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5.12 | 07.05.24
I’ve been arguing on the show since 2019 that the companies that run the big technology platforms—Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the rest—have far too much wealth and power. In the world these companies have built, we exist only to generate behavioral data. We supply that data through our decisions about what social media posts to click on and what stuff to buy and what videos and songs we consume; the companies hoover it up and use it to craft and curate more content they know we’ll like, so that they can sell us even more stuff.
This unimaginably profitable business model has been called “surveillance capitalism”—but that term doesn’t feel right, since surveillance is usually covert, and these companies are doing what they do right out in the open, with our willing participation. This week on the show, we bring you an interview with Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, who has a better name for it: technofeudalism.
The thesis of his new book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism is that since 2008 or so, old-fashioned capital has been eclipsed by Internet-powered cloud capital. The real power in today’s economy, Varoufakis argues, resides not with the owners of the means of production, but with the owners of the platforms that turn our behavior into data and use that data in turn to modify our behavior. Whereas old-fashioned feudal lords collected actual rent from their serfs in return for the right to farm the land they owned, cloud capitalists collect cloud rent—a tax on access to their platforms.
If you’re like me, you’re not very happy about the rise of technofeudalism and the decline of free, open markets. And you worry about how democracy can survive and how we can continue to flourish as creative beings when so much wealth and power is concentrated in so few companies and people. Fortunately, Varoufakis isn’t simply in the business of diagnosing the problem. In Technofeudalism, together with his 2021 science fiction novel Another Now, he does a lot of work to sketch out alternative worlds and ways we could get there.
Resources and Related Episodes
Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2024)
Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now (Melville House, 2021)
For more on the rise of capitalism and its consequences, check out Season 7 of John Biewen’s superb podcast Scene on Radio.
Goodbye, Google, Soonish (June 25, 2021)
How to Fix Social Media, Soonish (July 24, 2019)
A Future Without Facebook, Soonish (March 22, 2019)
Notes
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Full Transcript
[Music: Hub & Spoke Sonic ID]
[Music: Soonish opening theme]
Yanis Varoufakis: This is not a capitalist system anymore. So as I say to friends to whom I try to explain the concept of my book, you know, the moment you enter Amazon.com or any of these platforms, you've exited capitalism. Welcome to technofeudalism.
Wade Roush: You’re listening to Soonish. I’m Wade Roush.
I’ve been saying on this show for years, and I mean literally since about 2019, that the companies that run the big technology platforms, like Facebook and Google and Amazon, have too much power.
I won’t repeat every single argument from those episodes, but basically these companies have turned all of us into components in their giant money machine, like the permanently jacked-in bodies that serve as human batteries for the Matrix.
In the world these companies have built, we exist only to generate behavioral data.
We supply that data through our decisions about what social media posts to click on and what stuff to buy and what videos and songs we consume.
The companies hoover up that data and use it to craft and curate more content they know we’ll like, so that they can sell us even more stuff.
And in doing all that, they’ve become profitable beyond imagining.
If you look at the companies that have been described as The Magnificent Seven, meaning Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Alphabet, Tesla, and Nvidia, they’ve got a combined market capitalization of more than $15 trillion, with a T.
Which is more than half of the gross domestic product of the entire United States.
That’s beyond gargantuan. It’s Brobdingnagian.
The system these companies invented and perfected has been called surveillance capitalism.
But I never felt like that term was quite right, since surveillance is usually covert, and these companies are doing what they do right out in the open, with our willing participation.
Recently I met an economist who has a better name for it, and that’s Technofeudalism.
That economist is named Yanis Varoufakis, and he’s the former finance minister of Greece and the author of several books, mostly recently one called Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.
The thesis of the book is that since 2008 or so, old-fashioned capital has been eclipsed by Internet-powered cloud capital.
Meaning that the real power in today’s economy resides not with the owners of the means of production, but with the owners of the platforms that turn our behavior into data and use that data in turn to modify our behavior.
And whereas old-fashioned feudal lords collected actual rent from their serfs in return for the right to farm the land they owned, cloud capitalists collect cloud rent, which is basically a tax on access to their platforms.
Recent I reached Varoufakis at his home in Athens to talk about the book. And while I’m not sure he’s right about every single point in the analogy to feudalism, I think he’s correct about the broad strokes.
The system we live under today does feel closer to the medieval power structure than to what we used to celebrate as a free-market economy.
Now, if you’re like me, you’re not very happy about the rise of technofeudalism. And you worry about how democracy can survive and how we can continue to flourish as creative beings when so much wealth and power is concentrated in so few companies and people.
But it’s hard to know what to do about technofeudalism, given that the system is already so big and all-powerful. Here on the show I’ve advocated personal action, like closing your Facebook account and finding alternatives to Google’s products for search and email and all the rest.
But that tactic feels very small-bore. And it only works one person at a time. It’s like trying to fix our polluting and inhumane factory farming system by persuading people one at a time to become vegans. It’s not a scalable solution and it’s just never going to make a real dent.
But part of the reason I wanted to interview Varoufakis is that he’s not just in the business of diagnosing the problem.
He’s also done a lot of work to sketch out alternative worlds and ways we could get there.
Back in 2021 he wrote a novel called Another Now, which took a science fictional look at an alternative history where politics took a big left turn after the financial shock of 2008 and the nations of the world came up with a much more humane economic system.
In fact I almost interviewed him back then, when the novel first came out. But I’m glad I waited, because Yanis’s argument is more compelling when you join the fiction and the non-fiction parts of it together.
So, here’s the interview. And stay tuned because right after our chat I’ll be back with some big news about the Hub & Spoke audio collective.
Wade Roush: Yanis Varoufakis, welcome to the show.
Yanis Varoufakis: Thank you so much for having me.
Wade Roush: So I think a lot of listeners will recognize the outlines of what you're calling technofeudalism, but they might not think of it in the same package or with the same story around it that you're telling. So can you start off just by introducing listeners to this idea of technofeudalism, and how is it different from good old capitalism or bad old capitalism?
Yanis Varoufakis: The main thesis of my book is that we have a new form of capital. This is, you know, there's all this discussion about cloud services, about, uh, artificial intelligence, what effect that will have on destroying jobs, on copyright law and all that. Now, that, to me is all very important, but, um, peripheral to the main great transformation that our society is undergoing, mostly unbeknownst to us. And the reason why I'm talking about the transformation is because I think that if you take a bird's eye view of what is happening in cyberspace, what we used to call cyberspace, the internet, algorithmic, um, developments, uh, reinforcement learning algorithms, artificial intelligence and all that, if you take a bird's eye view and this is how I see it, at least we have a new form of capital. Capital has been the same since the beginnings of time. Capital was always a produced means of production, whether it's a fishing rod or an industrial robot building Teslas. It is something we've created, a produced means to produce something else, fish, a cat, you know, catching fish or producing a Tesla car. So even though capital has evolved and has become very technologically impressive from the fishing grounds to the industrial robot, nevertheless its essence has never changed. And it predated, of course, capitalism. With capitalism, what you had was a shift of power from the owners of land to the owners of produced means of production, to the owners of capital, to the capitalists.
Yanis Varoufakis: Now, if I'm right in the way I look at what's happening in the IT internet realm, algorithmic realm, capital has mutated into something which is no longer a produced means of production. So, you know, Amazon.com doesn't produce anything. Siri doesn't produce anything. You can think of it as a service, but it's not really a process of production. It's, uh, more like a produced means of behavioral modification, not a produced means of production, but a produced means of behavioral modification. Because, you know, when you converse with Alexa, which is the story I tell in my book, but it could be with any other kind of interface of whatever kind of cloud capital, when you interface with these machines, network machines, essentially, you train them to train you, to train them, to train you, to train them, to train you, ad infinitum, so that they know you individually and not just individually, but also regarding your mood on a particular day in a particular time zone to give you good advice on what music to listen to, what book to read, what electric bicycle to buy, um, what car even to buy. And once they give you good advice, then they grab your attention. I don't know about you, but I'm very impressed when Spotify, uh, offers me, um, songs that I've never listened to. And I listen to them, I think, oh, my God, I like that, you know, when because when friends of mine tell me to listen to music, I usually don't like even my best friends’ recommendations. But Spotify knows me, knows me intimately. When Amazon recommends books to me, you know, I've bought a lot of books from Amazon and I will declare this proudly and without any sense of shame, because we have to use the devil's instruments, you know, I've never been let down. The books that Amazon has recommended to me range between being interesting and fascinating. That is the range. Why? Because the algorithm knows me, knows me very well. And and so it captures my attention. Next time it recommends something, of course I'm going to take it seriously, given the success of the previous recommendation.
Yanis Varoufakis: And that's the end of capitalism, because the same algorithm which we train to train us, to train it, to know us well, to implant desires even ones that resonate with who we are into our mind, the same algorithm sells the stuff to us, bypassing markets, and the same algorithm gets us to produce or reproduce, replenish its cloud capital with our recommendations, with our posts, with our videos, with our post blog posts, and so on and so forth. So for the first time in the history of humanity, we have a machine which is a produced means of modifying our behavior. And given that it is privately owned by Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or whoever, essentially this is a piece of capital. I call it cloud capital. This produced means of behavior modification, which allows the owner of that cloud capital to extract gigantic amounts of value that is produced by us and by capitalists, you know, terrestrial capitalists, not cloud capitalists, you know, old fashioned capitalists who produce the book, the music, the electric bicycle.
Yanis Varoufakis: And let's not forget that Bezos extracts anything between 10 and 40% of the asking price. So this is a form of rent, like the feudal lords would extract rent from the peasantry. Ground rent. Now it's cloud rent. So a world in which markets have been displaced by these cloud fiefs, which are not markets, Amazon is not a market. It's a trading platform. But it is not a market. It's completely centrally organized. It's organized as if it was built by the Central Economic Planning Agency of the USSR. Gosplan. Okay. This is what the algorithm is. It's Gosplan think of it as a privately owned, very technologically advanced Gosplan, the opposite of a market. So the moment you have the same algorithm, interfacing with me, getting to know me, telling me what I want, selling it to me outside the marketplace, enabling its owners to extract rent from the capitalist to produce the thing that I buy and extract from me peasant labor, I call it, you know, cloud serf labor, to reproduce it' capital. Because every time I tweet, I add to the capital stock to the cloud capital stock of Elon Musk on X, okay. And I don't get paid for that. This is not a value judgment. It's not an ethical point. It's an economic point. And so this is not a capitalist system anymore. So as I say to friends to whom I try to explain the concept of my book, you know, the moment you enter Amazon.com or any of these platforms, you've exited capitalism. Welcome to technofeudalism.
Wade Roush: I think to a lot of people, it may be difficult to discern when a market transforms into a technofeudalist empire. I mean, can you really see the signs of this market evaporating? You're an economist, so maybe you can explain this. Just expand on this point a little more. In what sense is Amazon or Spotify not an actual marketplace? There's a lot of stuff there. There's seemingly a lot of choice. How is it not a marketplace?
Yanis Varoufakis: This is why I'm making this juxtaposition between a market and a trading platform. A trading platform, like a market, has a lot of commodities on it that are being bought and sold. Lots of people who do buying and lots of people who do selling, and some do both. Right. So a trading platform is identical to a market in that sense. But the market to be a market needs a degree of decentralization, at least some degree of even if it's monopolized, even if, you know, to think of a, I use in my book the analogy with a the Wild West, imagine you, you know, you, you ride into a wild West town and you discover that the saloon, the bar, the saloon is a bar, the saloon and the grocery store and the post office is owned by the same gangster, right? The same cowboy. Whatever. Still you and I riding alone, we will be able to have a discussion to say, you know what? Let's not stay in this town. Let's go somewhere else. Or, you know, this looks like a good deal. Let's try to try to bargain together. So we go together, we join forces, as you know, create a little cartel of buyers and go and negotiate with this monopolist. In a trading platform in Amazon.com, you cannot do that because there is zero degree of decentralization.
Yanis Varoufakis: I remember, you know, one of the great libertarian, uh, advocates of capitalism, Friedrich Hayek, uh, who is ideologically on the opposite side of where I am, but nevertheless, I learned a lot from this man, and I remember when I was a young man, a student, I remember listening to him deliver a speech at the LSE, the London School of Economics, and he wanted to make his case against socialism and in favor of market capitalism.
Yanis Varoufakis: And he got up and his usual flamboyant way, and he said this morning I went to it into a shop, and I left that shop holding an item which I purchased, which I never knew that I wanted, nor I knew that I needed it. And he wanted to make the point that the market is, because it's decentralized, because, you know, every seller does his or her own thing and every buyer does his own thing, but there is no central control, there's no gosplan, no Soviet state to say, you will produce this and you will buy that, this decentralization and spontaneity, the spontaneous order of the decentralized marketplace is what creates knowledge. So Hayek was a market fundamentalist because it wasn't just an instrument of bringing together consumers and producers for Hayek, but it was something beyond that. It produced freedom. It generated freedom. That's a libertarian view of the marketplace, which is a very good way of celebrating the market and describing the difference between a market and Amazon, because none of that of what Hayek was saying you can find in Amazon in a trading platform. The trading platform gives you no room whatsoever for this spontaneous, spontaneous order, for it is, as I said, it is a dream come true of Soviet planners. Soviet planners are kicking themselves, if they're still alive, that they had not invented the algorithm of Amazon.com.
Wade Roush: Uh, Yanis, you've described yourself as a libertarian Marxist, and I wanted to … you mentioned also that you had the opportunity to hear Hayek himself speak, and, uh, and you gestured at your time at LSE. So I wanted to just ask you if you could talk a little bit about your own biography. So I'd love to hear particularly how your experiences growing up in Greece in the 60s and 70s may have shaped your outlook and and how your economics training and your teaching history in England and so forth kind of turned you into the sort of thinker that you are now.
Yanis Varoufakis: Well. I loathe concentrated power. I don't care who has it, whether it is a state, a bureaucrat, Amazon, or, you know, the local, uh, um, owner of a mine or of a factory that, um, uh, exploits ruthlessly, you know, local workers. Uh, I grew up in a fascist dictatorship. Greece, when I was growing up, was, um, uh, it was a fascist dictatorship. There was no other way of describing it. The guys weren't fascists who were in power. Uh, when I was six, I remember vividly, 21st of April, 1967, the secret police breaking down our front door and abducting my father. So I'm no friend of the state. At the same time, my criticism of people like Hayek, from whom, as I said, I learned a lot. And this, you know, this is why I add the libertarian in front of it. Um, my criticism of them is they don't give a damn about the exorbitant power of the owners of, um, ridiculous amounts of capital, which gives them an amount of power which is no lesser than that of small dictatorial states. And some of them are actually large dictatorial states, especially if you look at the Magnificent Seven. Now, you know, the seven companies, the seven cloud companies that dominate, uh, the New York Stock Exchange. Each one of them is bigger than than a whole country. Uh, so if you if you truly care about decentralized power, about democracy, about liberty, for that matter, then you cannot support capitalism.
Yanis Varoufakis: And certainly you cannot support cloud capitalism or what I call technofeudalism. Um, so, you know, um, yes, I did go to England and I did study their economics, uh, which for me was a very sad experience, a very sad experience because, uh, uh, I loved economics. But in the same way, I love chess. Imagine if you were to go to a military academy, and all your training in the military academy, preparing you to go to battle, to war, was chess. It would be a very dangerous military academy. It would be preparing you for setting you up for massive, massive defeat at the battlefield. And that's what economics is. It's a beautiful mathematical abstraction which works only to the extent that it is absolutely relevant regarding really existing capitalism or techno feudalism. So, you know, I became an academic, effectively debunking the relevance of economic theory to capitalism. So in conjunction with my both my hatred of authoritarianism, of the secret police, of the exorbitant power of big business and of course, big finance, because you only need to know how banks work. So for your mind to rebel against what they're doing. Um, so that's me in a nutshell.
Wade Roush: Okay. Thank you, I appreciate that. So you mentioned the Magnificent Seven, these giant cloud companies that you call cloudalists. I think if you add up the current market capitalization of those 6 or 7 companies. So we're talking about Apple, Amazon, alphabet, Google, meta, Facebook and now Nvidia, which is actually perhaps the biggest one. Um, I'm not sure if I mentioned all of them, but if you add those up, they are worth more than the next 30 or 40 companies combined on the Nasdaq or on the stock exchange on the market capitalization tables.
Yanis Varoufakis: Allow me to interject to say that they are worth more than every company in um combined in Britain, Germany, Japan and France. Every single company.
Wade Roush: That's another way to look at it. Right. So okay, so I I'm working toward a question about the economics of this. So you've certainly identified a real phenomenon. And I'm trying, I'd like you to explain its impact or how dominant is it. And can you marshal sort of economic statistics numbers, documents, data to kind of convince me that technofeudalism is the new power structure in the global economy? Like, how do we measure this and how do we how do we know this has happened?
Yanis Varoufakis: Well, it's not easy. It's not easy because, you see, one of the problems we economists have had for centuries now, we could not distinguish between rent and profit. My point is that, um, in the way that when we shifted from feudalism to capitalism, wealth accumulation shifted from accumulating rent to accumulating profit. Similarly, what I'm saying now is that we are going from we are transforming, societies are being transformed, and there's a shift from profit to what I call cloud rent. It is impossible for me to tell you we don't have the statistics to tell you, how much of value added goes to cloud rent as opposed to profits, because some some companies themselves receive both cloud rents and profits. But their accountants jumbled it all up together in one statistic. But if you think that companies like Facebook, for instance compare and contrast Facebook with, let's say, General Electric or General Motors. In a standard old fashioned terrestrial capitalist firm like General Motors or General Electric or Volkswagen, for that matter, 85% of um revenues go going to wages and salaries. In Facebook, it's less than 1%. That gives you a quantitative expression of the vast, vast difference between those cloudalist companies and conventional capitalist conglomerates. That's the first point. The second point, even if, let's say you were, we suppose we had numbers, uh, and they were to show that only 10% of value added is cloud rent. I think it's more I think that already. And it's very it's rising very fast. But let's say it's 10%. And you were to say to me “But so Yanis, it's only 10%. What. How come your claim claiming this is no longer a capitalism, technofeudalism.” Well, what I would say to you, Wade, is this. That if you suppose this was 1800 and you and I are, you know, in New York City or London, and we're having a conversation about the great transformation that was happening at the time, from feudalism to capitalism. Well, let me tell you that we do have some numbers for that period. Only 3% of value added was profits. So capitalism was fledgling, but it was clear that it was already, even with this 3% of value added, it was already usurping the socioeconomic mode of production, and it was already overthrowing feudalism.
Yanis Varoufakis: So I'm not saying that, you know, and the thing to remember is that these socioeconomic modes of production coexist a bit like our own bodies. We have still in our DNA, elements of serpent DNA. It never goes away. Um, we, you know, you have a new species, Homo sapiens. I don't know if we're still Homo sapiens. We're not that smart and wise anymore. But you know what I mean. We still have elements in our DNA that are that and perhaps elements without which our body cannot function, that hark back to previous variants of our species. So when capitalism got completely and totally entrenched, let's say by the end of the 19th century, there were still feudal elements to it. So the agricultural sector was very feudal and capitalists would never have been able to survive without that feudal element, because it produced a lot of the food. So similarly today, and this is a point I make, especially in the appendix to my book, uh, all the surplus value comes from the capitalist sector. But it is siphoned off in the form of cloud rent, and the real power comes from the ownership of cloud capital, not from the ownership of traditional terrestrial capital. That's that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Wade Roush: So I get your point that the data doesn't exist yet, or it's going to be hard to figure out how to get it. And and that's okay, because you don't really have to work very hard to convince me about your argument. I've been spending years on this show actually trying to explain why I think that cloud companies like Google and Facebook already have too much power, and why it might be a good idea for us to be less dependent on them. In practice, though, that's really hard. And I want to ask you a question about how we might move to a post-technofeudalist society or how we might unchain ourselves. But let's be real. Sort of. You published your argument in the form of a book. The book is for sale on Amazon. You know, I bought the the udio version from Amazon. I'm interviewing you for a podcast that people will listen to on their iPhones and their Android phones from Apple and Google. I'm talking to you on a Macintosh computer made by Apple. You know, every single stage of our economy, basically, and our life is mediated by these cloud companies. And so do you think there's a way to be a productive, contributing creative professional today without participating in the technofeudalist system?
Yanis Varoufakis: No, of course not. And I'm not asking anyone to do it. I am going to be. I'm the last person who will give up his phone, his laptop, um, you know, um, Facebook and X, I can still call it X, I still call it Twitter TikTok. I personally adore TikTok. Spotify. But that's not the point. Um, the whole point is to embrace the beauty of technology, but make it work for humanity. Look, this this. I say this at the beginning of the book. This is something my father introduced me to from a very young age. The notion that technology is a double-edged sword. That it is since, you know, time immemorial, that was the whole point of the Prometheus myth. Prometheus, this demigod who had a great belief in humanity, maybe misguidedly, uh, he stole fire, which symbolized technology, from the Olympian gods, from Zeus, and gave it to us, hoping that we would do good things with it. And the whole point of the myth was that, you know, the ancients were worried that we were not doing good things with it, that Prometheus sacrificed himself to give us fire technology. Yeah. Uh, and we were using it to destroy one another. So the idea is not to take the fire and give it back to Prometheus. The idea is to do good things with it.
Yanis Varoufakis: And to cut a long story short, my view is that, you know, there used to be an interesting discussion between social democrats and socialists, between New Dealers in your country and more radical thinkers who believe that capitalism has to be changed. We have to have a cooperative foundation for social relations of production, which is my view. I don't think this is conversation is interesting anymore. I don't believe a New Deal is possible under cloud capital, under what I call technofeudalism. I don't believe such a democracy is viable anymore in Europe. You can see that it's gone. And I think that cloud capital has a lot to do with that. Uh, take Uber. I'm not against having an algorithm like Uber's. It's great. It works beautifully, but I'm against the private ownership of the algorithm of Uber, which leads to an exploitation of both the customers, the municipality, and the taxi drivers. But imagine if you have a cooperative of taxi drivers running its own cloud capital. Uh. So my argument is, and it is an old fashioned socialist argument for the socialization of capital, of cloud capital in particular. And the point I'm making is that, uh, even though we failed as the left, as a socialist left to convince people, uh, you know, to socialize old-fashioned capital and where we did socialize it, we ended up with a gulag like in the Soviet Union, so we have a lot of egg on our collective faces as the left, and a lot of crimes against humanity are weighing us down, but nevertheless, the point I'm making is that now we have this variant, this mutation of capital, that is cloud capital. Now we have to make it work and we need to combine liberty that's the libertarian part, with, uh, collective ownership of this very powerful and beautiful, beautiful, beautiful artifact of the human mind, which is AI algorithms, what I call cloud capital.
Wade Roush: Okay, so just confirm for me, it sounds like you're not in in outlining and calling our attention to the rise of this mutant variation of capitalism that you're calling technofeudalism. You're not necessarily trying to get us to look back to some wonderful lost past. It wasn't as if capitalism, old fashioned capitalism, was all that great either for workers. Uh, but you're saying let's let's figure out a way forward that is humanist. Am I good so far?
Yanis Varoufakis: Absolutely. Look, I'm an old lefty. I'm the last person to tell you who is going to wax lyrical about capitalism. Capitalists had to be overcome. My generation and my father's generation. My mother's generation. We failed to civilize capitalism, to overthrow capitalism, to bring something better than capitalism into existence. We failed, and the result was that capital went rampant and mutated itself to something far worse, which brought us technofeudalism. And, you know, we better get it right this time around.
Wade Roush: So maybe to wind down, I wanted to to ask you about your novel. You've been thinking about this set of questions for a long time, and you came out with a novel in 2021 called Another Now, which is in a sense, a blueprint for a post-technofeudalist world. I'm not sure you would have called it that in 2021, but that's how it looks now. And so I wanted to to give you a chance to very briefly sort of outline what you were doing with the novel and, and whether in a sense, the the current book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, is a way of grappling with the same ideas through nonfiction and essay form instead. Which one was more fun for you, writing a novel or writing a long nonfiction essay?
Yanis Varoufakis: I think I enjoyed writing the novel more. Uh, because it was my first attempt at fiction, and I crammed in three characters, a lot of people I've known in my life, and that was great fun doing. And also because there is an element of science fiction. I'm a science fiction freak. I'm a Trekkie, by the way.
Wade Roush: Live long and prosper.
Yanis Varoufakis: Indeed. Indeed. So, uh, the two are related. You see, one of the criticisms that I get for Technofeudalism, the book we've been discussing today, and thank you for that, is that okay, I've been told by many people that it's a good depiction of where we are, but it's not a great, uh, optimistic text for how we can transform the world. But that I had already written, as you so kindly pointed out in Another Now, my science fiction novel. And you see, when I sat down to write Another Now, for me, it was it was daunting because I had to face a question which I have been avoiding all my life. If you don't like the world we live in, firstly, what would another world look like, given the fallibilities of human nature given the technologies that we have, not some kind of, you know, science fiction of, you know, Asimov what happens in 3000 AD, but what could be happening today? Okay. Instead of what is happening? How is business organized if it's not capitalist? Uh, how is the banking system, how does that work if it is not ruled over by a big finance? And not only that, but how could we have gotten there today, in the past?
Yanis Varoufakis: So I sat down and I thought, okay. For me, 2008 was our generation's 1929. It was a moment of truth. It was a bifurcation. It was a moment when the world stopped making sense in terms of the pre 2008 period, uh, in exactly the same way that 1929 was a similar moment of discontinuity for the previous generation. So imagine that instead of doing what we did with Occupy Wall Street and all those, you know, very pleasant activities which were, which fizzled out and which ended up being irrelevant in the end, even though we had a lot of fun doing it. Uh, what could we have done differently? What kind of techno rebellion would I have imagined happening in 2008 that would have changed corporate law, that would have changed, uh, governance, which would have returned democracy, well, actually, the demos to democracy, because there's no, the demos has been banned from democracy a long time ago. You know, the people. And so I imagined that in 2008, the crisis then was so acute that the time space continuum split and there were two trajectories. We are on the one that you and I share now. But imagine you and I through a wormhole, we managed to communicate with our versions in the other trajectory, where there is a kind of techno socialism, uh, a utopian socialist but realistic utopia. And then we converse with ourselves in that one. And, you know, through exchanges, we find out how things work there. How so? This is that's Another Now. Thank you for giving the opportunity to discuss this. And the whole book ends with a huge dilemma of the main protagonist. Uh, and I will say nothing more than that.
Wade Roush: Okay. You know, I, I like your idea of an alternate future that began in 2008. For me, it felt like the divergence, the bifurcation was in 2016. And that's when I started feeling like, here in the US anyway, I was living in the wrong future, and I think a lot of folks feel that way. But sure, 2008 is just as good. But when people accuse you of being not prescriptive enough, you can point them toward the novel and say, here's my actual vision. And, uh, well, it's an alternative future. It's not necessarily a blueprint for our future, but it's helping people think about how things might have been different and what elements of that alternative future we might actually want to grab on to, and perhaps graft on to our present. Is that, is that fair?
Yanis Varoufakis: Yes. But it's a little bit more practical than that, in the sense that there are bits and pieces in that other novel in that, in another now in that novel which answer questions, you know, what kind of collective action do we need now? And answers to your question, what role does technology play in this? Because the point I was making in that book was that if you think about trade unionism was heroic in the 19th century, but also in the 20th century, you know, to, to, to, to set up a trades union in the 19th century in the United Kingdom, in the United States, you'd risk your life and limb. The private benefits from doing that were minuscule. I mean, the chances were that you would lose your job. Your family wouldn't have food, uh, you'd be injured, uh, you'd be vilified. Um, and yet people did it, and they created they changed the world, you know, they brought the eight hour day. They brought, uh, the pension system. Let's not forget that these were very difficult to win gains for the working classes. And yet it happened with a cost benefit analysis which was completely against them, for the collective good. And what I'm arguing in Another Now is that we need to use technology to switch the cost benefit analysis, instead of having maximum sacrifice for minimum private gain how can we use technology, algorithms, cloud capital, so as to make sure that our collective action requires minimal sacrifice from each one of us in order to have maximum benefit?
Yanis Varoufakis: So, for instance, you know, imagine, um, an international day of action against one of the conglomerates, one of the cloud lists on Amazon. Some of us try to put this in practice with hashtag #MakeAmazonPay, which is a campaign of the progressive international, which I'm party to, uh, with an international strike that begins in Vietnam on Black Friday, then moves as the sun. Uh shifts to Bangladesh, India, Germany, new Jersey and Seattle. And imagine if that at some point combined with, um, uh, a consumer boycott during that day, nobody visits Amazon.com on that day. Now, you see, that's what I mean by minimum personal sacrifice, maximum effectiveness. And imagine that if we had a way of organizing these activities, you know, uh, nonviolent activities against cloud capital internationally, not just Amazon, but all sorts of different ones. So when people ask me what kind of politics would make a difference, my answer is this a technology rebellion. So not only am I not advocating that we set aside our apps and our computers and our phones, all I'm saying is that we need to make use of them more and more effectively, and in a way that benefits humanity's prospects of defeating the tendency of technofeudalism to turn us all into cloud serfs.
Wade Roush: What a wonderful vision, and probably a good place for us to stop. It does take global networks to do that. And thank goodness there are still parts of the global network that are not controlled by the technofeudalists like SMTP and RSS and these other protocols that are still open-source. Okay. Well, Yanis, thank you so much for your time. This was terrific and it was great to connect.
Yanis Varoufakis: It was a lot of fun. Thank you, thank you.
