Technofeudalism

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 In that role it has been replaced by something fundamentally different, which I call technofeudalism.”

  • “the thing that has killed capitalism is … capital itself”

  • “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.”

  • “This is not a book about what technology will do to us. [It 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 lap- top and our smartphone, in conjunction with the way central banks and governments have been acting since 2008. ”

  • “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.”

  • “Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms”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.”

  • “a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital.”

  • keep going soon

  • whether or not my narrative made sense to a youngster was a litmus test of my own grasp

  • copper had facilitated our deliverance from prehistory: its ability to alloy with arsenic and tin to make the harder metal bronze gave the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians and the Achaeans new technologies including new ploughs, axes and irrigation, allowing them ultimately to produce the large agricultural surpluses that funded the construction of splendid temples and murderous armies. But for history to accelerate sufficiently to bring about what we now call civilisation, humanity needed something much harder still than bronze. It needed its ploughs, its hammers and its metal structures to have the hardness of my sword’s tip. It needed to learn the trick I had seen in our living room: how to transform soft iron into hardened steel by ‘baptising’ it in cold water.

  • Iron’s magic underpinned the new role of technology as the driving force that led to civilisation and its discontents.

  • the Iron Age got going, around the ninth century BC, three different and remarkable eras emerged in quick succession, within no more than seven centuries in total: the geometric period, the classical era and the Hellenistic civilisation.

  • the Second Industrial Revolution – the period of rapid technological innovation from 1870 onwards

  • I was being inducted in ‘historical materialism’ – the method of understanding history as a constant feedback loop between, on the one hand, the way humans transform matter and, on the other, the manner in which human thinking and social relations are transformed in return

  • “Iron, like all revolutionary technologies, had sped up history.”

  • ‘iron hardened not only our ploughs but our souls’

  • Light is, at once, a stream of particles and a series of waves. But how could that be? Particles differ fundamentally from waves. They are located at only one point at any particular moment in time, they have momentum, and they move only in a straight line unless and until something gets in their way. Waves, by contrast, are oscillations of a medium, which is what allows them to turn corners and transport energy in many different directions at once. To prove, as Einstein had done, that light was both particles and waves was to admit that something can be two utterly contradictory things at once.

  • the dual nature of light as the gateway to the essential dualism in everything

If light can have two contradictory natures, and if all of nature rests on a binary opposition, then hardened iron, steam engines and networked computers could also be, simultaneously, potential liberators and enslavers. And so it is up to us, collectively, to determine which of the two it will be