Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

by Yanis Varoufakis

Which brings us back to Trump’s ban on Huawei and Biden’s declaration of economic war on Chinese tech companies. The underlying logic of these prohibitions was a straightforward extension of the same thinking, adapted to the circumstances of a post-2008 technofeudal world: with cloud capital dominating terrestrial capital, the maintenance of US hegemony requires more than preventing foreign capitalists from buying up US capitalist conglomerates, like Boeing and General Electric. In a world where cloud capital is borderless, global, capable of siphoning cloud rents from anywhere, the maintenance of US hegemony demands a direct confrontation with the only cloudalist class to have emerged as a threat to their own: China’s.