“Under feudalism, the power of the ruling class grew out of owning land that the majority could not own, but were bonded to. Under capitalism, power stemmed from owning capital that the majority did not own, but had to work with to make a living. Under technofeudalism, a new ruling class draws power from owning cloud capital whose tentacles entangle everyone.” [1]

Trump’s victory in the 2024 US election on 5th November is sending shock waves around the globe. Although the world’s leaders are sending him nice congratulatory messages [2] one suspects they, and their advisors, are simultaneously wringing their hands wondering how they are going to counteract some of Trump’s more extreme rants and actions in the coming years.

Immediate concerns, at least amongst European (including UK) leaders are going to focus on Trump’s potential trade war with China, what he’ll do in Ukraine and the Middle East, what his policy will be towards NATO, as well as, probably most significantly, what the Republican’s stance on climate change will be. If Project 2025 does turn out to be a “wish list” for the party [3] then the threat to slash federal money for research and investment in renewable energy, and calls for the incoming president to “stop the war on oil and natural gas” may be about to be made real.

Whilst some commentators tell us that “Trump has killed the neoliberal order” [4] this is overly simplistic. I can understand why Americans do not want to preserve an economic system that does not reward them but I’m sure they will not be happy when tariffs on imported Chinese goods put up the cost of their cars, household electronics, clothes and their kids toys.

Remember also that one of the cornerstones of the neoliberal political philosophy is, through privatisation and austerity, to reduce the state influence on the economy. This is something that is very much at the heart of Project 2025 – namely, to“de-weaponize the federal government and dismantle the deep state”. Many Americans already suffer greatly from not having access to good quality, free at the point of access, healthcare. Although Trump stated he would not cut Social Security and Medicare his tax proposals would accelerate the date the Social Security Trust Fund runs out of money from 2034 to 2031 and deepen the cuts to benefits to about one third of their current levels [5].

What Project 2025 does seek to do is to privatise parts of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which will affect poorer recipients more directly, and to impose work requirements for Medicaid. That would result in loss of coverage for many of the most desperate patients [6].

Whilst it seems that neoliberalism might not be completely dead under Trump, there is a far greater threat that his next presidency may bring. As it says in this posts opening quote from Yanis Varoufakis, technofeudalists are the new ruling class that draw their power from owning cloud capital whose tentacles entangle everyone. Well guess what, those tentacled feudalists have just taken on a whole new set of superpowers by entangling themselves with the soon to be United States government under the presidency of Donald J. Trump!

It was no coincidence that within hours of Kamala Harris conceding defeat to Trump, Tesla shares went up by over $35, Amazon by $5, Microsoft by $10 and Bitcoin went up by over $5,000 to a whopping $75,643 per Bitcoin. Whether voters realised it or not, a vote for Trump was a vote for the tech moguls whose billionaire-in-chief is Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, Space-X and, most significantly, the X social media platform.

When Musk bought what was then called Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 [7] most people thought he was mad and that he had overpaid for it with one analyst believing Twitter was really ‘only’ worth $30 billion [8]. It was also not clear why Musk wanted to diversify into social media, surely building electric cars and space rockets was enough?

But clearly not and now we know why.

Musk is the defacto uber-technofeudalist. He has made X his own personal fiefdom where, because he now owns it, he can literally do what he wants. Since buying the platform Musk has:

• Complied with 808 of the 971 government demands to do things like remove controversial posts, as well as demands that X produce private data to identify anonymous accounts [9].
• Prevented users from posting links to a newsletter containing a hacked document that’s alleged to be the Trump campaign’s research into vice presidential candidate JD Vance and suspended the journalist who wrote the newsletter [10].
• Sued organisations who are attempting to fight disinformation thereby presenting a threat to the First Amendment [11].
• Allowed both paid “Premium” subscriber accounts and thousands of unpaid accounts that support pro-Nazi content to stay on X violating the platforms own rules [12].

I could go on, but you get the picture.

To paraphrase The Guardian journalist George Monbiot, Trump’s victory and his promise to give Musk a top government job (to head up the government efficiency commission) may well allow him to escape the regulators by effectively making him “his own regulator”. Bear in mind as well that Musk controls key strategic and military assets, such as SpaceX satellite launchers and the Starlink internet system. It is not hard to see how his control over such assets could “grow to the point at which governments feel obliged to do as he demands“. [13]

The genius of the technofeudalists, whether through foresight or opportunism, has been to intertwine themselves so tightly with government that they are no longer relatively benign providers of services (data centres, satellites, CCTV cameras and so on) but an integral and fundamental part of the whole machinery of government.

Whilst on the subject of media platforms owned by technofeudalists we must not forget that august mainstream media publication The Washington Post owned by the world’s third richest man (following close on the heels of Musk), Jeff Bezos. Leading up to the US election the Post allegedly spiked an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. This led to staff resignations as well as anger from its (and other) journalists as well as some 200,000 readers supposedly cancelling their subscriptions.

The Post’s publisher and chief executive, William Lewis, having a sudden epiphany, stated: “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates”, which it had been doing since 1976. Whilst this may be a justifiable and honourable position to take, the fact that this decision was made days before the election, when one of the candidates said he will take revenge on news organisations that anger him, smacked a bit arse-licking I would suggest. Whilst there was no suggestion that the non-endorsement was influenced by Jeff Bezos, it surely cannot be a coincidence that Amazon and Bezos’s space exploration company Blue Origin as well as Amazon Web Services (AWS) frequently bid for government contracts. As Alison Phillips says [14] “The non-endorsement may not have been Bezos’s decision, but good editors know instinctively what their masters want”.

So what does all this mean for us mere mortals that use the platforms owned by these ever more powerful, and rich, technofeudalists? Over to Varoufakis who explains the role of the users who service these cloud fiefdoms as being one of two types [15]:

1. The cloud proles who are the workers driven to their physical limits by algorithms that control their every working hour and who provide the physical services that the cloud platform’s require. These are the Uber drivers, the Amazon warehouse and delivery workers, the Deliveroo cyclists who buzz around our cities delivering burgers and pizzas and the myriad of content checkers whose job it is to weed out some of the appalling violent, pornographic, racist and misogynistic content from social media platforms in the vain hope it will not be seen by decent God-fearing folk (which it often still is).
2. The cloud serfs are the people (and that’s several billion people around the world) who provide the content (the raw tracking data, the stories, the videos, the images) largely for free, that enable these platforms to be more than just the server farms, networks and software from which they are built.

The genius of the technofeudalists, whether through foresight or opportunism, has been to intertwine themselves so tightly with government that they are no longer relatively benign providers of services (data centres, satellites, CCTV cameras and so on) but an integral and fundamental part of the whole machinery of government. This is both in the control they exert during the elections when our leaders are voted in as well as during the day-to-day running of government where they provide much of the machinery that allows surveillance capitalism to take place. Varoufakis again:

“Under technofeudalism, we no longer own our minds. Every proletarian is turning into a cloud prole during working hours and into a cloud serf the rest of the time. Every self-employed striver mutates into a cloud vassal, while every self-employed struggler becomes a cloud serf. While privatisation and private equity asset-strip all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains” [16].

This is what Alex Gourevitch refers to as anti-democratic power. The technofeudalists rule us without ruling through politics. Instead they rule us through their economic power. What they decide to invest in, whether it be machine learning, blockchain, space travel, virtual reality glasses or self-driving cars, decides what our entertainment, our social interactions and our cultural future will be like [17].

With the buddying up of the technofeudalists to autocracies, like the new Trump government promises to be, these gatekeepers are gaining even more power, influence and control over our lives – the kind of control that was once a work of dystopian fiction by an English author called George Orwell. It’s beginning to look like Orwell was right all along, he was just 40 years too early in his prediction [18]. The ‘2024’ version of ‘1984’ is one in which a few billionaires living on the West coast of America are the protagonists. Their goals are not about providing better lives for citizens but lining their own pockets whilst at the same time enjoying the fruits of the enormous power bestowed up them by autocratic leaders like Trump.

As Orwell warned, dictatorships don’t just arise from brutality and suppression. They arise from control of information and the platforms that control that information [19]. For him it was doublethink: famine is plenty, war is peace. For us it’s fake news and alternative facts.

How ordinary citizens can react to this and what can be done about it seems to be impossibly hard to answer questions right now. The renowned critic of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based projects Molly White in her newsletter [citation needed] makes an attempt to at least part address these questions [20], for example:

• Consider reducing your reliance on centralized social networks controlled by billionaires, and instead establishing a web presence you control.
• Find and support trusted sources of news and information. If you rely heavily on mainstream news outlets owned by billionaires who aided Trump in his victory, consider diversifying your media diet.
• Use end-to-end-encrypted messaging apps for your communications and consider using a VPN to help protect your privacy online.

However if we are to try and “wind the clock” we are going to have to do far, far more. What and how is something I plan to explore in future posts.

*I’m trying to avoid using AI generated imagery in these posts preferring to create composites like this one in the style of Cold War Steve.

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Notes

1. Technofeudalism – What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis, The Bodley Head, 2023, p215.
2. Netanyahu and Starmer lead congratulations to Trump, Gianluca Avagnina https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly2z812zxvo
3. Project 2025: The right-wing wish list for another Trump presidency, Mike Wendling, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c977njnvq2do
4. Trump has killed the neoliberal order, Richard Murphy https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2024/11/06/trump-has-killed-the-neoliberal-order/
5. Fact check: Does trump intend to cut social security and medicare?, Christine Sellers, https://checkyourfact.com/2024/10/24/fact-check-trump-cut-social-security-medicare/
6. It’s Find Out Time, Jay Kuo, https://substack.com/home/post/p-151381890
7. Elon Musk takes control of Twitter in $44bn deal, James Clayton & Peter Hoskins, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-63402338
8. Elon Musk’s X is worth nearly 80% less than when he bought it, Fidelity estimates, Matt Egan, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-fidelity/index.html
9. Twitter is complying with more government demands under Elon Musk, Russell Brandom, https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-orders/
10. X blocks links to hacked JD Vance dossier, Elizabeth Lopatto, https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-blocks-jd-vance-dossier
11. Elon Musk’s Supreme Court Endgame in Defamation Lawsuit, Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/elon-musk-media-matters-supreme-court.html
12. Verified pro-Nazi X accounts flourish under Elon Musk, David Ingram, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/x-twitter-elon-musk-nazi-extremist-white-nationalist-accounts-rcna145020
13. Can democracy survive now the world’s richest man has it in his sights?, George Monbiot, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/02/elon-musk-donald-trump-us-presidential-elections
14. The cowardice of the Washington Post, Alison Phillips, https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/10/cowardice-washington-post-kamala-harris
15. Technofeudalism – What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis, The Bodley Head, 2023, p80 – 85.
16. Ibid, p213.
17. The Machiavellis of the market: Entrepreneurs against democracy, Alex Gourevitch, https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-machiavellis-of-the-market-entrepreneurs-against-democracy/
18. The ‘foolproof’ election forecaster who predicted Trump would lose – what went wrong?, David Smith, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/16/trump-election-forecast-allan-lichtman
19. Welcome to dystopia – George Orwell experts on Donald Trump, Jean Seaton, Tim Crook and DJ Taylor, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/25/george-orwell-donald-trump-kellyanne-conway-1984
20. Wind the clock, Molly White, https://www.citationneeded.news/wind-the-clock/