Like my last book review, this book also came from my local library - they have so many cool tech-adjacent books available and I have so little time! This one wasn’t in quite as much demand as Careless People, but it still took a while to get it and it’s already been reserved by somebody else so I’d better get on with this book review, hadn’t I?

About the author

Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek economist and politician who used to be Greece’s Minister of Finance - according to the book, this was due to a “historical accident”. Born to a father who was a Chemical Engineer and Marxist and a mother who was a chemist and a feminist, he was brought up with what some would consider some fairly radical ideas about how the world should work. He calls himself a “libertarian Marxist”, much to the confusion of, according to him, “several libertarians and most Marxists”. Varoufakis has taught economics at universities in the UK, Australia and Greece, so you’d think he knows a thing or two about the economy. He has written quite a few books about the subject and Techno Feudalism is one of them.

The TL;DR

NOTE: This section contains spoilers, so don’t read it if that bothers you!

This book is written as a conversation between Varoufakis and his father, who sadly passed away a few weeks before he started writing the book. It is essentially the author’s attempt to answer his father’s question: “Now that computers speak to each other, will this network make capitalism impossible to overthrow? Or might it finally reveal its Achilles heel?” For context, Varoufakis’ father was a staunch marxist and felt strongly that capitalism was not the way forward for humanity.

The book proposes that the internet allowed capitalism to morph into something different entirely: a system of technical serfdom whereby we are all slaves to the machine, or more accurately, a bunch of billionaires who run tech companies. Varoufakis’ argument is that in return for the convenience of using the internet and devices like Alexa, we effectively sell ourselves to Big Tech. They harvest our data, track our activity and curate our content, alongside which algorithms sell things to us and sell our attention to others. This basically turns us into their unpaid servants who train their algorithms for them, making them ever more effective. It’s a vicious cycle that is difficult to get out of in our perpetually online world.

Varoufakis terms the result of the free work we all do on the internet “cloud capital” - rather than using steam engines, machine tools, spinning jennies or telegraph poles to make money, Big Tech trades in this “cloud capital” and in the process, commands people and nations. He has other terms for folks involved in techno feudalism - “cloud proles” for the workers hired by Big Tech to advance its agenda and “cloud serfs” for the end users of technology who create content for free and “cloudalists” for those folks who run “cloud fiefs” representing giant websites like Amazon and Facebook. It’s a pretty blunt metaphor, but it works.

The author argues that Big Tech has become this powerful due to the way the 2008 financial crisis was handled by the central banks. The bailout of the banks, which was done by printing lots of extra money and putting it into circulation, caused money to essentially became worthless. At the same time, austerity measures meant it wasn’t being invested in new production lines, because nobody had any money to spend, so instead companies used the money to buy out their own shares. This instantly made the CEOs of these companies extremely wealthy and powerful. Then, once inflation rose to really high levels in 2022, these same companies had to shrink to continue to make money and this, I presume is why the era of mass layoffs began.

My thoughts

While the premise of the book is interesting, I went in expecting something a bit more tech-focused when really, this is an economics book and it reads like one. I am not an economist, so I found it hard going at times. Your mileage may vary!

The whole book is treated as a thought experiment and a conversation with the author’s deceased parent. It is very theoretical and doesn’t really deal with the practical, everyday experiences of those of us who work in tech. It was interesting to see the very zoomed out view and extrapolate as to why certain things (like mass layoffs) might have happened, but the content was rather dry at points.

If you like the sound of this book, but you’re also not an economist, you might want to check out The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism. It covers similar ground but I personally found it a bit more accessible and, bonus, it’s fairly short at 224 pages.

My rating

★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

I’m sure this book is fascinating if you’re an economist, but I found it a tough read - I often had to read certain paragraphs a couple of times to figure out what was being said. I don’t think that’s the fault of the book per se, perhaps I am just not its intended audience. Check it out if it sounds interesting to you, but this is definitely not as tech-centric as it sounds. I give it a 6 out of 10 because I feel like I did learn something and Varoufakis’ metaphor is an interesting one.

Reserve Techno Feudalism from your local library like me, or you can buy it from bookshop.org or your local bookseller. It is also available digitally on Kobo and you can even listen to it read out by the author on libro.fm. I don’t use Amazon so will not post links to it here, though I’m sure they sell it too.