How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism
The Making of the Digital Economy
Cédric Durand author David Broder translator
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Verso Books
Published:3rd Sep '24
£18.99
This title is due to be published on 3rd September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The New Economy never arrived, instead we have regressed towards darker times. Have we already entered the age of techno-feudalism?
Inequality, stagnant productivity, endemic instability... The new economy of the nineties promised a new era of freedom and prosperity fuelled by IT. It didn't deliver. Certainly, algorithms are everywhere, but this does not mean that capitalism has become civilized
In the hands of private corporations, the digitalization of the world drives us toward an even darker future. The return of monopolies, the dependence of subjects on platforms, the blurring of the distinction between the economic and the political, all epitomize a systemic mutation. Information and data networks push the digital economy in the direction of the feudal logic of rent, dispossession, and personal domination.
Techno-feudalism brings a fresh genealogy of the Silicon Valley consensus and its aporias. It disentangles the principles of an emerging system-wide rationale. Large firms compete in cyberspace to gain control over data sources. Subjects are attached to the digital glebe. In this new economic order, capital is moving away from production to focus on predation.
Cédric Durand's book adds to the excitement. He treats Big Tech as monopoly capitalists whose digital platforms (e.g. Facebook, Amazon) function like utilities (e.g. electricity providers, water and sewage corpoations, railway networks or phone companies), except that Big Tech use the cloud to harvest our data so as to boost their monopoly power over us. -- Yanis Varoufakis
The technofeudalist model involves establishing a monopoly position and using sophisticated data extraction to secure it... Durand invokes the world of Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 dystopian sci-fi film Alphaville, in which a dictatorial sentient computer rules society down to the most personal decisions. -- Malcolm Harris * New York Magazine *
Durand has provided a very insightful view of finance-driven capitalism over the last three decades. Why was it able to prosper alongside sagging investment and plummeting productivity gains? The answer, argues Durand, lies in the tight connection between the shareholder value principle and the globalization of the real economy. -- Michel Aglietta
A must-read on the ongoing debate on techno-feudalism. A great book! -- Thomas Piketty
The publication of this book by the French economist Cédric Durand represents the most sustained attempt so far at a serious consideration of the economic logics involved. -- Evgeny Morozov * New Left Review *
If you want to understand how platform capitalism is turning into a predatory form of techno-feudalism and how the digital economy is radically transforming politics, society, and our everyday lives, read this book. An essential and fascinating analysis of the ideology and political economy of the digital age. -- Matthias Schmelzer, co-author of The Future Is Degrowth
ISBN: 9781804294383
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 300g
240 pages