Technofeudalism Album

In a world where tech giants control the digital platforms and data that we depend on for access to information, services, and work, I increasingly find myself overwhelmed, concerned, and at a loss. I notice that we wade through the static, grovelling at the altar of AI as it distorts the very reality around us. I sweat alongside you as we slave away in this brave new world of constant chaos and disruption, in exchange for scraps of digital power. Yet we keep our eyes fixed on the horizon. We still feel love, hope, and find the will to fight for a brighter future.

Technofeudalism may have replaced capitalism, but it will never truly replace us–because to be human is to be able to feel deeply and act together to make this world a better place for us all.

"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 In that role it has been replaced by something fundamentally different, which I call technofeudalism.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.

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. 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.”

Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism