have become like the feudal lords of old. They no longer operate for profit but rather they have become renters. They rent out their cloud to the cloud thralls and cloud serfs, as Varoufakis calls the companies and people that have to pay in order to operate their businesses and earn a wage (Uber drivers, Amazon sellers, software companies and so on).

There is an interesting analysis of why Musk bought Twitter and it wasn't as a vanity project but rather as a way to turn his company group into a cloud feudal lord. The breaking of traditional trade between the US and China and its replacement with cloud competition might also increase the risk of war.

In the final chapter Varoufakis describes a techno-utopia where technology is used to bring justice and equality to all, where the employees own the companies they work for, where countries have to pay a penalty for both their trade deficit and their trade surplus and so on. It's interesting, entertaining and completely unrealistic.

The book is an excellent analysis of the overwhelming power of cloud capital which is taking over the world economic system.

[Gabrielė Bužinskaitė · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do you remember the phrase “You will own nothing and you will be happy”?

It was once mocked as a dystopian warning about socialist or communist control, where the state owns everything and you are brainwashed enough to like it. Ironically, though, this vision seems to be realized not by socialism, but by the precious capitalism itself.

Gone are the days when we bought music, movies, or video games and actually owned them (remember CDs? I can even remember VHS tapes).

Now, we only subscribe and endlessly pay for access to things that will be snatched away the moment we miss a charge. Even books might not be ours anymore; they're can be borrowed through Kindle subscriptions. We pay to use, but not to have.

Just like… peasants in medieval times? That’s the connection Varoufakis makes. Like medieval peasants tied to the land they didn’t own, we are bound to systems we can’t escape. Only instead of serving landowners, we serve tech giants who control the platforms and the data. We work for them (through our clicks, attention, and subscriptions), helping them grow unimaginably, lord-level wealthy. That’s what the author calls technofeudalism.

The concept is certainly interesting, but not much more than that. I found the book painfully dumbed down—Varoufakis simplifies ideas to the point where it reads like it was written for children. Thus with so little depth, Varoufakis throws wild claims like “capitalism is dead” without bothering himself to prove it.

While it’s an interesting idea to philosophize about, claiming that capitalism has been replaced by modern feudalism is a stretch. After all, feudal hierarchies were based on birthrights, not markets or consumer behavior.

[Rick Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some really interesting characterizations of our current political economy as the author sees it.

I think it’s a really thought-provoking read and definitely value that. Yanis is a compelling thinker and a valuable contrary voice in a world that often elevates conformity of thought.

That said the form is very strange and distracts from the book. It’s kind of an affected letter to his dad. Which isn’t the end of the world, but I also think the author is overfitting his model. And uses the structure to cover that up at times. I think he’s a step or two ahead of where the economy actually is. And that’s not to say that it won’t go there, but I think it is not there currently

[Dominik Hudec · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, not a study on raves in feudal times. But very good at contextualizing recent economic developments.

Great insight into how post-2008 central bank policy and free flowing money for big tech increased rent’s structural importance. The role of our behavioral data (cloud capital, he calls it) in this is quite intersting as well. To me, dissolution of markets and algorithm’s grasp over our choices are perphaps not as dramatic as he puts it, but what do I know. The title sounds evocative, so..

[Hungry Rye · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rated 2.75 stars

I kinda feel like he was trying to reinvent the wheel here with “cloudalists” and “emotional value” but the rest is pretty decent. Idk why he wanted to dog on the USSR so frequently. His theory is interesting but I don’t agree with his conclusions on “technofeudalism” being the more apt term for what our current conditions are and that we’ve moved past captialism.

[Klejton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent enough, yet it failed to convince me that we are entering a non-capitalist stage.

Definitely suffers from what Gabriel rockhill calls the technological or globalist narrative, the idea that there is one “single” overarching narrative that connects everything into one “era” of our time, especially considering the fact that over 30 percent of the people in our planet do not even have internet access.

[Brendan Monroe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The great economist and former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis presents an excellent thesis positing that capitalism as we've known it has been replaced by something much more insidious — technofeudalism. I won't go into all the details of why this is, as plenty of other reviewers here have done an excellent job of summarizing this, but will just say that I found Varoufakis's compelling and, ultimately, convincing.

Breaking up Big Tech and overthrowing this evil, unethical system is critical to any future we might have left.

[Julian Worker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Technofeudalism is the idea that we are transitioning from capitalism to a system where a few tech companies function like the feudal lords of two hundred and more years ago.

The cloud, big data, and digital platforms have become the “land” of this new era, controlled by tech giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon where we continually buy their services as "cloud serfs" and never appreciate the "cloud proles" who work behind the scenes to fulfill our orders and help us when we run into problems.

America and American companies are in the driving seat. They have been for a long time. Today, over 70% of European and Asian capitalists' profits is diverted to buying American assets as the dollar is the de facto global reserve currency. EU exporters have no interest in having the euro replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency as they profit from the demand generated by America's trade deficit and can turn their profits into US assets.

The author argues that there is a gradual worldwide shift of money and power from the capitalist to the 'cloudalist' sphere and this is a bad thing for the EU / Europe as, unlike China, there are no Big Tech companies on the continent that can compete with Silicon Valley and the banking systems are reliant on Wall Street. If Europe is in a bad way, think about the Global South where governments are being banktupted by trying to service their dollar debts.

[Gigi · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very interesting straight economic look at Surveillance Capitalism — I wish he stuck to the point more clearly as it’s best when it’s focused and clear. The second person point of view doesn’t work, at all. I rarely say that. Needed a strong edit to cut a lot. The diagrams at the back were really interesting and helped with conceptualising. Rough.

[Keen Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The more our mass-produced cravings are satisfied, the less satisfied we feel. The greater the capacity of the techno-structure to stir the passions, the greater the void within when they were served.”

Opening up with the recollection of a quaint childhood interaction with his father by a roaring fireside, about the importance and enduring qualities of iron and valuing it over gold. Varoufakis then goes onto the likes of Hesiod and other philosophers and goes on from there. There is a lot in here, and I have to say at times this is simply brilliant.

He references the TV show “Mad Men” to illustrate just how the mass commercialisation of nostalgia marked a turning point for capitalism. He later adds that, “Capitalism had begun as a relentless drive to put a price on things that once had no price.” All the stuff that families once produced for own consumption or shared with others, “Capitalism found a way to commodify it: to subjugate its experiential value to an exchange value.”

Having assimilated every resource, crop and artefact it could, capitalism has since gone on to commodify the airwaves, women’s wombs, art, genotypes, asteroids, even space itself. In the process, the experiential value of all things is reduced to a dollar sum, a commercial asset, a tradable contract.

“The cultural impact was enormous. But the less visible impact was no less momentous. A new group of experts had been grafted onto the techno-structure: alongside the scientists, analysts and professional managers, there were now creative types like Draper, as well as a whole raft of strategists and engineers working on new ways to manipulate and commodify our attention.”

“They jointly decided the prices, the quantities, the packages and even the feelings imparted by capitalism’s leading products…The techno-structure transformed American capitalism from a decentralised market society into a centralised economy-with-markets. It was precisely what Soviet planners had always hoped to achieve, but failed. And there’s the irony. In the 1960s, a decade marked by an ideological and nuclear clash between America and the Soviet Union that almost blew up the world, Soviet planning principles were implemented with remarkable success in…the US. Irony has seldom taken a more effective revenge over earnest ideology.”

We see that as soon the US entered WWII it began to emulate the Soviet model by telling factory owners how much to produce and to what specifications. Economist J K Galbraith, whose job it was to price these items and to fend off inflation. The US struck a deal with Big Business they would produce what was necessary to win the war and in return the State would reward them with four things, i. State guaranteed sales = state guaranteed profits, ii. Freedom from competition, iii. Huge government funded scientific research (like the Manhattan Project) which provided Business with wonderful innovations and highly skilled pool of staff to draw from. iv. The façade of “Patriotism” to help disguise the stigma of corporate greed which remained after the Depression.

The War Economy was an unqualified success, production quadrupled in under five years, inflation was kept down and unemployment disappeared. But after the war it soon became apparent that Business and government had become inextricably linked, and a revolving door opened between the two as the professional classes moved freely between the two, cementing the culture of conflicted interests which still remains today.

Galbraith called this new system the techno-structure, in order to maintain the phenomenal rate of production and expansion these corporations had to source greater audience for their products and so they hunted down new, external markets abroad. They also had to trick people into believing that they needed these products, whether they did or not, which is where the marketing came in.

“Sometime in the 20th Century, the left traded freedom for other things. In the East (from Russia to China, Cambodia and Vietnam), the quest for emancipation was swapped for a totalitarian egalitarianism. In the West, liberty was left to its enemies, abandoned in exchange for an ill-defined notion of fairness. The moment people believed they had to choose between freedom and fairness, between an iniquitous democracy and miserable state-imposed egalitarianism, it was game over for the left.”

By the late 60s there were three developments which caused America to lose its trade surplus and become a chronically deficit economy, the escalating Vietnam War, which cost billions, the second was LBJ’s attempt to make amends for the ill-effects of conscription on working class America, especially in Black communities, in the Great Society project and thirdly both Japan and Germany’s factories surpassed America in both quality and efficiency, partly due to the support of a succession of US governments, so they had to act and Nixon killed of Bretton Woods in 1971.

This then resulted in open season for the finance industry and the powerful corporate world, who then went onto suppress wages and destroy unions at home, then pursue cheaper labour markets abroad, which also gave them generous tax subsidises, cuts or holidays to encourage and keep them there. “It is no coincidence that, to this day, American working-class earnings languish, on average, below their 1974 level.”

Varoufakis talks about how these new Big Tech platforms are effectively converting billions of us into cloud proles or cloud serfs, a depressingly accurate description in a kind of rebooted 21st Century serfdom, in what he describes as “central bank –sponsored socialism for the ultra-rich.”

He explains that because central banks just keep printing more money to solve problems, but the problem is they channel that money to the Finance industry which is responsible for most of the problems in the first place, they then use that money to speculate, buy up even more real estate and buy back their own shares, making more immense profits, for themselves at the expense of the vast majority who became even more impoverished to subsidise the richest getting richer. In 2020 largely thanks to the pandemic, became Amazon’s best year yet, they booked sales worth 44 billion Euros at its global HQ in Ireland and paid exactly zero corporate tax. No one is more anti-socialist than the bankers…until bail out time comes around again, or when it comes to gaining immunity from prosecution. Again it becomes socialism for the wealthy criminal class and capitalism and austerity for everyone else.

We see that thanks to a long and established and continuing culture of dreadful decision making from successive governments and short-sighted, cowardly central bankers around the world, we are stuck in a cycle of feeding possibly the most bloated and sociopathic system in modern recorded history, which continues to enrich the obscenely rich by extracting even more from everyone else. Varoufakis insists that the (unimaginatively titled) Big Three effectively own American capitalism - BlackRock ($10 trillion in investments), Vanguard ($8 trillion) and State Street ($4 trillion).

[Jowix · Rating 4 out of 5]

kiedyś zrozumiem giełdę, ale jeszcze nie tym razem

[Jakub Dovcik · Rating 4 out of 5]

As controversial as Varoufakis is, I have always considered his books interesting inputs to the public debate about global capitalism or as an interesting lens through which to look at it. This book does a similar thing - it looks at the impact of both the platform model of big tech firms as well as the ultra-low interest rates era on the functioning of capitalism.

In a way, the analysis is not novel at all - every business school teaches the case studies of Amazon marketplace, App Store etc. - but what makes it interesting is the more normative analysis connecting the functioning of these platforms with the feudalist economic models (what he describes as the ‘cloud capital’, that is based not on profit, but rent).

There is again a lot of personal backstory, this time with his father, who was an engineer and a leftist in Greece - the book is styled as an answer to his father’s question ‘Now that computers speak to each other, will this network make capitalism impossible to overthrow? Or might it finally reveal its Achilles heel?’. There is once again some history of capitalism and the Marxist theory of labour value (labour vs labouring power which Varoufakis calls commodity vs experiential labour) and of course, the Global Minotaur theory. That much is expected and his writing is interesting enough for a reader to enjoy it once again.

An interesting part of the book is his analysis of the various contributing factors to the growth of the technological feudal overlords. For instance, he considers the massive growth of the banking sector (the 'terrestrial capital') and its financialization as a strong contributing factor to the rise of business models based on rent. Or he looks at the growth of three gigantic passive income managers - BlackRock, Vanguard and StateStreet (attributing malicious nature to them feels a bit strange due to their passive nature) whose indirect impact in propping up the stock market was based on the ultra-low interest rates, allowing for the emergence of the cloud fiefdoms.

Overall, it is interesting, but quite short and not fully convincing. His theory holds for relatively few firms under some circumstances but largely fails once the interest rates go up. It nevertheless describes the power dynamics within modern late capitalism relatively well.

[Vic Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yanis Varoufankis' "Technofeudalism" was a pretty steep read for me. Add to that Varoufakis' habit of making assertions without supporting or explaining them and the book can be confusing at the same time. For instance, Varoufakis' says an American company importing a ton of aluminum from China and thus adding to America's trade deficit with China, can do so because of America's trade deficit with China and the position of the American dollar as the world's reserve currency. Umm. Ok. Care to explain that? Well, no as a matter of fact.

But Varoufankis' main point that 19th/20th century capitalism is either dead or dying at the hands of of "cloud capital" and that rents have returned with a vengeance to overwhelm capital as the source of income for the wealthy (whether that's individuals or countries).

Varoufankis refers to himself as a "libertarian Marxist." If the combination of those two terms caused you a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment, you will probably enjoy "Technofeudalism." Created by a combination of electro magnetism and the massive "quantitative easing" after the 2008 banking collapse, technofeudalism displaced capitalism by creating masses of unpaid researchers (e.g. unpaid people developing apps to run on Apple or Android) and users complicit in their own behavioral modification via BigTech algorithms. This ability to collect personal information about you to the point where the messaging and info you are presented with say on YouTube, is tailored to push your behavior in certain directions. It's a feedback loop. The more you consume, the more they learn, and the easier it becomes to feed you more of your self selected themes and then to influence your behavior and decisions. Not just in the market place but in the voting booth and more. If he's right then the internet has achieved the dream of displacing capitalism. But with something much worse.

Highly recommended to anyone curious about what post-globalism economics might look like as well as those who have already caught onto the fact that your attention is the most valuable thing in the world to this new threat to human well being.

[Walter Schutjens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Luxemburg was wrong, Socialism or Barbarism are not our only options. In another she was right, there is still the possibility of progress if we are able to measure the depth of our fall. I know no other man better suited for that task in the contemporary moment than Varoufakis. He is in equal measure humanist, translating complex ideas through ancient stories to a wide audience, politician, squaring off with new iterations of neoliberal state-apparatus and artificial financial shocks leaving his demos writhing with austerity, and scientist, in Marx's sense analysing the economic shifts that produce our reality and explain our social relations. Through a recognition of its own redundancy (death), the Left must once again be as agile as Capitalism (its inevitable sparring partner) which seems in a constant process of self-cannibalization and reconstitution whilst we keep teaching our children and waxing lyrical politically about the same myths of 'free markets' 'competition' and 'prosperity'. Many may understand that although the philosophy may be commonsensical that reality is often far dirtier and more complex, little have as of yet (especially on the left) considered that the philosophy has been abandoned and that an already dirty reality hides something far more sinister: historical regression to medieval rentierism and consequently, not even taking into account the maddened macabre dance of polycrises, the abandonment of objective freedom.

[Saif Elhendawi · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is really impressive how accessible this book is made to be, yet how much value it delivers in such a short amount of time. This is how science communication should be done, something that I have rarely found in most economic texts, especially those deemed classics. Firstly, I would like to address Varoufakis' style which feels intimate and personal without being overbearing. This is an achievement on its own, as in most non-fiction I find myself being tired of unnecessary attempts at force feeding "personal narrative" to make us more "connected" to the author. This book definitely employs this tactic to the last minute, by being addressed to the author's father. However, it never felt corny or forced, but intimate and real. It certainly added a dimension or layer to an introductory book about an otherwise, possibly boring or intimidating topic. This is definitely added to by references to popular culture and Greek myth, also overused tropes that somehow were done with sincerity here that didn't feel cheap or forced.

Secondly, on the matter of the label "technofeudalism", I think its very easy to get bogged down in definition debates, even more so in scientific topics. Are the crucial elements of capitalism as defined by materialists or economists still present? Yes. Does it matter or take away from the usefulness of this new word? No. Why? Because, it has practical value and adds nuance to a new period in contemporary politics and economics where we need a new term to define the relationship that we have with big tech. I think his defense of the importance of the term is solid and persuasive. Whether you agree with the term or not, however, it does not matter. What matters here is the new economic relationships and realities that we have in the internet age, the rent based systems, the privacy intrusions, the working conditions, etc. I think he explains these pretty well, laying out the history of changes to the financial markets post-2008, and then going on to explain what he means by new terms such as "cloud serfs", "cloud vassals", etc. He also explains thoroughly enough the current geopolitical dynamics of the second cold war in a way that makes a lot of sense to me and felt very reasonable by using the lens of technofeudalism.

Thirdly, he lays out his ideas for dealing with this new system and how to bring it to an end, discussing the alternative and the strategy to achieve it. In terms of the alternative, I agree with most of the proposed changes, although some of it feels not radical enough or a bit too reformist. He calls it anarchist, but in a sense it cant be called because it doesn't remove all hierarchies, especially social ones, like patriarchy, or race. Furthermore, in terms of economics, I think I would rather a complete removal of profit and shares, instead going for a mutual aid system, or something based on a non-transferrable currency. Otherwise, there remains the risk of bad actors or reactionaries amassing wealth and power. Unless I am misunderstanding something here. To be fair though, especially concerning the social issues, he is aware of these things, however, it is unreasonable to demand a full explanation of how the world is supposed to work from a book that already covers so much. In terms of strategy, the idea of tackling the oppression of the financial system and of technofedualism by utility strikes, cloud mobilization, hackavists, pension fund strikes, etc. all seem practical to me. This also lends more validity to the use of the new terms, because he directly relates it to his revolutionary strategy. Classical leftist strategies of seizing the means of production and gaining control of factories are not sufficient to tackle the cloud systems of oppression.

Overall, I highly recommend this book for everyone. Really, everyone should read this. While, I will go and read everything else this guy wrote and binge his YT posts.

[Coral Carracedo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yo a partir de ahora:

[Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most striking images of the Trump inauguration was the president standing surrounded by the titans of the tech industry. It was more than a photo-op; it was a visual metaphor for the final death throes of democracy—bludgeoned, not by a mob, but by the wealthiest and most powerful entities on Earth. The closer one stood to the president, the higher their net worth. Few images so perfectly encapsulate the political dynamics of our time: the formal arrival of an oligarchy so intertwined with kleptocracy that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

As I write this, seven of the ten richest people in the world belong to the tech industry. Once the kings of finance, Wall Street’s powerbrokers have now been dethroned by Silicon Valley’s digital overlords. Meanwhile, traditional media institutions—long discredited by their own failures—have left a vacuum where any opportunist can spout populist rhetoric, inflame culture war battles, and yet ultimately serve the same system under a different brand.

This brings us to Technofeudalism, in which Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism has been replaced by a digital feudal system unlike anything that has come before. Much like medieval Europe, today's economic order is not one of competitive markets, but one of lords and vassals. However, before we can understand this transformation, we must first ask: how did we get here? How did digital platforms rise to a point where they hold more power than governments, with the capital to buy entire elections if necessary?

The Financial Crisis and the Birth of Digital Feudal Lords

The origins of our current predicament can be traced back to the 2008 financial crisis, when central banks rushed to stabilize markets by slashing interest rates to zero and engaging in Quantitative Easing (QE)—a euphemism for printing trillions of dollars to buy assets like Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities. The stated goal was to stimulate the economy by encouraging borrowing and investment.

But that’s not what happened.

Instead of using this influx of cheap money to invest in innovation or production, corporations pumped it into stock buybacks, inflating asset prices while wages stagnated. This trend only accelerated during the pandemic when the CARES Act injected trillions into financial markets, leading to a surge in asset prices while the middle class and working poor were priced out of homeownership.

At the same time, tech companies leveraged these artificially low interest rates to lose tens of billions of dollars in pursuit of market dominance. They subsidized "free" services, offering products at a loss until competitors were eliminated. Once they achieved monopoly status, they simply raised prices—an economic model that was effectively subsidized by the taxpayer.

Technofeudalism: The Shift from Competition to Rent-Seeking

Varoufakis argues that tech monopolies operate under a new form of economic extraction—one that mirrors feudal rent-seeking rather than capitalist innovation. Unlike traditional businesses that compete by producing goods or services, tech giants own the infrastructure where commerce occurs. This enables them to charge fees on transactions without actually contributing to production.

- Amazon, for example, charges third-party sellers up to 50% of their revenue simply for using its marketplace.
- Apple demands a 30% tax on all App Store transactions, essentially forcing businesses to pay rent to access their own customers.
- Google prioritizes paid advertising over organic search results, forcing companies to pay just to be seen.

These fees resemble medieval land rents: peasants once paid lords for access to farmland; now businesses and individuals must pay tech giants simply to exist in the digital economy. Unlike historical marketplaces where buyers and sellers could communicate freely, platforms like Amazon control and algorithmically manipulate interactions to maximize their own profits. The idea of a "free market" on these platforms is an illusion—markets are rigged in favor of the digital landlords.

The Power of Algorithmic Control

One of the starkest differences between capitalism and technofeudalism is the ability of digital platforms to shape behavior through algorithms. This isn’t just about surveillance—it’s about modifying human decision-making at a scale never seen before.

- Tesla collects data on where you drive, where you shop, even who you date—feeding it into AI models that refine its self-driving algorithms.
- Amazon tracks every product you browse, every purchase you make, and every preference you show. This data is then used to nudge you toward more purchases, with recommendations tailored to keep you spending.
- Google and Facebook refine their algorithms to ensure you stay glued to their platforms, feeding you articles, ads, and links designed to manipulate your interests and beliefs.

This extraction of user data is what Varoufakis calls "Cloud Capital"—a system in which we, the users, unknowingly provide free labor for these companies, enriching their algorithms while receiving nothing in return. They know us better than we know ourselves, and they use that knowledge not for our benefit, but to extract more rent from our lives.

The Battle Against Digital Oligarchy

This rentier economy is not just an economic issue—it is a direct threat to democracy. Tech giants spend hundreds of millions in lobbying to prevent governments from breaking their monopolies, ensuring their unchecked power remains intact. The battle for fair competition, data privacy, and workers’ rights is now one of the defining political fights of the century.

Consider:

- Meta was caught using 82 million books to train its AI models—without compensating a single author.
- OpenAI has been accused of scraping copyrighted data to train its language models.
- Amazon uses heat maps to predict which warehouses are likely to unionize—preemptively crushing organizing efforts.

Tech CEOs claim to be libertarians, yet demand complete access to our personal lives while screaming about “government overreach” when regulators come knocking.

The public is too often distracted by manufactured culture wars, while the real power struggle is between democratically accountable institutions and unaccountable tech monopolies. Take Elon Musk, for example: one day, he decries “wokeness,” and the next, he is dismantling consumer protections in the name of “free markets.” The real agenda is not ideological—it’s about eliminating any obstacles to the unchecked power of tech lords.


Varoufakis' Technofeudalism is a sobering wake-up call. It forces us to confront the reality that we are no longer in a capitalist system—we are in a digital feudal order where a handful of tech companies control the infrastructure of the modern economy, extracting wealth without producing anything of tangible value. Instead of innovation and competition, we are left with monopoly and rent-seeking extraction.

The question is: Will we remain digital serfs, paying endless tribute to tech overlords? Or will we reclaim our economic and political autonomy before it’s too late?

The battle against Big Tech’s dominance will be one of the most defining fights of our era. An enjoyable book, I am glad I have this one in my personal library.

This is somewhere between 4 and 5 stars.

4.5 Stars for me.