From The Philosophical Salon, October 20:
In recent years, there has been much talk about the death of capitalism—whether that death is imminent, in process, or something that has already happened. In the latter category, we find economist, former Greek Minister of Finance, and current Secretary-General of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 Yanis Varoufakis. Varoufakis, certain that capitalism is dead, argues in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism that capitalism has been superseded by “cloud capital,” “cloud rents” and AI-guided electronic surveillance. This, Varoufakis tells us, is not a good thing.
According to Varoufakis, technofeudalism is more exploitative than neoliberal capitalism:
“Whereas capitalists can only exploit their employees, cloudalists benefit from universal exploitation, i.e. cloud serfs work for free to increase the stock of the cloud capital which allows cloudalists to appropriate more and more of the surplus value that the capitalists extract from employees already converted into cloud proles whose work is guided and sped up by cloud capital.”[1]
A “cloudalist” is someone who owns and controls a digital trading platform (Amazon, Alibaba, Shopify, Facebook/Meta, Apple, Google, etc.) —- all “fiefdoms” that charge “cloud rent”. Renters are vassals in relation to feudal overlords, and everyone else is merely a serf in a system that forces all to contribute unpaid labor to the cloudalists. Thus, the “bedrock” of technofeudalism is nothing less than “sanitized tech-terror.”[2]
As traditional markets are decimated, sellers must rent space on digital trading platforms. And anyone who owns a digital device ends up renting space in the cloud simply to store their stuff. We rent space for email accounts, and for file, document, and photo storage, to be accessed by tablets, phones, computers—for everything we need to live. Cloudalists manipulate and exploit us through AI-mined data, ever expanding the machine’s ability to execute its mission while ever contracting the remaining sphere of human freedom and autonomy.
Let’s think about some of the implications. Dragnet data collection yields a near-omniscient vantage point that exceeds, by an inestimable magnitude, that of Bentham’s panopticon. It’s no wonder that the generators of large language models behave as if they’ve created a new life form, with consciousness, volition, and desire. There is even talk of granting rights to AI. The irony and sadism of such verbiage is palpable in a society in which humans themselves languish in a dystopian netherworld of wholesale violation of even their most basic human rights. Assertion of “life creation” is without doubt useful in decentering responsibility away from the primary beneficiaries of a system that has jeopardized human freedom and dignity in ways that we are only beginning to understand.
It may be impossible to know if Varoufakis is correct. But it is certainly arguable that we have moved beyond neoliberal capitalism and are now confronted with something even worse. I’d like to outline some of the effects of this shift on human consciousness. They include nothing less than the psychological foreclosure of the future.
I have argued elsewhere that neoliberal rationality leaves us with nowhere to go, and that, as material conditions become progressively constricted, thinking itself runs up against an endless logical loop of cognitive dissonance. This endless logical loop is the result of attempting—and failing—to figure out how to surmount structurally imposed conditions of precarity. When housing and health care, for example, are commodities rather than basic human rights, there is no way to guarantee that one illness or accident will not strip one of the means to pay for them. This is particularly true when medical procedures are unconscionably expensive, and bankruptcy—with or without health insurance—is a real concern. The only way around the endless logical loop of cognitive dissonance is to engage in magical thinking, to have recourse to the fictional narrative of unlimited individual possibility, or to try to stop thinking altogether....
....MUCH MORE
