Why “Technofeudalism” Is Replacing Capitalism
Forget the free market as you once knew it. While we were busy scrolling, the underlying architecture of our global economy shifted. According to a growing number of economists—most notably Yanis Varoufakis—we are no longer living in a standard capitalist society.
Welcome to Technofeudalism.
At its core, Technofeudalism is a system where rent replaces profit as the primary driver of wealth.
In traditional capitalism, a business owner (the capitalist) makes money by producing a physical good or service and selling it for a profit. In Technofeudalism, the “Cloud Lords” (Big Tech giants) don’t necessarily need to produce anything; they simply own the digital infrastructure where everyone else trades.
How the System Operates:
The shift happened when “capital” mutated into “cloud capital.” This isn’t just a machine in a factory; it’s an algorithm that lives on a server.
The Extraction of Rent: When you buy a product on a major marketplace, the platform takes a “tax” or commission (often up to 30%). This isn’t profit from manufacturing; it’s rent for using their digital land.
The Death of the Market: In a true market, you can compare prices freely. In a digital infrastructure, the algorithm decides what you see, when you see it, and at what price. The “market” is replaced by a private arena owned by one entity.
Labor Without Pay: Every time you post a review, like a photo, or train an AI by clicking “I am not a robot,” you are performing uncompensated labor that increases the value of the Cloud Lord’s capital.
Examples
The Global Marketplace: A third-party seller on Amazon acts as a “Vassal.” They take all the risk of buying inventory, but Amazon owns the customer data and takes a massive cut of every sale just for providing the “land.”
The App Ecosystem: Whether it’s Apple or Google, developers must pay a “tribute” (the App Store tax) to reach customers. The platform owner dictates the rules of the kingdom, and if they change the algorithm, the “vassal” can go bankrupt overnight.
Social Media: We spend hours “tilling the soil” of Meta or TikTok with our content. We aren’t the customers; we are the serfs whose data is harvested to refine the algorithm—which is then rented out to advertisers.
This isn’t just a semantic debate. If we have moved from capitalism to technofeudalism, traditional tools like “interest rate hikes” or “standard labor unions” might no longer work. We are seeing a massive wealth transfer from the many to a handful of “Cloud Lords” who own the digital gates to the world.
