Welcome to Technofeudalism

Soonish

I’ve been arguing on the show since 2019 that the companies that run the big technology platforms—Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the rest—have far too much wealth and power. In the world these companies have built, we exist only to generate behavioral data. We supply that data through our decisions about what social media posts to click on and what stuff to buy and what videos and songs we consume; the companies hoover it up and use it to craft and curate more content they know we’ll like, so that they can sell us even more stuff.

This unimaginably profitable business model has been called “surveillance capitalism”—but that term doesn’t feel right, since surveillance is usually covert, and these companies are doing what they do right out in the open, with our willing participation. This week on the show, we bring you an interview with Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, who has a better name for it: technofeudalism.

The thesis of his new book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism is that since 2008 or so, old-fashioned capital has been eclipsed by Internet-powered cloud capital. The real power in today’s economy, Varoufakis argues, resides not with the owners of the means of production, but with the owners of the platforms that turn our behavior into data and use that data in turn to modify our behavior. Whereas old-fashioned feudal lords collected actual rent from their serfs in return for the right to farm the land they owned, cloud capitalists collect cloud rent—a tax on access to their platforms.

If you’re like me, you’re not very happy about the rise of technofeudalism and the decline of free, open markets. And you worry about how democracy can survive and how we can continue to flourish as creative beings when so much wealth and power is concentrated in so few companies and people. Fortunately, Varoufakis isn’t simply in the business of diagnosing the problem. In Technofeudalism, together with his 2021 science fiction novel Another Now, he does a lot of work to sketch out alternative worlds and ways we could get there.