Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism – Yanis Varoufakis

I read Roland Barthes as a twenty something. I probably did so with a hand rolled cigarette, thinking I was cool. It was all the geeky post-modern kids were talking about, despite the fact that Criticism and Truth was reaching for 50 years old when I did read it. Later, diving further into Eco and his own idea as to how we read (the semiotics of text consumption) ingrained in me some very bad habits – the assumption that text should be, to some extent of the other, complete on their own. This is relevant to this blog because I tend to read a lot of things in some kind of isolation – I want the text to stand on its own, and I think it is actually a good sign when a text does.

(Holy shit, I am already derailing this blog post. A real semiotician would find it necessary to point out that actually nothing you read actually stands on its own, as everything you consume is in dialogue with everything else you have ever consumed. But, uf, let’s not muddy these waters any further.)

I will stand by my decision to let texts stand on their own for good fiction. I don’t care that Stephen King wrote that during the 20 years he spent using meth to fuel his writing. Get a better editor. But for non-fiction, I think I need to start using this platform to give additional context for some of these books. I want to go a little heavy on this one not because I like Varoufakis, but because I kind of don’t.

While the topics discussed in this book require some additional investigation, we can hammer out some basics from the beginning. In Technofeudalism Varoufakis makes an argument that tech companies are accumulating a new kind of capital, which he calls cloud capital, and that this accumulation is going unchecked in the world. I read this book because a much better book – Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns The Future, (a book which is on my top 10 of non-fiction) talks about the same thing. It is an argument I am already sold on. It is true that platforms like Facebook made their money because we, the unsuspecting users, put in hours of unpaid data entry work for them. The data was about ourselves, and the companies later sold it to whom-ever-the-fuck. If this sentence has enticed you, read Lanier’s book, and then maybe Varoufakis’. For the lazy, here is a pretty good summary of Technofeudalism.

This is now my third book by Varoufakis, and I think it is important to comment on a stylistic consistency I have found in the books. They are all very legible, which is something I think the author has done intentionally to try to demystify economics, a topic that, for better or worse, most people are fucking (horrifically) clueless on. In this book and a previous one, he uses the conceit of speaking to a non-economist family member to help justify that simplicity of the prose. I did find that helpful, and it added a sort of richness to the text that I appreciated by making reference to shared experiences that he and that family member would have. It added a lot of nice color to a text that would otherwise come across as very dull. Someone else will look at this and call it spoon-feeding or babying the audience. I didn’t feel that way.

I remember at some point in my education someone telling me to avoid passionate language in my own (professional – which this blog is not) writing, and to be weary of it when encountered. Varoufakis must have missed that valuable lesson. He riddles his writing with language geared towards getting a certain emotional manipulation from his audience. The modern banking is referred to as a ‘Minotaur’ – a metaphor from one of his previous books – or as ‘Dark Forces’. I got to the point where I was surprised he did not refer to FreeMasons and the Illuminati. This didn’t sit well with me – if you have a strong argument to why something is bad, leave the name calling to the school yard and present a clear and logical case. All this did was foster my distrust for Varoufakis. Some would want to excuse this as a stylistic flourish. I am not sure I am willing to give him the liberty. If you want to be taken seriously, act so. Thousands of very well meaning people work for the institutions he calls out as little short of satanist kabals. You can call them useful idiots, you can call them deluded kool-aid drinkers, but you must acknowledge that they are there because they believe they are doing the most good. It is the same kindness that I extended to Varoufakis that got me to read his bloody book to begin with.

I liked the conceit of this book. I no longer do. When I was a child, I heard the trite ‘History repeats itself’ line, saw the abuses of capitalism, and with the preachings of an unhinged and Cassandra-esque father crying that the empire is falling, extrapolated that we were heading into a dark ages. America is Rome, it is now corrupt, so obviously dark ages are afoot. But why is the US, and not the British Empire, Rome? The US could be Byzantium as well. Or, this whole conceit could be rubbish. That was my reaction while reading this. Even if I accepted Varoufakis argument about what was going on, I am not sure the analogy that he was going for really works, but in fairness that is the opinion I came to after reading the whole book and feeling uncomfortable for a day and a half about kind of not getting this exact metaphor. I have deep seated epistemological issues best unpacked by therapy, and I am always willing to give a complex issue a certain benefit of the doubt by assuming it was too complex for me. At some point I decided to trust myself with this one. If all the emotionally laden language Varoufakis threw in here did not move me, nor did it help me understand. How are we better served by understandings ourselves as vassals and serfs to Meta and Alphabet?

And of course with a book like this, all the details matter. There were one or two occasions where I was not sure what the fuck he was talking about. There is an anecdote about a young person who says that he cannot get a job until his public (online) persona has reached some nadir of purity of essence, where said person is able to convince the online world that he is there for his calling. Sure, that is the kind of bullshit you have to put into cover letters. But I have no real online presence with my actual name on it. My name is so utterly common that I can never have an online presence with it, as I have to out-compete the more successful people I share this name with. No one has ever asked me for my online media presence in any formal way. I truly didn’t get this.

And those were my opinions. But when it comes to the economics of what the fuck he is talking about, I am largely out of my element. It was at this point that I decided to dedicate myself to some proper research of this bloody topic. I was really hoping a proper right leaning (but respectable!) magazine such as The Economist would have a review of this. Alas, they didn’t.

So here are some opinions I found online. Not all are equally respectable:

Some interesting comments from HackerNews, and I especially like the person who reminded us that, while working for Valve, Varoufakis literally created the problem he is criticizing. But for me that is actually a point in Varoufakis’ favor. There was also a general confusion as to how more capital kills capitalism.

This article from the Jacobin reminds us that the promises of tech are overblown, and not some spirit killing nether demon. It is an excellent rebuttal to this book. This is the book review I wish I had written. I read it after writing the majority of this.

Top comment on this reddit post has some interesting critiques of Varoufakis politics, although irrelevant to the book. Some other threads suggest that not many people really get the argument, or find it of much use.

Cory Doctorow chimed in, but the piece seems shy of actual opinions. It does plug his own book, and because it’s Cory Doctorow, I will happily steal this one too.

Finally, this review feels longer than the book itself. It mentions Fredric Jameson in the second line, and if that means something to you then you know whether it is worth reading or not.

Right. I normally write much shorter reviews that don’t really get to the point of anything. I just try to open up an interesting discussion or two. Here, I can say very clearly: Varoufakis is looking at a very real phenomenon and talking a lot, but I am not sure he is actually saying very much. I agree with the problem he indentified, I agree with the solution that both he and Lanier propose. Lanier did a much better job proposing it, and did so sooner.