‘If it ain’t a capitalist market, what in the sweet Lord’s name are we stepping into when we enter amazon.com?’ a student at the University of Texas asked me a few years ago. ‘A type of digital fief,’ I replied instinctively. ‘A post-capitalist one, whose historical roots remain in feudal Europe but whose integrity is maintained today by a futuristic, dystopian type of cloud-based capital.’ Since then, I have come to believe that it was a reasonably accurate answer to a hard question.
