Introduction
In the past fifty years, neoliberalism wasn’t new or particularly liberal. Its main advantage was its marked deviation from classical liberalism, paying homage to liberal thinkers while not sharing their methods or ideas about the market. Today, we stand on the brink of another profound ideological innovation.
The Rise of Technofeudalism
A new form of capital on the rise, cloud capitalism (machines connected in a network that grant their owners extraordinary power to modify human behavior), requires its own ideology to fully liberate itself. I’ve termed this new system technofeudalism, a mode of production and distribution driven by cloud capitalism that replaces markets with cloud feudalisms (like Amazon) and capitalist profits with cloud rents.
The Three Pillars of Technofeudalism
To fully realize the power of cloud capital, its owners—people like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk—need a new ideology that supports the growing dominance of cloud capitalism in three ways:
- Legitimizing the colonization of human activity: This includes relaxing norms in areas like autonomous vehicles and AI-based medical or legal services, justifying the unlimited replacement of fallible humans with cloud-powered machines across all sectors, including enjoyable work (like translating poetry) or tasks we value (like raising children).
- Legitimizing the colonization of state institutions: Primarily, this involves justifying the privatization of public data through transfer to cloud capitalism by megatech companies. For example, it should justify Musk’s use of his Efficiency Government Department to connect his cloud capital systems with various federal agencies or the persistent linkage of Palantir’s (Thiel’s defense company) and Google interfaces with the Pentagon, making their cloud capital indispensable for the military-industrial complex.
- Legitimizing the colonization of Wall Street: Zuckerberg was the first technofeudal to attempt a personal digital currency (Libra), but Wall Street blocked him. However, Musk’s Twitter acquisition sparked a bolder attempt to create a “universal application” capable of challenging Wall Street’s payment monopoly. Encouraged by President Trump’s executive order for the Federal Reserve to create a strategic crypto reserve, megatech companies seeking unrestricted cloud financing outside traditional financial markets need to justify merging their cloud capital with financial services more than ever.
The Emergence of Technolordism
This new ideology, which I call technolordism, is a mutation of transhumanism—a creed promoting the blurring of organic and synthetic boundaries, aiming for genuine freedom or even immortality for enhanced humans. Just as neoliberalism borrowed from classical liberalism but added an infallible market divinity, technolordism serves the triple colonization that cloud capitalism intends through substituting the neoliberal homo economicus with an amorphous “humIAn,” a blend of human and AI.
Technolordism also replaces the neoliberal divine entity. The new deity is the algorithm, rendering decentralized market signaling mechanisms obsolete and creating a fully centralized mechanism for matching buyers and sellers (like amazon.com).
Implications of Technolordism
The social transformation accelerated by technolordism has significant repercussions, including unprecedented macroeconomic instability (as cloud rents erode aggregate demand), abandonment of democracy, even as an ideal (Thiel’s stance), and the end of universities (replaced by AI-based personal enhancement devices).
Trump’s Gift to Technofeudalists
Trump’s agenda—the deregulation of AI-driven services, the strengthening of cryptocurrencies, and tax exemptions for cloud rents—multiplies the power of cloud rents. For the new dominant class, what they might lose in the short term due to Trump’s arbitrarily tariffed delusions appears a magnificent long-term investment.
About the Author
Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister, leads the MeRA25 party and teaches Economics at the University of Athens.
