is technofeudalism really killing capitalism, or is it just capitalism?

Alyaza Birze (August 26, 2025)

last week's reading was Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis; this book is interesting primarily because it is Varoufakis' attempt to put to paper a unified theory of the economic system he thinks is currently replacing (or perhaps has already replaced) capitalism. this is the much-talked-about "technofeudalism," through which (to simplify) cloud capital¹ is used to create cloud proles ("waged workers driven to their physical limits by cloud-based algorithms") and cloud serfs ("persons unattached to any corporation (i.e. non-workers) [who] choose to labour long and often hard, for free, to reproduce cloud capital’s stock, e.g. with posts, videos, photos, reviews and lots of clicking that makes digital platforms more attractive to others.") who are forced to partake in the cloud fiefs that enrichen cloudalists.

now, i will say i am in agreement with Varoufakis and his description of a change in the economic system; technofeudalism is obviously real, manifested most prominently in the large-scale transition to a digital rentier economy, and it is innately linked to things like enshittification. i diverge from Varoufakis here though. i think he does not make an especially compelling case in attempting to distinguish technofeudalism as a wholly distinct economic system that has eaten capitalism from the inside-out. when, for example, he describes the form of Amazon at length—

Imagine the following scene straight out of the science-fiction storybook. You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first, everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out that all the shops, indeed every building, belong to a chap called Jeff. He may not own the factories that produce the stuff sold in his shops but he owns an algorithm that takes a cut for each sale and he gets to decide what can be sold and what cannot.

If that were all, the scene would evoke an old Western in which a lonesome cowboy rides into town to discover that a podgy strongman owns the saloon bar, the grocery store, the post office, the railway, the bank and, naturally, the sheriff. Except that isn’t all. Jeff owns more than the shops and the public buildings. He also owns the dirt you walk on, the bench you sit on, even the air you breathe. In fact, in this weird town everything you see (and don’t see) is regulated by Jeff’s algorithm: you and I may be walking next to each other, our eyes trained in the same direction, but the view provided to us by the algorithm is entirely bespoke, carefully curated according to Jeff’s priorities. Everyone navigating their way around amazon.com – except Jeff – is wandering in algorithmically constructed isolation.

This is no market town. It is not even some form of hyper-capitalist digital market. Even the ugliest of markets are meeting places where people can interact and exchange information reasonably freely. In fact, it’s even worse than a totally monopolised market – there, at least, the buyers can talk to each other, form associations, perhaps organise a consumer boycott to force the monopolist to reduce a price or to improve a quality. Not so in Jeff’s realm, where everything and everyone is intermediated not by the disinterested invisible hand of the market but by an algorithm that works for Jeff’s bottom line and dances exclusively to his tune.

—i personally find it hard to believe that what is described is a new economic system rather than the logical, morphological conclusion of an omnipresent capitalist monopoly/oligopoly. in other words, i think that technofeudalism is primarily describing an inevitable outcome of the hyper-consolidated capitalist economy that we currently live under, particularly as separation between our digital and physical existence blurs.

probably the easiest way to illustrate my contention is to ask yourself one question, which is: doesn't it just obviously make sense for a monopoly (or oligopoly) under capitalism to establish a rentier relationship with its consumers as the next incremental step in maximizing profits? the very nature of a monopoly (or oligopoly) is that there is no real freedom of choice; either you consume a commodity or product on the terms of the monopoly providing it or you do without it—effectively the ideal leverage needed to create a rentier relationship where one did not previously exist. to say that the modern economy is rife with leverage of this sort over consumers is also putting it lightly: avoiding the rentier monopolies and oligopolies is not a particularly serious option when they operate most of the internet's digital scaffolding, facilitate most of the internet's traffic, and mediate most of the internet's commerce. (even Varoufakis recognizes consumer withdrawal as an untenable option in most cases.)

this behavior does not seem new

my contention might prompt a question like why this did not occur previously—or at least did not occur unambiguously—in the prior history of capitalism. i cannot claim absolute knowledge on this subject, but the capability to do this seems like it would be a function of globalization and corporate consolidation more than anything. i suspect that pre-Information Age capitalists were prevented from such things because they generally lacked the kind of infrastructural omnipresence major corporations have today; they also had, in many cases, stronger regulatory and political headwinds to contend with; and in some cases they also simply had too many serious competitors to realistically implement the kinds of at-scale rentier economies which now permeate our daily lives.

it is also true, though, that in some pre-Information Age cases capitalists did still have one or more of these dynamics working in their favor—and they often demonstrated an orientation toward rentier relationships as such (just on a smaller scale versus today). company towns and company stores—although not exact matches to what is taking place here—were one such reasonably widespread example; these institutions, which persisted until the proliferation of the automobile and the decline of industrial paternalism, often gave corporations extremely direct and extractivist power over the lives and labor of their employees. at the larger scale, AT&T's long-held Bell System vertical monopoly also supports the belief that a rentier relationship is the next logical step for any sufficiently entrenched monopoly (or oligopoly). beyond the structure of the Bell System (which obliged its operating companies to pay a "license contract" of up to 2.5% of their gross annual revenues to AT&T, plus cash dividends, in exchange for AT&T's services), AT&T was alleged by the Antitrust Subcommittee of the House to have

forced competitors “engaged in the rendition of telephone service to acquire AT&T patent license under threat of (...) patent infringement suits,” or refused “to issue patent licenses except on condition” to be able to control the telephone manufacturer or by “refusing to authorize the manufacture (...) of telephones (...) under patents controlled by (...) the Bell System” or by “refusing to make available to the telegraphy industry the basic patents on the vacuum tube” that are essential for telegraphy to compete with telephone or by refusing to purchase equipment “under patents which are not controlled by Western or AT&T, which are known to be superior”

this was fairly straightforward attempt to make a rentier relationship out of AT&T business partners and consumers, if you ask me. (the behavior was also, as an aside, instrumental in justifying the 1956 consent decree that limited AT&T's monopoly to a maximum of 85% of the US telephone network, obliged it to divest its holdings in other countries, and made all of its patents royalty-free.)

where i think Varoufakis gets his wires crossed

if i had to guess what part of Varoufakis' analysis steers him toward a conclusion i don't agree with, it would be in making the following assertion:

[...]a commodity is a thing or service produced to be sold for profit. Search results are not produced to be sold. Alexa and Siri do not answer our questions for a fee. Like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, their purpose is entirely different: to capture and modify our attention.

Varoufakis uses this assertion to advance the conclusion that "[...]this power over our attention that allows them to collect cloud rent from the vassal capitalists who are in the old-fashioned business of selling their commodities. Ultimately, the cloudalist’s investment is aimed not at competing within a capitalist market but in getting us to exit capitalist markets altogether."

but i think this is—in several ways—a rather obvious misread. it is, for one, actually quite debatable whether search results—and data more generally—"are not produced to be sold;" but even if they aren't intended to, there is still exceptional market incentive to do so once that data has been collected, making any distinction an academic one. in the words of Richard Seymour, data is "one of the most profitable raw materials yet discovered [...] We write to the machine, it collects and aggregates our desires and fantasies, segments them by market and demographic and sells them back to us as a commodity experience." that data has such undeniable value gives meaning to that oft-repeated axiom, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." that data becomes profit when commodified is also, arguably, the very thing which gives rise to the regime of surveillance capitalism we increasingly live under.

there are also no shortage of other commodities to be considered: attention, as even Varoufakis notes in another section of the book, is also a commodity (albeit an abstract one) in a capitalist economy; it has, needless to say, become a dominant dynamic in the digitally-mediated attention economy. algorithms also commodify our everyday lives, our self-image, our person. virtually anything and everything in the digital space is at risk, at any point, of being turned into a commodity—because the system we live in, although increasingly unrecognizable from traditional Marxist descriptions of the economy, is still an essentially capitalist system defined by production for profit.

i suppose you could say my belief here, then, is one described by Murray Bookchin. in Social Ecology and Communalism (2006), he wrote that—

Capitalism is unquestionably the most dynamic society ever to appear in history. By definition, to be sure, it always remains a system of commodity exchange in which objects that are made for sale and profit pervade and mediate most human relations. Yet capitalism is also a highly mutable system, continually advancing the brutal maxim that whatever enterprise does not grow at the expense of its rivals must die. Hence “growth” and perpetual change become the very laws of life of capitalist existence. This means that capitalism never remains permanently in only one form; it must always transform the institutions that arise from its basic social relations.

—and this is what i think Varoufakis has failed to take into account in some way. the capitalist system was always bound to change with the Information Age, because the Information Age begat a wholly new set of social relations and mediums to mediate them; likewise, the financial system has never been a stable one, always mutating into new things that trailblaze new assets for speculation and profit. neither change means that we have left capitalism, though, it just means that capitalism has taken a new form—really, it's no more than the basic interaction of base and superstructure.

we are still governed by capitalists who want wealth, and their corporations which exist to make objects for sale and profit. companies like Uber still angle, fundamentally, to give a return on investment. as argued (rather convincingly, in my view) by Palo Alto author Malcolm Harris, there is a surprisingly direct throughline between the archconservative, anti-New Deal economic ideology of Herbert Hoover and the modern sentiments of Silicon Valley capitalists and their technology today. says Harris at one point, "Even Silicon Valley’s liberals worship [Friedrich] Hayek"—Hayek being one of the cadre of capitalist thinkers promoted by the Hooverites in their war against liberalism and the social safety net. (Milton Friedman is another.) technofeudalism seems, to me, a noteworthy new development but fundamentally more of the same capitalist ideology.

notes

¹ defined by Varoufakis as

[...]the agglomeration of networked machinery, software, AI-driven algorithms and communications’ hardware criss-crossing the whole planet and performing a wide variety of tasks such as inciting billons of non-waged people (cloud serfs) to work for free (and often unconsciously) at replenishing cloud capital’s own stock; or helping us switch off the lights while recommending to us books, films and holidays, etc., so impressively in tune with our interests that we become predisposed to other goods sold on cloud fiefs or platforms (e.g. Amazon.com), which are running on exactly the same digital network that helps us switch off the lights while recommending to us books, films and holidays, etc.; or utilising AI and Big Data to command workers’ labour (cloud proles) on the factory floor while driving the energy networks, the robots, the trucks, the automated production lines and the 3D printers that bypass conventional manufacturing

Femlandia (Christina Dalcher) is kind of a bad novel

Alyaza Birze (September 3, 2025)

in an attempt to balance out my non-fiction reading imbalance (currently, 78% of my reading is non-fiction) i've been working on my backlog of fiction books to read. this is easier said than done—i'm rather selective with my fiction reading—and today's entry, Femlandia seems worth singling out as a good example of what i don't care for in fiction. calling this novel consistently bad would potentially be an overstatement of the case, but i don't like it and i would not recommend you seek it out. in writing this post, i've actually bumped it down a half-star from where i initially had it, in fact.

the blurb for this novel—which i will quote verbatim below—might already tip my hand as to the sorts of criticisms that are going to be had for this novel:

Miranda Reynolds always thought she would rather die than live in Femlandia. But that was before the country sank into total economic collapse and her husband walked out in the harshest, most permanent way, leaving her and her sixteen-year-old daughter with nothing. The streets are full of looting, robbing, and killing, and Miranda and Emma no longer have much choice—either starve and risk getting murdered, or find safety. And so they set off to Femlandia, the women-only colony Miranda’s mother, Win Somers, established decades ago.

Although Win is no longer in the spotlight, her protégé Jen Jones has taken Femlandia to new heights: The off-grid colonies are secluded, self-sufficient, and thriving—and Emma is instantly enchanted by this idea of a safe haven. But something is not right. There are no men allowed in the colony, but babies are being born—and they’re all girls. Miranda discovers just how the all-women community is capable of enduring, and it leads her to question how far her mother went to create this perfect, thriving, horrifying society.

this is because if you've spent any time learning about second-wave feminism, your takeaway from this blurb will probably be something like "'Femlandia' is going to be radical feminism taken to a logical extreme"—and you'd be correct, because that is exactly what it is. in the novel the eponymous Femlandia is essentially a rehashed-take on a lesbian separatist or radical feminist commune from the 1970s. unfortunately, the novel does not compellingly grapple with any of the innumerable purposes, problems, and political theories these communes produced.

the most obvious example of this comes when, upon arriving in Femlandia, our protagonist Miranda is forced to undergo what amounts to a gynecology exam (to prove she was "always a woman") to gain entry to the commune. i'm sure you can see where this is going, and it is played as follows:

I’m flummoxed. “You need a half-assed gynecological exam to satisfy yourself I’m a woman? Really?”

Kate frowns at me, creating lines in a forehead that was, until a moment ago, smooth as a newborn’s. “I need to satisfy myself that you were always a woman.”[...]

“Sounds pretty exclusionary to me,” I say.

Kate shrugs. “Let me ask you something. You see how we are here, right?” She waves one hand over her bare breasts. “How free do you think we would be if we started letting in male residents?”

“If they identify as women, though—”

I’m cut off before I can finish. “They can identify as a fucking hedgehog for all I care. I’m talking about what they are. Not what they think they are or what they want to be. It’s a slippery slope. You let in one, you have to let in all. There’s a reason your mother called this place Femlandia. Get used to it.”

at face the trans-exclusionary positioning the novel takes here—which is used in the story to, in effect, violate every woman upon entry to Femlandia—is fine, and in fact would be a potentially interesting as a plot device, or alternatively as a commentary on the consequences of idealizing and essentializing womanhood. the problem is the novel does not do either of these things—in fact, it barely lingers on this detail; it barely considers the social and political consequences of such an essentialist policy (one that, again, victimizes women analogously to how the world outside Femlandia does); and it barely even addresses this detail in any real way after bringing it up. instead, Miranda does just kind of get over it despite her initial protestation, and the fact that this radical feminist commune is trans-exclusionary is taken for granted from then on because there are, as far as i can tell, no trans characters in the book. this is unfortunate. moreover, it's not very good writing, and it's a missed opportunity that directly leads to the novel's biggest problem: instead of, say, trans people being the mechanism through which the consequences of this type of feminism and separatism (and where they become misandry and bigotry) are explored, we instead get a frankly unconvincing and comically villainous level of man-hatred as a substitute.

Miranda's mom Win, for example, spends virtually the entire novel talking about men as if she is Valerie Solanas. i would call this exaggeratory but she literally kills her husband for being an annoying manchild and frames it as a suicide, and then flees when Miranda threatens to call the cops on her for this. she is rather obviously a beyond-the-pale evil character and unto itself that would not be a problem, but this is done in such an extremely silly and over-the-top way that it just cannot be taken seriously. it does not help that chapter after chapter of her rationale is anvil-blunt nonsense like this (directed in this case at Miranda for not being sufficiently misandrist)—

“I’ve known women like you. Some people call you deniers; some people call you other names. No reason to get into a name-calling match, though, so let’s just say it like it is. You’re the kind of woman who thinks that because a pile of shit didn’t fall on you, there was no pile of shit. It didn’t exist, right? It didn’t come crashing down out of the sky like a dump-truck load of manure and fall on anyone else. You didn’t get groped by an uncle or a priest or your own goddamned father, so no one else got groped. You didn’t wake up one morning and discover dried jism on your panties, so no one else woke up that way. You weren’t beaten because supper was late or cold or not what your wonderful Mr. Right had a craving for that evening, so no other woman took a beating.”

—that is simply not a compelling or convincing caricature of a radical feminist, or any coherent political belief besides blind misandry. it would not be convincing even if Win were just a husband-murderer and Femlandia an unusually misandrist women's commune, because the logic she uses wouldn't even justify that level of action on her part. but not content to just be a husband-murderer, Win's Femlandia is upheld by a grotesque, poor-man's-Omelas system—that Win signed off on, to be clear—wherein they abuse male children and young adults as a subhuman breeder class, fit only for their semen and otherwise treated as feral livestock, to perpetuate Femlandia in the absence of male residents. there is literally no logic that could justify this (or the evil it represents) and Win hardly even tries to do so narratively, instead upholding it through brainwashing and coercion.

the effect of this is that it collapses what could be a nuanced (or at least reasonably complex) story into a one-dimensional one—Win is just a monstrous person with no redeeming qualities and no understandable belief system. she is a frankly sociopathic character whose actions in the narrative amount to taking vulnerable women under her wing, secluding them, playing upon their worst traumas, and making them into her loyal subjects. making her into a narrative manifestation of feminism with these traits is, needless to say, something that must be executed with care—care that is not really taken here and which, as a result, makes it concerningly easy to read this novel as explicitly anti-feminist. i might even go so far as to say that, because Win is so explicitly misandrist and man-hating—an avatar of what "excessive" feminism might look like—that an anti-feminist reading is the default reading you would come away with here.

a friend of mine put it like this while i liveblogged this on Discord: "thinking generously this story has a place but i don't think the author has thought about it beyond a gross caricature of the ideology." in a lot of ways this novel's narrative is, at least in what it's trying to say, not much better than a 336-page Virgin vs. Chad meme. i do not like it when a novel reads this way.

i particularly do not like it here, because there is a lot to genuinely critique about radical feminism (especially modern radical feminism), political separatism, trans exclusion, and all the other things this novel tries to touch on with at-best mixed results. the lengthy article "On Wimmins Land" by Sasha Archibald comes to my mind here, with its voluminous paragraphs about the triumphs, but also the troubles, of separatist feminist communal life and the political theories upholding it:

Establishing rules was a quagmire. How best to collectivize labor when some participants had mobility issues? How to share childcare when not all women wanted to care for young children, and not all mothers wanted to cede control? Drug-use was central to some women’s spiritual practices, but a drug bust would bring policemen to the land. Some thought it wise to have guns — commonplace in this part of Oregon — while others were adamantly opposed. Zealous efforts to achieve fairness tended to sharpen the perception of unfairness, and anarchist-minded land-dykes never entirely agreed that rules were necessary. [...] Cabbage Lane started a monthly Singles Week, during which the names of lovers-to-be were drawn out of a hat. Residents at WomanShare used Tarot to decide who would sleep in what bed on a given night, while others maintained ménages à trois. Communal masturbation was not uncommon, and loud lovemaking declared one’s right to pleasure. [...] Men were unequivocally banned from women’s lands, but the question of when exactly a boy becomes a man constituted one of separatism’s great quandaries. Some collectives allowed male children under eleven years old, some none at all, some one male child but no more, and some drew the line at breastfeeding — after weaning, male infants had to go. [...] Trans women were perceived through the distortions of cis-gendered bias, and commonly characterized as men who were using disguises to penetrate women’s attempts at privacy. Some factions espoused outright transphobic violence.

and i think a better novel would grapple with these sorts of things instead of constantly lingering on a character's belief that "[...]men were animals. She would have called them pigs but found no reason to insult a perfectly good pig with the comparison. Hyenas, maybe. Jackals. Anything wild that ran in a pack and looked out for itself first. But not anything that could be considered cute, edible, or useful." or that character's hatred of dresses because they reinforce patriarchy or—to reiterate—that character's Omelas-like system that uses male children as breeders.

so it goes in fiction. there is necessarily a great deal of shlock and slop out there and to be a part of this mass is not the worst crime. as i said to start out, though, skip this one. or if you find my descriptions compelling enough to explore for yourself—and also want to read a novel i consider a trainwreck—go check it out of a library i guess. maybe Dalcher's other books are worth financially supporting her for; this one is not.