We are humble servants of the lords of the cloud: welcome to technofeudalism

No matter where we look, we are witnessing the triumph of capital.

In warehouses, factories, offices, universities, public hospitals, media, even in space, but also in the microcosm of patented seeds.

How dare I say, then, that capitalism has been murdered?

Who killed him?

The answer is deliciously ironic: capitalism has been murdered by its own hand: by capital.

If I am right, the worrying thing is not what Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to do to us in the future, but what it has already done: capital has become so dominant and has mutated into such a toxic variant that , like a stupid virus, has ended up killing its host, capitalism, to replace it with something much worse.

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Consultants: the great deception of capitalism

This new mutant capital that has killed capitalism lives in the famous cloud, so let's call it cloud capital.

Cloud capital, of course, does not actually live in the cloud, but on Earth;

It resides in networked computers, server farms, cell towers, programs, algorithms based on artificial intelligence and at the bottom of our oceans, where countless kilometers of fiber optic cables extend.

Unlike the means of production of traditional capital, such as steam engines or modern industrial robots, which are manufactured means, cloud capital does not manufacture things, but is composed of devices designed to modify the human behavior.

That's what Amazon's Alexa or Google Assistant are: a means of behavior modification built for precisely that.

It is a machine, a piece of capital, which we train so that it trains us so that we train it so that it decides what we want.

And, once we have decided what we want, the same machine sells it to us directly, without going through the markets.

As if that were not enough, that same machine makes us support the enormous behavior modification network to which it belongs with our own efforts, voluntarily and free of charge.

When we post reviews, rate products, or post videos, rants, and photos online, we are helping to reproduce capital in the cloud without receiving a cent for our work.

The machine, in short, has turned us into servants of the cloud.

Meanwhile, in factories and warehouses, the same algorithms that modify our behavior and sell us products are used—usually through digital devices on workers' wrists—to make them work faster, direct them, and monitor them minute by minute.

It is impressive to see how cloud capital manages to perform five functions that were previously outside the reach of traditional capital.

Capture our attention.

Manufacture our desires.

It sells directly to us, without going through traditional markets, which has made us want to.

Promotes proletarian work in the workplace.

And it creates a huge free labor force (the servants of the cloud).

Is it any wonder that the owners of this capital in the cloud - let's call them the

cloudlists

- have a hitherto unimaginable power to extract a gigantic surplus value from the proletarians, an incalculable volume of unpaid labor from almost everyone and, from vassal capitalists, inconceivable cloud rents?

How can they not be much more powerful than Henry Ford or Rupert Murdoch ever could be?

“Wait a moment,” they will tell me.

“How is Jeff Bezos different from Henry Ford?

Aren't they all monopolists?

No. Amazon.com is not a monopolistic capitalist company.

The moment we enter amazon.com we have left capitalism.

It is true that it is a site full of buyers and sellers, so it is a huge trading platform, but it is not a marketplace.

The owner of everything is a man named Jeff, who is much more than a monopolist.

Jeff does not own the factories that produce the items that traditional capitalists have no choice but to sell on his platform.

What it does have is the algorithm that decides which products we see, the same algorithm that we have trained so that it knows us perfectly and matches us with a seller—whom it also knows perfectly—so that each pairing has the maximum likely to allow Jeff to extract the largest possible margin from the seller on each thing purchased: up to 40% of what we paid.

A building with an advertisement for Google Cloud, Google's subsidiary for cloud-based technology, in San Francisco in April 2019. Michael Short (BLOOMBERG)

The mind is stirred by an exploitation of such dimension and so radically new.

The same algorithm that we help train in real time to know us from top to bottom modifies our preferences and manages the selection and delivery of the products that will satisfy those preferences.

If two people type “electric bikes” into amazon.com, they will get totally different recommendations.

It is as if, in a traditional market or shopping center, the two people were walking side by side, looking in the same direction, but seeing different things depending on what Jeff's algorithm wants each one to see.

All of us who enter amazon.com navigate in an isolation constructed by the algorithm, as if we were in a panopticon in which we cannot see each other but only the algorithm that sees everything or, to be more exact, what the The algorithm allows us to see, in order to get the maximum dividend from the cloud, the current version of the rent that the feudal lords charged for the land from their vassals and their peasants.

This is not capitalism.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to technofeudalism.

Capitalism, let us not forget, had two pillars: markets and profits.

Of course, markets and profits are still omnipresent.

But cloud capital has displaced them from the center of our socioeconomic system, pushed them to the margins and replaced them.

Markets, the medium in which capitalism develops, have been replaced by fiefdoms in the cloud, digital commerce platforms like Amazon.com or Alibaba that, as we have seen, look like markets, but they are not.

And profits, which are the fuel of capitalism?

Well, their feudal predecessors have replaced them: rents.

Specifically, cloud rents, a new form of rent that must be paid for access to these fiefdoms or digital platforms.

How did cloud capital emerge?

It was born at the end of the nineties, when the original internet, which was a common good - it functioned as a zone free of capitalism - that internet 1.0, so to speak, fell into the hands of the large technology companies that were being born, which they privatized.

Who paid the billions of dollars it cost to manufacture and accumulate cloud capital so quickly in the hands of a few

cloudists

?

The surprising thing is that it was, above all, the central banks of the G-7 countries.

How is it possible?

Well, by accident, or, to be more exact, because of the crisis.

David Limp, vice president of devices at Amazon, announces the new Echo Dot, from the digital assistant Alexa, in Seattle, United States, on September 20, 2018. GRANT HINDSLEY (AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

After the collapse of the financial sector in 2008, central bankers printed a whopping $35 trillion to bail out the banks while our governments subjected people to harsh austerity measures.

The capitalists were clever enough to foresee that people would not have a cent and would not be able to buy their products.

So, instead of investing, they took the money from the central bank to the stock market and bond markets, where they bought stocks, bonds and, incidentally, yachts, art, bitcoins, NFTs and any “asset” they caught.

The only capitalists who really invested in capital were the owners of big technology companies.

For example, nine out of every ten dollars invested in creating Facebook came from central bank money.

This is how capital in the cloud was financed and this is how the

cloudists

became our new ruling class.

As a consequence, true power today is not held by the owners of machinery, buildings, railways, telephone companies or industrial robots.

These old-fashioned terrestrial capitalists continue to obtain profits from wage labor, but they are no longer the ones in charge.

They have become vassals of the owners of cloud capital, of the

cloudlists

.

As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs and contribute to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid effort, which is added to the waged work we do when we have the possibility.

Still not convinced?

Already, it is difficult to leave the word capitalism behind.

Liberals aren't the only ones for whom it's like water to fish.

Socialists also need to feel that our purpose in life is to overthrow capitalism.

It is difficult to accept that capital has gone ahead of us and replaced it with something worse.

In fact, my friends on the left are the ones who try to dissuade me the most and convince me that yes, cloud capital may be important, but “this is still capitalism, buddy.”

Amazon is full of buyers and sellers, but it is not a marketplace, the owner of everything is Jeff Bezos

Let's call it rentier capitalism or monopoly capitalism, they suggest.

But it's not enough.

Renting the cloud is not like renting land, because it requires a huge investment in new technologies.

And they are not income from a monopoly either, because Bezos and Zuckerberg do not monopolize markets to sell what they manufacture (as Ford and Edison did), but rather they have replaced the markets and are not interested in manufacturing anything (unlike Ford and Edison ).

How about surveillance capitalism?

Neither.

Cloudists

don't just use algorithms to brainwash us on behalf of advertisers in a capitalist environment

.

No, cloud capital reproduces itself thanks to our free labor, directly exploits wage labor and squeezes cloud rents from vassal capitalists on commercial platforms that are not markets.

This is not capitalism, gentlemen.

But what about the claim that techno-feudalism is parasitic on the capitalist sector embedded within it?

It's true.

If conventional capitalists became extinct,

cloudists

would disappear, unable to collect cloud rents from manufacturers.

And?

When capitalism ended feudalism, capitalists became parasites of the landowners, in the sense that without private lands to produce food, capitalism would have disappeared.

Now, the traditional capitalist sector also feeds technofeudalism, but those that dominate are capital and cloud rents.

The concept of technofeudalism demonstrates that organizing autoworkers and nurses, while still essential, is insufficient.

It clarifies what it will cost to mobilize against the fossil fuel cartel when our media operates thanks to cloud capital prepared to poison public opinion.

Explains why the shift to electric cars has led to the deindustrialization of Germany, as the benefits of precision mechanical engineering are replaced by the dividends earned by owners of cloud capital dedicated to observing routes and driving habits. the drivers.

Elon Musk's decision to buy Twitter suddenly makes a lot more sense, as an interface between his mechanical equity stakes in Tesla and SpaceX and cloud equity.

The new cold war between the United States and China, especially since the war in Ukraine began, is explained as the repercussion of an underlying confrontation between two techno-feudalisms with cloud rents, one in dollars and the other in yuan.

Isn't it amazing?

All those incredible scientific advances, those fantastic neural networks and those unimaginable artificial intelligence programs, to achieve what?

To create a world in which, while privatization and venture capital empty our environment of all physical wealth, cloud capital is dedicated to emptying our brains.

In order for us to individually own our minds, we must collectively own the capital in the cloud.

When we have regained our minds, we can all work together to find a way to create a new commons in the cloud.

It will be incredibly difficult, but it is the only way to transform our cloud-based devices from being a manufactured means of behavior modification to a means of human collaboration and emancipation.

Servants of the clouds, proletarians of the clouds, and vassals of the clouds of the world, unite!

We have nothing to lose except our mental chains.

Yanis Varoufakis

(Falero, Greece, 1961) is an economist, essayist, activist and politician.

He was Minister of Finance in Greece and is co-founder with Bernie Sanders of the Progressive International (PI).

This is a text written by him for 'Ideas' following the launch of his latest book,

Tecnofeudalismo.

The stealthy successor to capitalism

, by Deusto, which will be published on February 14.

Translation by

María Luisa Rodríguez Tapia

. 

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