Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023)

Written in an informal, engaging style (Varoufakis frames the book as a long letter to his beloved, and morally and intellectually inspiring, Marxist father, and he frequently makes pop-culture references, for example to Don Draper from Mad Men), Technofeudalism is thought- and discussion-provoking (my Zoom book club read it). It's also - ultimately - unpersuasive. Varoufakis is an unorthodox Marxist, who is willing to concede forthrightly that Marxism failed in many ways. He also parts with orthodoxy in his assessment that capitalism is currently being eclipsed, not by a bright socialist replacement, but but a technofeudal one that will be and already is much worse. Varoufakis's central claim is that what he calls the two pillars of capitalism - markets and profits - are no longer operative in an economy increasingly dominated by digital-tech behemoths, whom Varoufakis refers to as "cloudalists." The idea is that Amazon, Google and Facebook have created monopolies of one kind or another, eliminating competitive markets. As a result, their income is due not to profits, but "rents" in the technical sense of the term. We have been turned into cloud serfs (and also cloud prols, if we work for or by means of tech - think the gig economy). The comparison to feudal lords is stimulating, but a closer look reveals that competition is not really dead. Amazon competes ferociously, for example, with Walmart's e-commerce side. Social media platforms increasingly resemble each other (so I've heard) and hence abandoning one for another happens all the time.