Technofeudalism

I’m typically not one for socio-political economics books really. Put me in front of Dickens or Christie and I am a content man. But I heard this fellow Yanis Varoufakis on a podcast and found the way he spoke about our current state of post-capitalism fascinating. He spoke about his book - Technofeudalism - and some of the interesting ideas therein and I was hooked.

In this book he writes to his father - a staunch Marxist - to tell him that what replaced Capitalism was not Socialism as hoped, but Technofeudalism - a new system by which we - the techno-serfs - pay a sort of rent to the people who own the spaces in which we make a living. Think of a market stall selling cabbages - under feudalism the land owner would charge a rent to the seller. Now think of an Uber driver - who provides a more abstract good or capital - through the Uber app, algorithm and network, all owned by Uber. While our market seller can be physically evicted at any time, so our Uber driver can be denied at the press of a button. Like a serf may be bound to the land they work, our driver is bound to Uber, as they own the network. The same is true of those of us that use cloud networks. This post here is on Substack. I do not on the space, but I work on it without pay.

Varoufakis writes about how this came to pass with eloquence, humour and a sense for story-telling that makes it easy for even a regular techno-serf like me to understand it, and - most impressively - at the end of the book he outlines his ideas for how we stop this, or what system could replace it. This is the part of the book I’ve recommended most, and delivered a terrible recounting of often. In order to form the thoughts he planned a sci-fi book on it, and released Another Now sometime before. This has gone straight on my to-read list.

In the thought experiment, the economic structures of the cloud are democratised and socialised - social media, digital banking, search engines - the cloud marketplace - are all owned collectively by all citizens. These socialised corporations are a one-person-one-vote system - like the Green Party. Cloud-rent adds to the public fund, no data is stored privately and algorithms are transparent and democratically governed, so monopoly should be structurally difficult by design.

Entrepreneurship and private business isn’t dead here, you can still setup an online book seller and sell books, but your profits have to come not from rent on the platform, but from your production, like for example fees that are transparently stated.

Every citizen would get a social dividend of the central capital, which is paid into by the cloud platforms that have been socialised, and the rent extracted to use the platforms would be a social dividend for all.

I have to say this socialist utopia certainly gives me hope that it could be done, even if I’m not sure I totally understood every nook and cranny. It would require incredibly drastic social reform, collective decision-making agreements that are both rational and fair, and for the current big-scale capitalists to be forced to hand over the reins. I’m not sure these things are realistic, but if nothing else it certainly gives me something to point to when someone in the pub says “but what’s the alternative?”