This episode explores the concept of technofeudalism and the role of digital platforms in governing the lives of individuals. How has the cloud created a feedback loop that removes agency from those who produce data? And what are the effects of technofeudalism on democratic politics? Listen to consider what democratic societies must do to shift control of the algorithms toward the interests of the many.
Guest featured in this episode:
Yanis Varoufakis is a well-known Greek economist, politician, and public intellectual at large. He is currently Secretary General of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, a left-wing pan-European party he co-founded in 2016, and is also founding Secretary General of the Greek political party European Realistic Disobedience Front. Having served as George Papandreou’s economic advisor some two decades ago, Varoufakis later became a staunch critic of Pasok, the Greek socialist party. He joined the radical leftist Syriza alliance, becoming finance minister in Alexis Tsipras’s government in 2015. His uphill battles with the Troika in this capacity may be the most publicized period of his career. His own memoirs about this doomed fight titled “Adults in the Room” offer unparalleled insight into the political mismanagement of the so-called Eurozone crisis.
Besides his political accomplishments, he has also had an illustrious academic career as an economist. He has held professorships the universities of Essex, East Anglia, Cambridge, Sydney, Texas at Austin, and Athens in Greece, where he established and directed The University of Athens Doctoral Program in Economics. Besides a number of books on game theory, he has published several influential books about the 2008 global financial crisis, the Eurozone crisis, and contemporary capitalism, such as “The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy” (2011), “And the Weak Suffer What They Must” (2016), “Talking to My Daughter about the Economy”[iv] (2017), and “Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present” (2020). In his latest book, provocatively titled “Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism”, Varoufakis addresses the rise of large web-based oligopolies that have of late transformed almost every aspect of our lives. The rise of “cloud capital”, as he terms it, has fundamentally altered the logic of contemporary capitalism, to the extent that profit may have been displaced by rent as the core logic of wealth accumulation.
