The classical perspective of the Left, or what is called the Left, and indeed the strategy shared by the clever of the Right, is to blame the problems of modernity, or rather postmodernity, on the underlying economic base; all ills of the world are the tendrils growing from the undying rhizome of Capitalism. It began in the simplistic industrial style, birthing the issues Feuerbach and Marx initially diagnosed. Then it became Monopoly Capitalism, the high state of Imperialism outlined by Lenin and startling accurate to describing the world wars. Then it transformed again, under the post-war and later Neoliberal policies, the system shifted into Financial Capitalism, the ever illusive beast which ruled the world from the shadows. But perhaps you haven't heard? Perhaps you have not been listening, or looking, or watching the sinking of beast. It is the day to rejoice, my friends. Capitalism is dead! The dragon has slayed itself, and in its place, there stands and even more illusive beast. Not some serpent standing in the ocean, but the waves themselves. The whole ocean waiting to sink the ship. We indeed have traded in Capitalism, but like our murder of God two centuries ago, this is not a celebrator event because in our weakness we have replaced our overlord with a progress and regression in equal measure. We have reinstated the feudal system under the guise of technological progress. Welcome, dear spectators, to the monstrosity of the day: that of Technofeudalism.
Varoufakis was the first to give this prescription, but anyone observant should not be surprised by such a claim. We have long traded in second-order simulacra, the fiat paper which buys goods through trust--now living in the world of disillusionment in all narratives--but you may notice how redundant this is to our overlords. What use does a business have for money and profits? This was the innovation of Finance Capitalism. As long as investors keep printing currency, there's no longer a need for profit; because we have a new currency. Look to Netflix, Uber or even the king Amazon. What use do they have for your silly imaginary paper? There is something worth much more: your digital soul.
Someone with keen eyes has surely seen the emergent model. Alongside a subscription service which uses a weaponised version of dependence and attention for continual financial gain, countless services have seen a transition into "free-use". Amazon. YouTube. The digital marketplaces, the digital real estate.
The classical argument is that these places, these untilled lands make profit off of advertising, but that is hardly pervasive enough to be worth; not to mention, the currency of ads is the same as the worthless paper print.
No! It is not so! We are the serfs now, tilling on the land of the digital lords. And for access to their land, for the chance to plant our seeds, we must trade in the currency of this electronic land, the data, the soul which makes us up.
Feudalism was always the payment through the labour and soul of the serf. And, in many ways, it could be argued Capitalism is the same, demanding the humanity and spirit of the worker, it at least obfuscates this through the introduxion of capital. It democratises the position by giving the labourer the chance, albeit not the opportunity, to buy themselves out of this slavery. But that's no longer the case. There is no longer any exit strategy. One can never overcome their design, their biology.
In the 18th century, long time villain to this series of essays, Jeremy Bentham proposed the question of applying new means of thinking, observation and reason to design the prefect prison, what he called the panopticon. Essentially, this prison is a circular containment unit with a guard tower in the middle. This tower can see every axion in every cell at every minute. For Bentham, the ever useful, ever consequential utilitarian, this constancy of observation and the impending consequences of due punishment will discourage any inmate from behaving out of turn. But what of the supposed human nature! I demand. What of greed and selfish ness? The vanity of the wise French immoralist? Surely, these drives, these forces buried within us can't be subdued by one observer and the promise of future pain. My dear Bentham, even the wisest utilitarian will exchange the threat of future punishment for maximum achievable pleasure.
Keep your eyes open. The panopticon only works when the prisoners are aware of their observation. Sure, even without, it remains a highly efficient system for observation and maintenance, but to funxion as a deterrent for the prisoners (supposedly) and thus funxion as the perfect prison, they must be aware of their observation and their impending punishment.
Now, suppose the world were a prison. What then? Have you been told as such? Indeed, you have. It's plain and clear every single day. I don't mean we literally live in a giant jail cell, though there's something to be said at a later date about how certain infrastructural plans design a city as a feedback circuit that prevents escape, I mean we are surrounded by a digital watch tower, which instead of standing in the middle and looking out, surrounds and pervades us to the point that escape the view of the DigiEye would be ontologically unthinkable; to do such would mean a total escape from being.
It is likely, you carry with you every day a tracker in your pocket that stores data about your habits, your location, the things you look up, the music you like, the pictures you take, the thoughts you have, the things you say and countless other incalculable intricacies to your personality, to the idea and observation of yourself. This is just one of the devices forming the engulfing wall of the panopticon and the DigiEye.
There are also the neetworks of security cameras in urban areas. The ones resting on traffic lights. The CCTV cameras placed at business and the doorbell cameras outside of houses. We may all think of these as individual entities sharing nothing other than a common abstraxion, but in truth, they all form a web. They all have to access the internet to store their data, and even the data stored entirely locally on-site could be entered into the system by an outside systemic element, such as a warrant from the police.
There's also computers. Governmental administrative systems and shared third-party private contractors (perhaps your fingers are on file). Card cards and bank histories. Drones and satellites taking constant pictures to design separate systems that tell you all the places you can and cannot go. Tax records. Medical records. And the most insidious of all, online shopping.
All of these independent sources share a common procedure, the harvesting of data. And with the emergence of the new Technofeudal currency, that of the digital dollar, this data is worth more than hold. It should be no surprise it passes along a stream of recipients from governmental institutions to private companies which use it to train and algorithm tailored specifically to you.
By the time we make it back to the notion of Technofeudalism, everything seems clear. How could we still be living in Capitalism? We've outpaced that system. This is the liminal period where old institutions crumble to make way for the emergence of the future, of the technofeudal.
The predixions of cyberpunk, dating all the way back to Gibson and before, were always accurate, but not because they imagined a hyper-capitalist future where any remainder of humanity is eradicated, but because it saw the future as a class of serfs buying digital land from the corporate lords who own the web-based land. Everything is a subscription because ownership is, and always has been, an illusion.
Enter the consequence of this technofeudal slide. Perhaps the most persistent is the subscription model. When one is no longer selling a product but instead selling the space to sell a product, the subscription is an obvious tool. If you do not own the land, how can you pay a flat rate for it? No! You must rent. You must rent your media from a streaming service. Rent your goods from an online marketplace (a deceiving name that aims to preserve the spirit of the old capital). Rent your gas from the Costco or Sam's Club pump. And this will only get worse. Even the work you create is no longer your own. You used the lands of YouTube to spread this, hence YouTube will always have the ultimate control. You used Word to write your novel, hence once Microsoft increases prices, they will own that piece of writing. And if you are like me, typing away on a private block such as this, you'll notice that Wix will soon own these ideas and words I've thrown together.
Of course, the most nefarious of this land buying lordship is the search engine. Because not only does it rent out space for exposure, but it mediates what can and can't be seen. Thus we see the interaxion of the three elements once again. The digital currency by a tailored result that best continues your mindless consumption, thus proving this as an extension of the DigiEye meant to keep you as a reliable serf through policing of your own brain chemistry and finally proving how the great techno lord, in the most common case that of Google, is now the one with all the power.
This brings us to my flaw with Varoufakis's proposition, mainly he believes to heavily in this as a feudal transformation, a kind of side-step back-step in the development, rather than a logical next stage. He seems to believe that the new feudal lords are the heads of these companies. Bezos. Musk. Gates. But in truth, I believe nothing has changed in that regard. The system has grown too big and the companies must eat even if the owner's don't. I'm reminded of the sexion in the Communist Manifesto which reference Goethe's "Sorcerer's Apprentice".
These supposed lords are slumbering. We dare not wake them, for it would make no difference. The works gets done by the system. All good systems are self-sufficient and produce positive feedback. They all fight for their own existence. Thus, I believe if we are to identify these new lords, and it can be hard to do so due to the optics of such an apparatus, we should identify them as the true owners of the digital land. Google. Disney. Microsoft. Meta. It's these companies that are the lords. No single individual. They are the ones at the panopticon screen, directly beside the panopticon itself, another system that refuses to die without a say.
But Wait! We're being too charitable. We've given too much "good faith" to this idea. Let us become again critics.
The problem of Varoufakis's idea is that it falls into this succession of applied labels meant to shift the abstraxion because of a visible change in the system. But we already know our language is insufficient. We know it freezes the constant motion of the world and represents it as static. That is the semiotic curse.
In fact, Varoufakis is only following with a popular trend, a constant need to predict what comes after Capitalism, identifying changes in the system as an emergence of something new--or in the case of Varoufakis, a return to something old.
This is simply not the case. Indeed, things have changed. The panopticon has been literalised. The currency in your wallet has been traded in for the secrets on your computer. Old abstraxions which served the world have been disillusion through the power of capital. Borders are gone. Economics is gone. Education aside from preparation for work has gone. We have known since Freud that the new manifestation of our destiny would be a conquering of our minds and desires. We have long known the unconscious domain is the space where money best funxions.
In truth, this is not the Capitalism of Marx and Engels. That hasn't been the case since the turn of the century. But that doesn't mean it's a new system. The great advantage of Capitalism is as a system itself. This means it can, and must, change. It can metamorph. It can un and re metastasise. It can obscure its nature through image and desire produxion and through projexion of the future into the past to literalise events which maintain its existence. It does as all processes do. It continues to live, to evolve, to survive in any climate or weather or ecosystem. It is a bio-organism. And it is in competition with humanity as the dominant species on the planet.
It may be chic to apply new labels or new names to the Neu era, the frontier beyond the frontier. But there is no tangible benefit to doing so. Varoufakis's best contribution is his analysis of the changing systems, the emergence of digital land serfdom and the usage of subscription frontiers in the world of YouTube or Amazon. Abstraxions never serve a point beyond communication. We should not go around crafting labels without purpose. For we can call this Technofeudalism or Capitalism or if you are a right-driven ideolog, maybe you believe we're already living in a Luciferian Communist Dystopia. In truth, your words are meaningless. None of those encapsulate the world beyond a surface level freezing of the true nature of reality, a reality you experience in both the conscious and unconscious realms. We should instead focus on those details. On those change in trends. In watching the DigiEye emerge from the primeval sludge of technologic expanse and its ascent to power. What is next? The same as there always has been. Things will change, they must change, they are change. But sometimes something changes into itself. From caterpillar to butterfly to caterpillar. We should instead focus on a change which will break the positive feedback of this cybernetic system.
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