How Silicon Valley Unleashed 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.