Greek economist/politician Yanis Varoufakis “was briefly Greek finance minister in 2015,” remembers the Conversation. Now his new book asks the question, “What killed capitalism,” with the title’s first word providing an answer.
“Techno-feudalism.”
Varoufakis argues that we no longer live in a capitalist society… “Today, capitalist relations remain intact, but techno-feudalist relations have begun to overtake them,” writes Varoufakis. Traditional capitalists, he proposes, have become “vassal capitalists”. They are subordinate and dependent on a new breed of “lords” — the Big Tech companies — who generate enormous wealth via new digital platforms. A new form of algorithmic capital has evolved — what Varoufakis calls “cloud capital” — and it has displaced “capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits”.
Markets have been “replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets”. The moment you enter amazon.com “you exit capitalism” and enter something that resembles a “feudal fief”: a digital world belonging to one man and his algorithm, which determines what products you will see and what products you won’t see. If you are a seller, the platform will determine how you can sell and which customers you can approach. The terms in which you interact, share information and trade are dictated by an “algo” that “works for [Jeff Bezos’] bottom line”…
Access to the “digital fief” comes at the cost of exorbitant…
