Serfs of Silicon: Technofeudalism and the End of Digital Innocence

Jun 24

Let’s begin with a confession, one that is itself a microcosm of our predicament: I read Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism in a browser tab, sandwiched between the dopamine-drip of Slack notifications and the collaborative surveillance of a Google Doc. My attention, parsed and packaged by the very lords Varoufakis indicts, became yet another data-point in the ledger of extraction. To review this book is not to stand outside its thesis, but to enact it: we are all, already, inside the castle, the drawbridge long since raised.

Varoufakis’s book is not a warning but a dispatch from the interior—a cartography of the new order, rendered in the dialects of economics, history, and a kind of lucid fury. His claim is both audacious and inescapable: capitalism, as we knew it, is dead, replaced by something stranger and more totalizing—technofeudalism. The market has abdicated; the platform reigns. Amazon, Google, Facebook—these are not companies but fiefdoms, their CEOs digital lords, their users and gig workers the new serfs. Technology has not liberated the market; it has enclosed it, privatized it, and set the watchtowers of surveillance at every gate.

A Feudalism for the Age of the Algorithm

Varoufakis’s argument is as radical as it is crystalline: the platform is not a marketplace, but a manor; the cloud is not a commons, but a castle. The new economy is not animated by competition, but by rent—the relentless extraction of value from every transaction, every click, every heartbeat of digital life. The platform sets the rules, polices the boundaries, and collects the tolls. The “cloudalists” do not produce; they enclose, surveil, and extract.

This is a world where Adam Smith’s invisible hand has been replaced by the algorithmic fist. The platform is not a neutral tool; it is a weapon, wielded by the few against the many. The old bourgeoisie have been replaced by a new aristocracy, their power rooted not in land, but in code.

Pepi’s Platforms: The Ideology of the Interface

To read Varoufakis alongside Mike Pepi’s Against Platforms is to see the full, fractal contours of our predicament. Pepi’s book is a scalpel, dissecting the ideology of the platform, exposing the hidden assumptions and power relations encoded in every interface. “We have been taught that digital technologies are neutral tools,” Pepi writes. “The reality is that they are laden with assumptions and collateral consequences—ideology, in other words.”

Pepi’s critique is not merely economic, but existential. Platforms do not simply extract value; they shape subjectivity, fragment time, and dissolve the very possibility of public life. “Our lives are more fragmented and pressure-filled than ever, as we race to keep up with technologies that manipulate, command, and drain us at every turn.” The platform is not just a site of extraction; it is a factory for the production of compliant, exhausted, and isolated subjects.

The New Feudal Compact: Tech Lords and the Autocrat

If Varoufakis’s cloudalists are the new feudal lords, then the election of Donald Trump as the 47th U.S. President has revealed their truest allegiance: not to markets, nor to democracy, but to power. The capitulation of Silicon Valley’s titans—Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos—to Trump’s burgeoning autocracy is not a betrayal of their technofeudal project, but its logical endpoint.

No figure embodies this new compact more than Elon Musk, whose financial and ideological investments have fundamentally reshaped the digital and political landscape. Musk’s contributions to Trump and allied Republican candidates in the 2024 cycle soared to nearly $290 million, funneled through his America PAC and a constellation of super PACs, including the controversial RBG PAC, as well as direct support for state Republican committees. This staggering sum made Musk not just the largest donor of the cycle, but a kingmaker in the truest feudal sense—his largesse buying not only access, but influence over the very machinery of state. In the wake of Trump’s inauguration, Musk’s appointment as Special Advisor to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was less an act of public service than a coronation, cementing his role as the regime’s chief architect of “innovation,” deregulation, and surveillance.

Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) has become the regime’s preferred megaphone, reshaped by algorithmic tweaks that privilege state-sanctioned narratives and suppress dissent under the guise of “platform neutrality.” His Starlink satellites, once touted as tools of global connectivity, now serve as the backbone of a new digital border regime, providing privileged access to government agencies while throttling service to independent journalists and civil society groups. Musk’s public pronouncements—equal parts libertarian bravado and autocratic menace—have become policy, as Trump’s administration dismantles antitrust oversight and eviscerates AI safety regulations at his behest. In return, Musk delivers the tools of surveillance, data extraction, and algorithmic control, transforming the platform into an instrument of autocratic governance.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, after years of performative handwringing over misinformation, has pivoted to dismantling content moderation policies, rebranding censorship rollbacks as a return to “free expression.” Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose empire thrives on surveillance and labor extraction, has quietly aligned with Trump’s deregulatory agenda, ensuring the castle’s walls grow higher.

This is not mere opportunism. It is symbiosis. Trump’s promise to dismantle regulatory oversight offers tech giants what they crave most: unbridled expansion. In exchange, platforms become tools of autocratic control—amplifying propaganda, normalizing surveillance, and eroding the public square. The FCC’s punitive investigations into “disloyal” media outlets and the FTC’s neutered antitrust efforts are not bugs of this system, but features. As the Open Technology Institute warns, the administration’s fusion of corporate and state power has turned platforms into “tools of authoritarian legalism,” where data extraction fuels repression and dissent is algorithmically suppressed.

Burning the Digital Manor: Toward a New Ludditism

If Varoufakis is the chronicler of the new feudal order, and Pepi its anatomist, then what is the task of the reader? To accept our fate as digital serfs? To hope for a benevolent lord, a more “ethical” platform? No. The only radical response is to become a digital Luddite—not in the sense of smashing machines, but in refusing the terms of the platform, in imagining new forms of collective agency.

Varoufakis gestures toward this: the need to reclaim the digital commons, to democratize ownership and control of platforms, to build new institutions that serve the many, not the few. Pepi is more skeptical, wary of easy solutions, but insists that we must “reform our institutions to become reliable stewards of skeptical techno-progressivism.” Both agree: the platform is not destiny. The castle can be stormed.

Rethinking Resistance: Beyond Nostalgia, Beyond Reform

But let’s be honest: the castle is seductive. The platform offers convenience, connection, the illusion of agency. To reject it is to risk exile, irrelevance, even poverty. The challenge is not just technical or political, but psychological and cultural. We must invent new myths, new rituals, new forms of solidarity. We must learn to see the castle for what it is—a machine for the extraction of value and the production of obedience—and to imagine life beyond its walls.

This is where Varoufakis and Pepi point us, if only obliquely. The task is not to return to some imagined golden age of capitalism or the open web, but to invent something new: a digital commons, a platform cooperative, a network of mutual aid and solidarity. The tools are there, hidden in the cracks of the platform, waiting to be repurposed.

Conclusion: The Castle and the Commons

Technofeudalism is not just a book; it is a provocation, a call to arms. It demands that we see the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. It insists that the platform is not our friend, that the cloud is not a commons, that the algorithm is not neutral. It challenges us to imagine new forms of resistance, new ways of living and working together.

To read Varoufakis through the lens of Pepi, and in the spirit of radical critique, is to recognize that the digital future is not yet written. The castle may seem impregnable, but every castle contains the seeds of its own destruction. The commons can be rebuilt, if we have the courage to imagine it.

The platform is not the horizon of possibility; it is the battleground. The task is not to reform the castle, but to burn it down—and to plant a garden in its ashes.