Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

by Yanis Varoufakis

Previously, to exercise capital’s power to command and make other humans work faster and consume more, capitalists required two types of professionals: managers and marketeers. Especially under the auspices of the post-war technostructure, these two service professions achieved greater prominence even than bankers and insurance brokers. Gleaming new business schools were set up to initiate MBA students in the dark arts of quick-marching a workforce towards explosive labour productivity. Advertising and marketing departments nurtured a generation of Don Drapers. Then, cloud capital arrived. At one fell swoop it automated both roles. The exercise of capital’s power to command workers and consumers alike was handed over to the algos. This was a far more revolutionary step than replacing autoworkers with industrial robots. After all, industrial robots simply do what automation has been doing since before the Luddites: making proletarians redundant, or more miserable, or both. No, the truly historic disruption was to automate capital’s power to command people outside the factory, the shop or the office – to turn all of us, cloud proles and everyone else, into cloud serfs in the direct (unremunerated) service of cloud capital, unmediated by any market.