Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

by Yanis Varoufakis

Amazon was just the start. Alibaba applied the same techniques to create a similar cloud fief in China. Copycat ecommerce platforms, offering variations on the Amazon theme, are springing up everywhere, in the Global South as well as the Global North. More significantly, other industrial sectors are turning into cloud fiefs too. Take for example Tesla, Elon Musk’s successful electric car company. One reason financiers value it so much higher than Ford or Toyota is that its cars’ every circuit is wired into cloud capital. Besides giving Tesla the power to switch off one of its cars remotely, if for instance the driver fails to service it as the company wishes, merely by driving around Tesla owners are uploading in real time information (including what music they are listening to!) that enriches the company’s cloud capital. They may not think of themselves as cloud serfs but, alas, that’s precisely what the proud owners of new, wonderfully aerodynamically gleaming Teslas are. It took mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical-sounding neural networks and imagination-defying AI programs to accomplish what? To turn workers toiling in warehouses, driving cabs and delivering food into cloud proles. To create a world where markets are increasingly replaced by cloud fiefs. To force businesses into the role of vassals. And to turn all of us into cloud serfs, glued to our smartphones and tablets, eagerly producing the cloud capital that keeps our new overlords on cloud nine.