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Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism Paperback – February 13, 2024

by Yanis Varoufakis (Author)

4.4 469 ratings

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“Blending intellectual memoir, history, and economic and technological history, Varoufakis creates an intimate atmosphere that is a genuine pleasure to read ... It’s hard to read this book and deny its power ... illuminating.” - The Washington Post

In a revelatory and pathbreaking work, the #1 international bestselling economist opens our eyes to the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world . . .

“The Thucydides of our time.” —Jeffrey Sachs

Big tech has replaced capitalism's twin pillars—markets and profit—with its platforms and rents. With every click and scroll, we labor like serfs to increase its power.

Welcome to technofeudalism . . .

Perhaps we were too distracted by the pandemic, or the endless financial crises, or the rise of TikTok. But under cover of them all, a new and more exploitative system has been taking hold. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies after the crash of 2008 went to big tech instead. With it they funded the construction of their private cloud fiefdoms and privatized the internet.

Technofeudalism says Yanis Varoufakis, is the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world, and is the greatest current threat to the liberal individual, to our efforts to avert climate catastrophe—and to democracy itself. It also lies behind the new geopolitical tensions, especially the New Cold War between the United States and China.

Drawing on stories from Greek myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men, Varoufakis explains this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power, and, ultimately, what it will take overthrow it.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Melville House
Publication date

February 13, 2024
Dimensions

5.48 x 0.87 x 8.24 inches
ISBN-10

1685891241
ISBN-13

978-1685891244
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Editorial Reviews

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Bloomberg News Anticipated Book for 2024
Bloomberg News Best New Books for 2024

“Blending intellectual memoir, history, and economic and technological history, Varoufakis creates an intimate atmosphere that is a genuine pleasure to read ... It’s hard to read this book and deny its power ... illuminating.” - The Washington Post

“Throughout, Varoufakis’s exuberant prose amuses. Readers who feel burned out by intrusive apps, relentless advertising, and inexorable algorithms will revel in this fiery complaint." - Publishers Weekly STARRED Review

"The rare economist to hit international bestseller lists, Varoufakis is known for his left-of-center political positions and outspoken statements while serving as Greece’s finance minister. His newest book argues that capitalism is over; its sinister replacement, he writes, has emerged in the form of Big Tech, which has single-handedly taken control of most of global society. Unsurprisingly, Varoufakis isn’t a fan of the new order." —Bloomberg News

"Engaging prose. Varoufakis’s talent for explaining economic developments in accessible language shines throughout...convincing and enlightening. We all should and we can be grateful to have a comrade like [Varoufakis]." —Jacobin

"[Varoufakis has] a talent for synthesizing complex economic issues. The narrative is entertaining, and the author’s arguments are sure to be popular among economic theorists and students." —Kirkus Reviews

“This sort of macroeconomic musing on capitalism’s succession is worth taking seriously, for it pushes the reader to ask whether we’re observing business as usual or something else—and what business as usual even means. In particular, by tying capitalism’s development to the evolution of the internet and the computer, ” - The Washington Free Beacon

“The main virtue of Varoufakis’s book is that it poses the problem of global digitally mediated value. This by itself is illuminating, whether we adopt the term ‘technofeudalism’ or not.” - Front Porch Republic

Varoufakis’s core point, that capitalism will change as technology does, is surely right, and essential
“Few finance ministers have such a talent for economics as Yanis Varoufakis.” — Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist

“An outstanding economist and political analyst.” — Noam Chomsky

“"What if capitalism died and no one noticed — not even the capitalists? Digital platforms usurped capitalism and installed something far worse. This book is an urgent demand to seize the means of computation." — Cory Doctorow

“The Thucydides of our time.” — Jeffrey Sachs

“An important new book that describes what is happening in terms of an epochal, once-in-a-millennium shift … In Varoufakis's telling, this isn't just new technology. This is the world grappling with an entirely new economic system and therefore political power.” — Carole Cadwalladr, The Observer (London)

Arresting … an ambitious thinker and a lively writer … Varoufakis is right that we are in thrall to digital platforms, who hold our data hostage and prevent us from switching to “a competing cloud fief” ― The Times (London)

About the Author

Yanis Varoufakis is an economist, political leader, and the author of numerous bestselling books, including Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism, Adults in the Room, a memoir of his time as finance minister of Greece. Born in Athens, he was for many years a professor of economics in Britain, Australia, and the USA, before he entered politics, serving in Parliament until May, 2023. He is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Athens, and is Secretary-General of Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DEM25).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Some years ago, I decided to write a brief history of capitalism. To temper the task’s enormity, and force myself to focus on what capitalism boils down to, I decided to pretend I was narrating capitalism’s story to my then twelve-year-old daughter. So, without seeking Xenia’s permission (something she will never let me forget!), I began writing the book in the form of a long letter to her. Taking care to use no jargon (not even the word capitalism!), I kept reminding myself that whether or not my narrative made sense to a youngster was a litmus test of my own grasp of capitalism’s essence. The result was a slim volume entitled Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism. It took as its starting point an apparently simple question of hers: why is there so much inequality?

Even before it was published in 2017, I was feeling uneasy. Between finishing the manuscript and holding the published book in my hands, it felt as if it were the 1840s and I was about to publish a book on feudalism; or, even worse, like waiting for a book on Soviet central planning to see the light of day in late 1989. Belatedly, that is.

In the years after it was published, first in Greek, later in English, my weird hypothesis that capitalism was on the way out (and not merely undergoing one of its many impressive metamorphoses) gathered strength. During the pandemic, it became a conviction, which became an urge to explain my thinking in a book if for no other reason than to give friends and foes outraged by my theory a chance to disparage it properly having perused it in full.

So, what is my hypothesis? It is that capitalism is now dead, in the sense that its dynamics no longer govern our economies. In that role it has been replaced by something fundamentally different, which I call technofeudalism. At the heart of my thesis is an irony that may sound confusing at first but which I hope to show makes perfect sense: the thing that has killed capitalism is . . . capital itself. Not capital as we have known it since the dawn of the industrial era, but a new form of capital, a mutation of it that has arisen in the last two decades, so much more powerful than its predecessor that like a stupid, overzealous virus it has killed off its host. What caused this to happen? Two main developments: the privatisation of the internet by America’s and China’s Big Tech. And the manner in which Western governments and central banks responded to the 2008 great financial crisis.

Before saying a little more on this, I must emphasise that this is not a book about what technology will do to us. It is not about AI-chatbots that will take over our jobs, autonomous robots that will threaten our lives, or Mark Zuckerberg’s ill-conceived metaverse. No, this book is about what has already been done to capitalism, and therefore to us, by the screen-based, cloud-linked devices we all use, our boring laptop and our smartphone, in conjunction with the way central banks and governments have been acting since 2008. The historic mutation of capital that I am highlighting has already happened but, caught up in our pressing dramas, from debt worries and a pandemic to wars and the climate emergency, we have barely noticed. It is high time we paid attention!

If we do pay attention, it is not hard to see that capital’s mutation into what I call cloud capital has demolished capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits. Of course, markets and profits remain ubiquitous – indeed, markets and profits were ubiquitous under feudalism too – they just aren’t running the show any more. What has happened over the last two decades is that profit and markets have been evicted from the epicentre of our economic and social system, pushed out to its margins, and replaced. With what? Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud rent.

As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labour, but they are not in charge as they once were. As we shall see, they have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labour – in addition to the waged labour we perform, when we get the chance.

Does all this matter to the way we live and experience our lives? It certainly does. As I’ll show in Chapters 5, 6 and 7, recognising that our world has become technofeudal helps us dissolve puzzles great and small: from the elusive green energy revolution and Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter to the New Cold War between the USA and China and how the war in Ukraine is threatening the dollar’s reign; from the death of the liberal individual and the impossibility of social democracy to the false promise of crypto and the burning question of how we may recover our autonomy, perhaps our freedom too.

By late 2021, armed with these convictions, and egged on by a pandemic that strengthened them, the die had been cast: I would sit down and write a brief introduction to technofeudalism – the far, far uglier social reality that has superseded capitalism. One question remained: whom to address it to? Without much thought, I decided to address it to the person who had introduced me to capitalism at a ridiculously young age – and who, like his grand- daughter, once asked me an apparently simple question that shapes almost every page of this book. My father.

For the impatient reader, a word of warning: my description of technofeudalism does not come until Chapter 3. And for my description to make sense, I need first to recount capitalism’s astounding metamorphoses over the preceding decades: this is Chapter 2. The beginning of the book, meanwhile, is not about technofeudalism at all. Chapter 1 tells the story of how my father, with the help of some metal fragments and Hesiod’s poetry, introduced my six-year-old self to technology’s chequered relationship with humanity and, ultimately, to capitalism’s essence. It presents the guiding principles on which all of the thinking that follows is based, and it concludes with that seemingly simple question Father put to me in 1993. The rest of the book takes the form of a letter addressed to him. It is my attempt to answer his killer question.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Melville House (February 13, 2024)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1685891241
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1685891244
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.48 x 0.87 x 8.24 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #6,655 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Microeconomics (Books)
- #10 in Theory of Economics
- #13 in Economic History (Books)

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4.4 469 ratings

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Yanis Varoufakis

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Yanis Varoufakis is the former finance minister of Greece and the author of several international bestselling books. And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability reveals the underlying problems that led to the Eurozone crisis and its ongoing catastrophic mishandling. Adults In the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment is an explosive memoir that reveals what goes on behind the scenes in Europe's corridors of power. Talking To My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism (forthcoming) explains through vivid stories and easily graspable concepts what economics actually is and why it is so dangerous in the form of a letter to his teenage daughter.

Born in Athens in 1961, Yanis Varoufakis was for many years a professor of economics in Britain, Australia and the USA before he entered government and is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Athens. Since resigning from Greece's finance ministry he has co-founded an international grassroots movement, DiEM25, campaigning for the revival of democracy in Europe and speaks to audiences of thousands worldwide.

yanisvaroufakis.eu / @yanisvaroufakis

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Conor Knapp

Important moment in modern economic theory

Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2023

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Every so often an idea comes along that changes how we look at things. A good theory does that, but a great theory goes a step further and forces us to reevaluate all of our concepts up to the present moment. Varoufakis accomplishes this here, guiding us to take a step beyond capitalism into, not our future, but our present. Techno-Feudalism, in a crudely simple sketch, is about the merging of capital markets and technology, and how this has fundamentally changed the nature of capitalism. Varoufakis argues that it has changed it so much so that it is actually no longer capitalism because of two key ingredients that are now missing from capitalism: markets and profit. Now he doesn’t mean missing as in they are gone, but that they are no longer the central ideas around which today’s capitalism is organised. He does a phenomenal job bringing us up to date with a recap of how we got to this stage of capitalism and his arguments are not only well argued and eleoquent, but also deeply personal. This book is dedicated to his late father and at many points in the book he uses their dialogues together as a basis for asking/answering questions, a device he used also to great effect in “Talking to My Daughter about Capitalism”. He also uses Mad Men and the character of Don Draper to exemplify old capital vs. new capital, a comparison I was thrilled to read because I have always felt like that show is incredibly interesting from an economic ideological perspective. Overall this book is very well written, relevant, deeply enjoyable, and I believe Varoufakis’ theory of Techno-Feudalism will only prove more accurate with each passing year.

31 people found this helpful

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S Rosenbaum

Solid critique and he offers a good solution in the end.

Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2024

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Solid critique and he offers a good solution in the end. Drags in the middle a little. Type of book you will wish more people will read to digest the ideas, rather than repeat the same old we have heard.

Unfortunately, because it offers a new way of thinking that tries to depart from the black/white, communist vs capital world we are used to at the end, people will probably ignore it. Or get scared of it and describe it as something it is not. Which of course makes it the reason everyone should read it.

7 people found this helpful

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Michael Harper

Time to Examine Our Heritage and Direction

Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2024

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It's time to reexamine our assumptions about capitalism and the changing role of capital in a post-globalization, post-2008 financial collapse in light of the rise of a rent-based, cloud-based, surveillance economy run by unaccountable billionaires. Written by the former Minister of Finance for Greece and professor of Economics, Varoufakis presents an easy to follow history of economic principles and examines emerging trends that are changing the foundations of the global economy and Democracy itself. An entertaining and thought-provoking read I'm happy to have found.

4 people found this helpful

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Rolland F Smith

Star Trek or Matrix

Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2024

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Yanis Varoufakis shows us how we might turn our Matrix world into a Star-trek one. Which pill will we take? The best way to start breaking my addiction to Technofeudalism is to acknowledge the addiction to the Cloudalists which this very review to Amazon demonstrates. I am Cloud Serf. It was not my choice. This book shows me to be bred into this post- capitalist system. Do I take red pill or the blue one? Or do I wait for some Messaiah, the strong orange man or his successor to save us. Read this book and think. Then let’s organize.

10 people found this helpful

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Randy Lee

This is a serious explanation from a serious economist - a must read.

Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2024

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Wasn't sure what to expect from this when I got it and wasn't sure who the author was. Until I got into it. Wow. written by the ex-finance minister of Greece, this book is absolutely one that should be on anyone who wants to understand macro-economics reading list!

Where we are right now and how we got there, and why, from feudalism itself to the present cloud driven economy.

6 people found this helpful

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Isolatrix

Interesting POV, but wrong

Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2024

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Yanis Varoufakis is an engaging presence as any of his Youtube interviews shows. He claims he has arrived at the idea that platforms like Amazon, Apple's store, and Facebook are what he calls technofeudalisist entities. By this, he means that they control wages to keep them low, and gain free work from users who he calls serfs. Most people would call these entities monopsonists whose worsening conditions enrich the platform's owners "enshittification" as Cory Doctorow has coined.

Why is technofeudalism as a new term wrong? IMO, for several reasons:

Feudalism ensured that serfs had no choice. They could only work for the fiefdom, usually farming. They could no move to another fief. The harvest that they had to turn over only benefitted the fief lord.

Firstly, In reality, there is no forced working for low wages or for free for the platforms. One can avoid the platforms entirely. Even if you don't, platforms like Amazon, do have competitors, e.g. Walmart for groceries. So the control is only partial. Facebook and Apple do create walled gardens that make escaping hard. I am particularly thinking about Apple's iTunes which has a very high wall to escape if you have extensive playlists. So while the platforms do their best to keep suppliers and users, this is not like medieval feudalism.

Secondly, the free work we users provide as "technoserfs" does provide value to the user. Amazon's reviews, however imperfect and gamed, provide valuable feedback on products and services, that one doesn't get at brick-and-mortar stores.

Thirdly, the claim that manufacturers of MUST use the platform to benefit the platform fief or die is extreme. There are many manufacturers that do not, as even the most cursory glance would tell you, and they seem to do fine.

Yes, the growth of the biggest platforms did benefit from post-2008 financial collapse low-cost capital. But as Ben Thompson (Stratechery.com) has long explained, there is huge value to be gained from aggregation. It reduces search costs, creates simplified transactions, and the network effect benefits users.

The real problem is the government, especially in the US, of allowing platforms to control user inputs and extracting very high rents for sellers. This is allowing the same evils that monopolists and monopsonists have demonstrated in the past and could be legislated against. It is why we don't like "company towns", and use antitrust to create competition. If our data was legally ours, and there was forced interoperability using standards, then the walled gardens would be much lower.

So while Varoufakis has identified some features of the problems of platforms, he analysis is forced, and I believe, incorrect.

Having said that, the book is an easy read, with and interesting family backstory, and an interesting presentation rather like an extended letter to his very Communist father. I didn't find the analysis convincing, and his utopian economic solution for the post-capitalist world even less so. YMMV.

40 people found this helpful

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Sara

Great book

Reviewed in Canada on February 25, 2024

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it was a great book.

Novoarte

Tema esclarecedor

Reviewed in Mexico on December 18, 2023

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Tesis importante sobre el desarrollo actual del capitalismo en relación con la nube digital, haciendo una comparación con lo que llama feudalismo y el tecnofeudalismo de hoy en día. De fácil lectura. Lo recomiendo ampliamente a quien se interese por conocer hacia donde van nuestras sociedades en lo económico con la irrupción de la tecnología en todos los aspectos de la vida.

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Conan The Librarian

Brilliant analysis

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 31, 2024

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A brilliant analysis of where we are now and how we got here.
The solution to the problem is - rather as with Marx - disappointing and unrealistic.
But, the main 4/5ths of the book is a tour de force - and everyone should read this.
As noted, the solutions to the problems explored just feel like a form of neo-Communism and undermine the excellent description of the mess we are in. But, essential reading if you want to understand why the world is the way it is.

Leon

Great book, but...

Reviewed in Spain on April 26, 2024

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Varoufakiis has written a very interesting and well-documented book. However, like all good Marxists, he is very good on the diagnosis but falls short on the prognosis. Nevertheless, it is a book well worth reading to understand where our society is heading.

Amazon Customer

A Must Read

Reviewed in Germany on February 9, 2024

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A must read analysis to understand recent bi-polar political situation

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