Summary

Capitalism has mutated into technofeudalism. While feudalism extracted rent from land, today's "cloudalists"—Amazon, Google, Meta—extract rent from digital platforms. Unlike capitalists who profit from production, they profit from owning digital territory where commerce must occur. Central bank money-printing since 2008 turbocharged this, and the pandemic locked it in. Result: cloud-serfs, subordinate traditional capital, and a US-China cold war over competing cloud fiefs.

Key Takeaways

Notes

1: Hesiod’s lament

• Labor = commodity labor (time) + experimental labor (surplus)
  • False commodification, origin of profits
• Money is a reflection of our relationship to each other and our technologies
• Choice between freedom and equality
• Theory on capitalism’s end: socialist islands expand into continents
• Will internet networks end capitalism or forever entrench it?

2: Capitalism’s metamorphoses

• Retrieving the irretrievable
  • Manufacture of desire / attention
  • Finance, big business
  • Basically went communist during wartime economy
• Technostructure
  • ↑: private + public decision-making nexus
  • Keep people working, consuming to utilize ever more
  • Commodified attention-grabbing
• Attention markets and the Soviets’ revenge
  • Centralized economy with pockets of commodity markets
• The audacious Global Plan
  • Bretton Woods: centralized exchange + capital controls
  • Predicated on US remaining in trade surplus
  • $750T in stock options / “bets”
    • Split into small pieces to spread risk (actually more interconnected)
• The fearless Global Minotaur
  • Controlled disintegration of ↑ system
  • US global world reserve currency
  • Globalization
• The Minotaur’s favorite handmaidens: Neoliberalism and the computer
  1. Money rushing to the US middle class
  2. Computer-generated complexity of financial derivatives
  3. Neoliberal faith that markets know best
• Props of current system:
  • Big finance
  • Big tech
  • Neoliberalism
  • Industrial-scale inequality
  • Atrophied democracies

3: Cloud capital

• Feudalism → capitalism = land → capital as source of power
• IoT + singularity
• Internet started as open protocols
  • “Designed to be free of market forces”
• The New Enclosures
  • Tech companies own your “ID card” now (not you or gov’t)
  • Digital commons
• AI (algos → RL → ML)
  • Decreasing interpretability
• Amazon Mechanical Turk inhumanity
• Cloud capital = data exhaust value
• ↑ is replacing capitalism

4: Rise of cloudalists + demise of profit

• “It was the pandemic, with the flood of state money it released, that ushered in the age of cloud capital”
  • Started in 2008
• Share buybacks
• ZIRP: central bank “poisoning of money”
  • Now, it’s about central bank money > profits
  • 2008 killed off demand of money to be invested
  • Decoupled accumulation of capital from profits
  • (No profit or just focused on reinvestment?)
• PE = wealth extraction > creation
• Big 3 US asset management firms:
  • Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street
  • Single largest shareholder in 90%+ of NYSE companies
• Back to your question

5: What’s in a word?

• Nomenclature is important (frames)
• Why capitalism → technofeudalism?
  • The triumph of rent over profit
• Rent (vs profit)
  • Flows from privileged access to things in fixed supply
  • Vulgar exploitation
• Brand premium is a form of rent
• Platform rent (eg. App Store)
• Isn’t it just hyper-capitalism? (R&D → competition)
  • No, because platforms + data + winner-take-most dynamics create monopolies / rent
• The technofeudal underpinnings of the Great Inflation
• Central bank printing won’t stop

6: Technofeudalism’s global impact: the New Cold War

• US moving off gold standard → foreigners to finance gov’t + imports simultaneously
• Globalization
  • Exploitation everywhere
• China
  • Inflation via gov’t investment
  • China’s big 5 tech companies
• US reserve currency: exorbitant privilege for some US constituencies, but exorbitant burden on the US economy overall
  • Most Americans must pay for the trade deficit with higher unemployment, household debt, or greater fiscal deficits
• TikTok is a cloud feudal threat
• US Russia economic warfare
• China digital Yuan
• ↑ all 3 interrelated
• Europe, Global South are irrelevant since they don’t own platforms / fiefs
• “The rise of technofeudalism… has led to a state of polycrisis”
• CCP is the only force that can curb technofeudalist power

7.1: Escape from Technofeudalism

• Personal brand imperative
  • Shareable everything
• “Cloud serfs do not even consider themselves producers”
• No fear of price regulation since services are free
• Relativism: embraced by right → left (shifted)
• The impossibility of social democracy
• Class struggle → identity politics
• Crypto: “a brilliant answer to a question we have not discovered yet”

7.2: Escape from Technofeudalism

• Democratized companies
  • Collective voting / decision making
  • Only employees can own shares
  • Make incentives not attention (data bank / crypto; digital bill of rights)
• Democratized money
  • UBI
  • Federal savings bank
  • Tax on revenue, not profits
  • Levies to balance trade surpluses + deficits
• The cloud and the land as a commons
  • “Local public media centers”
  • Permanent auction sub-letting scheme (Radical Markets)
  • Elections → lotteries (citizens assemblies)
• A cloud-rebellion to overthrow technofeudalism
  • Cloud makes it harder to unite (global distribution)
  • But also easier (mass coordination)
  • Strikes
  • Whistleblowing / transparency
• Concentrated capital = concentrated power