Technofeudalism: The new system created by big tech rewriting the rules of global power

Lumkile Mondi, senior lecturer at Wits Business School, joins Stephen Grootes for the Business Book Review on The Money Show.

(Listen at 54:30 in the audio below)

Every week, The Money Show interviews the author or reviewer of a new or trending business book.

This week Stephen Grootes talked to Lumkile Mondi, senior lecturer at Wits Business School.

Mondi reviewed Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.

It's written by Greek economist and best-selling author Yanis Varoufakis, who was briefly finance minister at the time of Greece's financial crisis during 2015.

The book has been described as one of the most important critiques of how the owners of big tech became 'the world's feudal overlords'.

Drawing on stories from Greek myth to pop culture, Varoufakis examines how capitalism has been replaced with a fundamentally new system that 'enslaves our minds, defies democracy and rewrite the rules of global power'.

He also looks at the opportunities which technofeudalism contains to thwart and overturn this very system.

"Keep in mind that Varoufakis is Greek, and socialist ideals are embedded in that community."

"Remember when Greece was forced by the IMF to restructure its economy - there was lots of resistance because the culture is family oriented and there is also a lot of solidarity with the rest of humanity, in that society."

"This book provides a framework of how cloud capital enables the extraction of surplus labour... Basically, it's a critique of the transition in capitalism - which had moved from where everything was priced and commodified, towards financialisation where we shifted from producing products into producing financial assets..."

"And now we've moved towards the cloud, dominated by seven important companies including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. Those are companies that are larger than many countries' combined GDP."

"It's very interesting when you really look really into the decolonisation school who talk of this 'cloud colonialism'; that it is a new form of power affected by interrelated events covering the political, economic, social and technological domains, where communality of knowledge for instance controls African knowledge through repression of African modes of knowledge and replacement with Eurocentric epistemologies."

"And we're all so caught up with our own gadget, with information; that we forget about human relations, we forget about the politics, and about solidarity... And these so-called cloud colonialists basically want us to move to a different mode where we're captured and controlled and we forget about our own knowledge."

Lumkile Mondi, Senior lecturer - Wits Business School

Description on Amazon:

Big tech has replaced capitalism's twin pillars - markets and profit - with its platforms and rents. With every click and scroll, we labor like serfs to increase its power.

Welcome to technofeudalism...

Perhaps we were too distracted by the pandemic, or the endless financial crises, or the rise of TikTok. But under cover of them all, a new and more exploitative system has been taking hold. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies after the crash of 2008 went to big tech instead. With it they funded the construction of their private cloud fiefdoms and privatised the internet.

Technofeudalism says Yanis Varoufakis, is the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world, and is the greatest current threat to the liberal individual, to our efforts to avert climate catastrophe - and to democracy itself. It also lies behind the new geopolitical tensions, especially the New Cold War between the United States and China.

Drawing on stories from Greek myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men, Varoufakis explains this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power, and, ultimately, what it will take overthrow it.

Scroll up to the audio player to listen to Mondi's review: Book discussion at 54:30