How I will long for your halcyon days
What if capitalism, in any way that an encyclopedia or economics 101 class might describe it, is over? That’s the hypothesis of the former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Veroufakis, who argues that we’re entering into something worse: what he calls Technofeudalism.
If you, like me, have had this sneaking thought like, ‘well, obviously the platforms now have more power than governments,’ then Veroufakis’s argument won’t come out of nowhere, but it’s a bleak picture of how we’ve ceded our economic systems to purely extractive rent-seeking, in ways that have little recourse for rebellion, given that this autocracy does little to directly govern. We don’t vote for these leaders, they don’t provide our necessary physical infrastuctures, though they own a lot of fiber and servers. They leech off of the systems ‘citizens’ pay for and then determine what else we can buy or pay attention to, how we can communicate, and increasingly, what systemic resources we ourselves can access.
Obviously terrorism is a fail in my eyes, but you can’t help but think a little wistfully about the underlying hope in Ted Kaczynski‘s attempts to bring attention to technology’s negative impacts and his desire to get the hell out and off the grid. But I don’t have a shack in the woods future without a catastrophe. I’m about as incompetent at living off the land as one could be (aside from a successful attempt to grow kale). Instead, I am here participating in making myself a serf, a sharecropper of this system.
We’ve been living in a pretty obvious tipping point with ‘creators’ and AI and ‘the sharing economy’ for some time, and now it’s here.
The only antidote I can propose, with even a shred of reason, is to really re-focus on re-wilding ourselves in some way through the practice of practice. We can learn to be with each other, suffer the messiness and frustration that will always be a part of connection and collaboration, and then perhaps start to build tools to support trust-sized networks that can start to provide infrastructure alternatives to the cloud- keeping in mind that we are not in a position to abandon our feudal overlords wholesale yet. (Yes, tech things like mesh networks, private authentications, alternative financial systems that are not about solving trustlessness at scale, but non-tech things are probably more important).
In this lifetime, we’re only going to sow possibility, and won’t taste the fruit of our labours. And so, it will be quite tempting to just say, ‘but I need that thing from Amazon’ or “it’s fine if I just look at social media a little bit.” I mean, these are just the most obvious things that I still do on the regular. As an advantaged western person, I’m not only choosing my own serfdom, I’m basically forcing it on other people who thus far haven’t even had the option of purchasing Prime.
What will happen about war, or other old-school dominance activities? It’s an interesting question. Surely to innovate in the manner in which technology lords depend, there will need to be enough sense of personal autonomy to be creative, and creativity breeds subversion, as a rule. But we’ve invented these excellent policing technologies such as AI, blockchain, and social media, so perhaps any of our efforts to resist will simply be co-opted into fun memes or lead to banishment.
For a much more entertaining read, while also unhopeful, I recommend The Immortal King Rao, which breezed into the top spot of Novels I Read Last Year That Basically Support and Annihilate My Worldview Simultaneously. No spoilers, but one theme of the book centres around what happens when the algorithm rules us, like, officially. It’s very nearly nonfiction.