Technofeudalism – is capitalism dead? (2025)

From the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists might seem a bit obsessed with how words are used, not because we consider ourselves to be the special constables of whatever language we speak, but because we are interacting with our fellow members of the working class, engaging with ideas about what words represent and defending and advancing our political tradition, in order to gain working class freedom.

So it is of some interest that we have had a globally known political individual, celebrated by many, stating in bold capital letters on the back cover of his book that ‘CAPITALISM IS DEAD WELCOME TO TECHNOFEUDALISM’.

It is this assertion, made popular by Yanis Varoufakis with his book Technofeudalism – What Killed Capitalism (2023) and its consequences that will be examined here.

Two years before the publication of Varoufakis’s book, a French academic published a book titled Technofeudalism: A Critique of the Digital Economy which argues along similar lines to Varoufakis’ book but with a more philosophical perspective. Durand puts the root of the digital economy’s structure in what he calls ‘The Californian Ideology’ – radical individualism, libertarianism, and neoliberalism emerging from Silicon Valley – but does not go as far as stating that technofeudalism has replaced capitalism. Varoufakis mentions Durand’s work in the acknowledgements of his book.

The book by Durand locates the first use of the word ‘technofeudalism’ to a science fiction role playing game manual – the GURPS (Generic Universal Role-Playing System) Cyberpunk Adventures where it is mentioned once:

‘As the world becomes tougher, the corporations adapt by becoming tougher themselves, out of necessity. This “we protect our own” attitude is sometimes called techno-feudalism. Like feudalism, it is a reaction to a chaotic environment, a promise of service and loyalty from the workers in exchange for a promise of support and protection from the corporation’.

GURPS Cyberpunk Adventures book has an interesting story in itself: the editor’s home and publisher’s office were simultaneously raided by the US Secret Service who were under the impression that the book was a computer hacking manual and confiscated the disks containing the book. The publishers got them back in the end although the hard drives no longer worked and the book had to be re-written from memory. Several of the people involved in that episode went on to become founder members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Technofeudalism

In the body of Varoufakis’s book, the author makes the case for technofeudalism in the form of a conversation with his father, who had recently died. There are lots of interesting examples, anecdotes, bits of history, and the recalling of conversations about current events as they happened in the context of his father nearing the end of his life. The book has an appendix named The Political Economy of Technofeudalism, where Varoufakis lays out his case in a much more direct way.

In the main part of the book there are lots of sweeping statements made without qualification, and somewhat gross generalisations. The author makes similar statements in some of his interviews. He has said capitalism ‘is defined by profits and markets’ and left it at that, but in this appendix he shows a greater understanding:

‘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 to make a living. Under technofeudalism, a new ruling class draws power from owning cloud capital whose tentacles entangle everyone’.

‘Cloud’ here means data centres. That data may be data (information) or it may be code which enables networked software like Zoom to work. Like most resources in capitalism, the cloud is mostly owned by a few capitalists and is thus used to ration access to software and data via subscription services, such as Netflix.

Capitalism

Varoufakis states there are eight keys to understanding capitalism: commodity production; distribution of revenue into wages, interests, rents and profits; circulating money capital; capital accumulation, frequent crises; social classes (capitalist, middle class, waged labourers); extractive power (inequality and state enforcement); and a ‘techno-structure’; marketing and behavioural modification infrastructure.

Varoufakis also has a spin on the Labour Theory of Value to support his view. He states that value in capitalism has an experiential form – which seems to be synonymous with what Marx called use-value – examples given include – both commodities such as drinking water – and non-commodities like sunsets, or feeling appreciated. Exchange or commodity value, he states, is a quantity at which goods and services trade for one another. Labour is treated as a separate category but in similar terms as experiential labour and commodity labour. He states the ‘exchange value of commodity labour equals the sum of experiential labour that other workers have put into commodities that a worker’s wage can buy’.

According to Varoufakis two main forces cause capitalism to enter crises – the falling rate of profit and debt crisis (financiers going on credit strike). Rent he considers to be any price paid by a buyer above the price which most closely reflects the exchange value of the commodity. This includes ground rent, financial rent (interest), monopoly rent and brand rent (higher prices associated with in-demand brands, eg Apple computers or Nike training shoes). Varoufakis considers capitalism to be driven by profit and private debt.

Private debt he says is created by financiers from thin air – which qualifies him as a bit of a ‘currency crank’ – his note on this simply says bankers create loans from thin air by an audacious transfer of future values to the present. In the main text he states:

‘Most people think that banks take Jill’s savings and lend them to Jack. That’s not what banks do. When a bank lends Jack money, it does not go into its vault to check it has enough cash to back the loan. If it believes Jack will return the loan, plus the agreed interest, all the bank needs to do is add to Jack’s account the number of dollars it lends him. Nothing more than a typewriter or, today, a few strokes on a keyboard are necessary’.

We would disagree here and state that crises are caused by the chaotic nature of capitalist production that doesn’t know when to stop producing. Debt crises are a symptom of over-production in the real economy. The falling rate of profit is a real tendency but is generally negated by the development of new markets and labour market flexibilities. The Thin Air Theory of Debt is debunked (as detailed in the Socialist Party Pamphlet The Magic Money Myth). There is no reason to extend the concept of rent to the price pain of money loans (interest) or monopoly prices.

Cloud serfs, cloud proles and cloud fiefdoms

Varoufakis goes on to define technofeudalism. He starts with cloud capital, defined as the agglomeration of network machinery, software, AI-driven algorithms and communications hardware criss-crossing the whole planet and performing a wide variety of tasks. These include inciting billions of non-waged people (‘cloud serfs’) to work for free at replenishing cloud capital’s own stock (eg by uploading photos and videos to Instagram or TikTok, or submitting film, restaurant and book reviews, allowing their every click to be tracked across their social media use). Two further ideas central to his case are introduced here: the industrialisation of marketing to buy goods on platforms (‘cloud fiefdoms’), plus and the enhanced automation of actual physical production of goods by what he calls ‘cloud proles’.

Here the word capitalist is replaced by “cloudalist”. He states that because there are major cloud-based services (such as Twitter/X, or Uber) that have not made significant profits but managed to grow via issuing shares. He also states that Big Tech were the main effective recipients of extra currency produced by central banks in the post-2008 growth period and particularly during the pandemic. Via the money and share markets, and the inflation of the value of fictitious assets low interest loans were obtained to spend on cloud infrastructure. So profit via the direct exploitation of labour, became irrelevant for the cloudalists, instead their focus was on market dominance – the establishment of “cloud fiefdoms”. Varoufakis argues that profit is no longer the goal of the cloudalist, instead they seek “cloud rent” paid by “cloud vassals” (the “terrestrial capitalists” who now sell their goods and services via the cloudalist platforms).

Using social media services is of course not working for Big Tech for free: that is not an obligatory activity for survival based on social class like wage-labour is for most people. In fact, those who are doing the value-creating work are those collecting data – which is a whole industry: it’s the bread and butter of Google and Facebook and their thousands of workers. And almost every other firm selling on the internet is using in-house or third party SEO (search engine optimisation) software and expertise to boost sales by exploiting data about potential clients. It’s as if shopkeepers don’t rearrange their window displays to attract their customers, just because they can now do it remotely tailored for individual customers. Profit is still the driver, and movement of surplus capital from one section to another has always happened, including via the state’s capital which is sourced by skimming off capitalist production by means of taxation.

Many of the trends identified in Varoufakis’ thesis are in fact the continuation of long running trends in capitalism. Capitalists in different sectors are in constant competition for access to shares of the surplus value created by work. As the review in this journal stated: ‘What Varoufakis is analysing is not the downfall of capitalism, but its purest application’.

Critical and uncritical reception

Publicity material for the book garnered positive comments from a variety of sources: ‘The dark scary exciting song of our age’ (Irvine Welsh), ‘An urgent demand to seize the means of computation’ (Cory Doctorow), ‘Remarkable’ said the Financial Times who made it ‘Best Book of the Year’, ‘This is the world grappling with an entirely new economic system and therefore political power’ (Observer).

Several Trotskyist papers criticised the book on similar lines as this journal. Meanwhile a lengthy review in Jacobin Magazine said it was wrong about serfdom and that the economy still relies on a class of wage labourers.

However, for every review that seriously engaged with the idea and agreed that capitalism was not dead and that technofeudalism was not a new form of society, there are a multitude of newspaper reviews and blogs that just repeat the ideas in the book – trading on the excitement of something apparently new, it seems. Whilst not widespread, we have seen the term ‘technofeudalism’ spring up across social media: in posts by commentators suggesting that it is now the new social system and needs to be escaped from, in adverts for security software that will prevent cloud serfdom, for crypto-currencies, and for introductions to join slightly shady looking discussion groups on Telegram which promise to spill the beans on how to break out of the system.

Viewed generously Varoufakis’s contribution in Technofeudalism – What Killed Capitalism has put discussion of ideas about capitalism, the system we have now, into the ‘Recent Publications’ section of bookshops and libraries, both physical and in the cloud. But socialists have not been convinced that capitalism is dead. What it will take to kill capitalism is a politically organised working class that understands capitalism and wants socialism.

PDH

Blogger's Note:

There is a review of Yanis Varoufakis' book by Pik Smeet in the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Media musings (2002)

From the June 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Through the media, the working class is constantly exposed to a significant flow of mind-numbing drivel and misinformation. Important issues of the day are distorted, totally ignored or relegated to the margins of page eleven or broadcast as minor news items on the TV. Sensationalism is used to increase market shares and sell adverts, which thus brings in profits. In this latter regards newspapers can be said to be a means of exposing us to advertisers rather than of telling us what we need to know.. The market for a newspaper is advertisers – other business out to make a profit – and the product us! It would be no bold assertion to say that the editor of a daily tabloid is far more interested in the number of advertisers he attracts than the news he reports – though the latter pulls in the former. Thus the never-ending hunt by tabloid hacks for the latest sex scandal to feed a readership hungry for insignificant gossip and trivia, a readership consequently bare to hundreds of adverts a day.

It is easy to despair at endless streams of workers leaving their newsagents in the morning clutching the Sun or the Daily Star, knowing the news they will be reading during their lunch break will be that regarding the love life of a soap star, instead of a piece on US foreign policy or the situation in Israel. A recent issue of the Sun carried a full page photograph of David Beckham’s injured foot and readers were asked to put their hand on the foot at 12.00 midday and pray for its speedy recovery because the English football team were so dependent upon it. Reportedly many workers did just that in the belief that a concerted countrywide focus on the injury would miraculously heal it. If things were that easy, they could have printed a photo of the Queen Mum and asked for readers to place their hands on it and pray for her resurrection.

The fact that so many workers are prepared to buy such newspapers each day reveals how big the task facing socialists is. All these workers need a real education they will never receive via the press or TV. The capitalists are wonderfully aware of this – an unenlightened working class is hardly going to pose a threat to their interests; the real threat comes from a class conscious majority, hungry for useful information, who don’t give a shit about how many hamsters Freddy Starr eats or how many women Jack-the-lad from Coronation Street has bedded.

Everyday, British people are subject to the media for an estimated 4 hours every day, either via newspapers, radio or TV, so it is important for the master class that they can control and manipulate the media for their own ends. Major media corporations in Britain are enjoying a growing monopoly. Just five companies account for 85 percent of all newspaper sales, with Murdoch’s News Corporation controlling over 60 percent of newspaper circulation. As well as this it also has vast shares in Twentieth Century Fox, Harper Collins publishers, BSkyB and StarTV, which covers most of Asia and the Middle East, numerous newspapers and TV stations in Australia, Stream in Italy and Sky Perfect TV in Japan, giving it access to the minds of almost two-thirds of the global population. AOLTimeWarner – the world’s largest media company – owns CNN, 40 percent of US cable TV, 50 record labels, countless magazines, as well as being the world’s largest Internet Service Provider.

Needless to say, such media corporations and the likes of Rupert Murdoch, the right-wing media mogul, have interests that conflict with those of the workers. Thus it is in their interests that news and important issues we should know about are distorted and kept from us, or presented to us in such a way that we end up with tunnel and distorted vision, unable to make informed decisions or engage in intelligent discussion. Thus the media is very much a part of the indoctrination system, reinforcing the basic social values that ensures the survival of capitalism – passivity and sub-missiveness to authority, the virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or illusory enemies, a suspicion of anything outlandish or threatening to the status quo and national pride, etc.

Because people are misinformed, they are oblivious to the real nature of the system that exploits them. This then makes it easy for the media to confuse the workers by hiding real power from view. The result is – and this is intentional – is that they blame governments, their allegiance to political parties often switching overnight because of a newspaper’s slanted coverage of certain policies and social conditions. A newspaper like the Sun can make all the difference to a political party’s electoral chances. Hence Tony Blair’s visit to Australia to prostrate himself in front of Rupert Murdoch in 1997, fully aware that the Sun can run post election headlines such as “It was the Sun what won it” (which followed one Tory election victory). The fact that it is the capitalist system that is seriously faltering, creating problems governments just can’t cope with (because it is the system controlling them, not vice versa) would be too dangerous to print or report.

With the arrival and popularity of the internet and the consequent boom in computer use, opportunities for access to real information are now at an unprecedented high, giving anyone interested a chance to find out for themselves the real story behind news that the media otherwise would have us believe is inconsequential. The “information revolution” has placed a wonderful tool at the disposal of the working class. But a tool is only useful if used correctly. If we fail to use this tool to help us pursue our own class interests, then this “revolution” becomes just so much mind-numbing entertainment the masses will get addicted to and which the powers-that-be will eventually use to steer our thoughts away from the pressing matters of the day. Maybe there is more to Tony Blair’s plans to get a computer in every home by 2005 than we think! Would he really promote computer use if he thought the workers would be accessing informative websites in their spare time?

John Bissett

Will information goods undermine capitalism? (2024)

From the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Information goods are goods whose value derives not from physical characteristics but from the information they convey. In many cases they can simply be copied or downloaded without any cost to speak of (apart from the time spent doing this). Moreover, there is no obvious upper limit as far the volume or quantity of these goods is concerned. They are intrinsically non-scarce or non-rivalrous and, also, ‘non-destructible’ – unlike a physical good.

For instance, by accessing a piece of music on YouTube or an article via Google, you are not denying anyone else the possibility of doing the same. This may very well not be true of a physical good. If I take the last loaf of bread off the supermarket shelf you will, sadly, have to go without at least until the next delivery.

A further characteristic of information goods is that while they have very low or zero marginal costs, their fixed or amortised development costs tend to be particularly high. This cost structure is rather different from the traditional cost structure pertaining to physical goods and, thus, calls for a somewhat different pricing strategy.

Given the non-rivalrous nature of information goods, their zero marginal costs, and the technical ease of capturing or pirating such goods (perhaps in contravention of copyright law), an internet-based business might decide that the most pragmatic thing to do would be to simply abandon the idea of charging for the information goods or service it makes available to its customers. However, while it costs you nothing to have a Facebook page or use the Google search engine this does not mean these commercial entities don’t generate enormous revenues (and profits) for themselves in some other way. In fact, both these entities currently make billions of dollars in profits and even more in revenue. Primarily their revenues derive from advertising (and the copious use of algorithms to more effectively target individual users to benefit their advertisers) though there is also a growing secondary source of revenue in the form of various ‘virtual goods’ or Cloud-based services.

The point is that unless a business like Google was able to make a profit under capitalism it would simply not exist. You and I would not then be able to use its search machine. Being able to freely make use of this facility is contingent upon Google making a profit in the first instance.

As a matter of fact, making this facility free to its users is actually a rather clever way of generating a massive revenue flow through advertising and thus securing a handsome profit into the bargain. People using this facility are a captive audience as far as the advertisers are concerned with adverts being tailored via algorithms, as mentioned, to our own particular tastes and online viewing habits. How many of us would even consider using a Google search engine if we had to pay for it? One suspects only a miniscule fraction of its current users.

Dominated by Big Tech

It is not difficult to see why this kind of commercial activity based on the provision of information goods has come to be absolutely dominated by a tiny handful of very large corporations that have nearly all become household names in their own right. These corporations have the wherewithal to afford the very high development costs incurred. They have the economic clout and reach to shape the industry to suit themselves. For advertisers too, the large size of these corporations has distinct advantages; it provides a platform that enables them to cast their net much more widely – and efficiently – than would otherwise be the case.

Of course, not all information goods are free to the public. Far from it. Internet-based corporations, like Meta (Facebook) and Alphabet (Google), may be able to provide a free service to the public but only because they can cover the enormous, fixed costs all this involves, and make a profit, by making an even larger sum of money primarily in the form of advertising revenue.

However, in the case of other internet-based businesses we see a somewhat different model in place. The information goods and services they provide are not free but are commodified. This is apparent in the case of paywall sites for some online journals or newspapers or else, streaming services like Netflix or Disney. Still other internet-based businesses such as Amazon are engaged in the retailing and distribution of actual physical goods and thus depart even more from the conventional cost structure of businesses purely concerned with the distribution of information goods and services.

However, regardless of the kind of business we are talking about or the type of good it is peddling, the bottom line for any business in a capitalist economy is the need to make a profit. There is no such thing as a free lunch in capitalism. Somebody somewhere ends up having to pay the bill.

Developments like artificial intelligence, the internet of things, robotics and even 3D printing and desktop manufacturing are revolutionising the costs of doing business and shifting the emphasis from tangible to intangible assets. Physical goods are, so to speak, increasingly taking on or incorporating more and more of the qualities or aspects of information goods even though they obviously can never transcend their essential status as physical goods. Or to put it in a nutshell – you can´t have software without the hardware that goes with it

For this reason (and others) information goods are not, and can never be, free in some absolutist sense in a capitalist society as might be inferred from the fact that they – or some of them – can be downloaded effortlessly and without cost to your computer screen; they come with a price (even when the price is not necessarily paid by the consumer but the advertiser in this case).

Too easily beguiled

Some are too easily beguiled by the notion that we are moving, or already have moved, into something called an ‘information-based’ economy. It is the very nature of such an economy, they imagine, stemming from the intrinsic nature of information goods themselves, that has somehow supposedly changed the basic rules of the game, so to speak.

Tom Stonier, for instance, argued in The Wealth of Information: A Profile of the Post-Industrial Economy (1983) that:

‘Whereas material transactions can lead to competition, information transactions are much more likely to lead to cooperation. Information is a resource which can be truly shared’.

Superficially, this sounds all very plausible. One thinks of the crucial role of R&D in industry. A lot of the work of scientists involves collaborating with other scientists and sharing information through peer-reviewed journals and so on. This comes across as all very cooperative and civilised, indeed. Being a ‘non-rivalrous good’, information can be universally shared at virtually no cost. No nasty competition is required.

Its very abundance, goes the argument, means that an information good fundamentally breaks with the logic of the market itself. ‘Plenty’ undermines the rationale for attaching a price tag to a product and, thus, the idea of exclusively owning this product – in this case an information good. Insofar as a price tag is still attached to such a product this can only be explained, it is argued, by the fact that the provider is seeking to perversely, and quite unnecessarily, exclude others from freely using it. The motive of the provider is simply one of self-gain to be achieved by such means as patents and copyrights. In other words, they are asserting an unjustifiable monopolistic hold over the product in question in an age of potential plenty.

Indeed, this, it is sometimes suggested, is precisely why ‘late-stage capitalism’ is today dominated by the existence of virtual monopolies – or, more precisely, oligopolies. Prices are no longer explicable in the conventional terms of supply and demand. Rather they are imposed by diktat by the price makers – namely, those industrial giants striving to enlarge their share of the market in which they operate – to the detriment of price takers, the consuming public.

The basic idea that information technology is – allegedly – more and more bent on subverting the rationale for a market system is a recurring theme in books like Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski´s The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (2019). Capitalism, according to them, is being progressively hollowed out from within and what remains of it is but a brittle shell that seeks to needlessly confine and imprison the new life forms it has given birth to. These represent its arch nemesis: in particular, information technology.

Such technology, goes the argument, by enabling the application of so-called ‘centralised planning’ within the corporation and, by extension, the suspension of market principles – has the potential to transform society along ‘socialist’ lines or at least, provides us with a model of what such a future society would look like. This in itself is a questionable proposition in some ways, but it is also one that seems fundamentally at odds with the pre-eminent role of big corporations today in promoting market imperialism and commodity fetishism.

We should be more cautious in our assessment of the potential impact of information technology and not get too carried away with fanciful notions of the imminent arrival of what has been dubbed ‘fully automated luxury communism’ (FALC). There is no reason to think that information technology or the enhanced role of information as a factor of production, will somehow in and of itself pose some kind of existential threat to capitalism.

This should be obvious from the standpoint of capitalist businesses. The idea that they would somehow resign themselves to economic suicide seems inherently implausible. Under capitalism, generally speaking, technological innovations tend not to be taken up and developed by businesses if there is no prospect of making a profit by doing so.

Robin Cox

Blogger's Note:

Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski´s The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism was reviewed in June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Capitalism and the Internet (2): The Internet and Ideology (2000)

From the February 2000 of the Socialist Standard

Link 1

  The Internet is being hailed as a saviour by both capitalists and anti-capitalists alike. Rarely has any technology been so universally viewed as a holy grail by sworn mutual enemies. Who is right? Will it destroy capitalism or rejuvenate it?

At the Christopher Columbus school in Union City, New Jersey, a dustbin school with a dropout rate as high as its pass rate was low, an experiment was conducted in 1993. Each student was given a home PC and taught online, with both teacher and parent training to assist. The dropout rate fell to near zero, the daytime attendance rate rose to near perfect, and test scores rose 10 points higher than the NJ state average, in every subject. (http://www.gip.com).

Though schooling is unlikely ever to be entirely online, for social reasons, the possibilities of education in general via the Internet are nevertheless enormous. Traditional education—in real time—relies on too many ingredients being present in the right order, amount and quality. Virtual schools can tailor classes to individuals to a far higher degree of precision. Night school does not have to be at night, or local, or regular, or in one place, or reliant on one teacher. Educators have literally a world of resources to draw upon, while self-educators have the best access to knowledge of any generation that has existed. The establishment of the global knowledge network which we are now seeing has been aptly described by Douglas Rushkoff as “the hard-wiring of the global brain” (Cyberia 1994). Education, once the province of the rich and jealously guarded by them, is being democratised at an unprecedented rate. And ideology cannot change without a change in education.

Education is also about debate, and the lack of a public domain or sphere in which to discuss ideas has been held to be a key factor in late 20th Century ideological stagnation (Habermas, Schneider, Rheingold, quoted in Alinta Thornton’s Masters thesis, University of Sydney, (Link). Now, however, Usenet, the global network of mailing lists and newsgroups, is becoming an organic encyclopaedia and coffee house which permits debate on every issue 24 hours a day. As the Romans had the Forum, so we have Usenet. It is the new theatre in the war of ideologies now heating up. Good ideas will spread there. Bad ones will die there. Usenet is where theorists become activists, and where activists learn their theory. Capitalist ideologues are going to have to work harder in future, for educated populations cannot be fobbed off with fairy tales. They start to expect things their forebears didn’t even imagine. They start to make demands.

The DD Digerati

The first demand is more democracy. Capitalism in its advanced form relies on a model of liberal democracy to get the best out of workers, but it has to take a chance on them asking for too much. Now, governments from Britain to Malaysia to Costa Rica are “enthusiastically” experimenting with virtual council meetings and online voting in an effort to keep abreast of the public expectation of more open government. That this enthusiasm is ambivalent is shown by the fact that many of these same governments are also trying to legislate controls into the Internet—unsuccessfully as it happens. The cybergeek contingent—the “digerati”—are excitedly lyricising about running society with Direct Democracy instead of representative government, which they somewhat naively imagine was a democratic expedient imposed by geographical and other practical limitations.

Astonishing technical advance

Nobody who comprehends the class struggle will believe for an instant that the rich will allow Direct Democracy—except where it can’t do any harm and where it might bore us stupid with trivial decision-making. However, the expectation of more democracy is an important and empowering development nonetheless, for it represents a line of convergence with socialist thinking and away from the leadership mentality which plagues radical thinking. When it becomes loud enough, it will be a sign that the working class is gaining a little self-respect at last.

The second demand is a new agenda. As the organisational ability of “wired” protesters is now increasingly on a par with that of governments, as we saw with J18 and N30 and may see again with Mayday 2000, a new sense of potency seems to be sweeping through the radical mind. We don’t have to take it lying down. Corporations are not invulnerable. Individuals can be held to account. Even an entire social system can be challenged, as disparate and sometimes frankly deluded single-issue activists coalesce under the gravitational pull of common experience into what may yet become an embryonic anti-capitalism movement. Instead of being a passive consumerist mass, we can learn to think of ourselves as a proactive team of individuals. The Internet is creating a climate of new possibilities that cuts away at the dead growth of apathy and spawns a new idea: the network consciousness, a concept of interactive, interlinked human nodes in a vast, decentralised and co-operative process, a foretaste of working class consciousness.

Custodes custodiamus

Schooled however in the old thinking, we might conclude that the state will take over the Internet and use it as a new and terrible weapon of control over the working class. Accepting that they have always won in the past, we can only imagine that they will always win in the future. Is there not now a CCTV camera on every street corner? Do they not have their satellites, listening stations and Cray computers monitoring every move, purchase and phone call we make? Well, they may do, and those dedicated to underground criminal or insurrectionary activities may indeed worry about this, but there is something here for the monitors to worry about too—we can also watch them.

The near-level playing field of the cybersociety means that whatever they can do to us, we can do right back to them. This mutual integrated surveillance is already taking place, as US state governors now find themselves and their domestic affairs interrogated by an international brigade, and the government of Mexico finds its attempts to quietly crush the Zapatistas constantly harried and hamstrung by the unwelcome attention of the global online community. Amateur video of Rodney King helping police with their enquiries started the LA riots, and protesters now typically tool up with camcorders, laptops and mobile phones. Anything one protester discovers, all soon know. Governments, like the burglars they are, hate to work in the spotlight, and now it isn’t only the news media which are directing the beams. This is a game we can all play. Quis custodes custodiat? Answer: we do.

Bomb damage

Much is made of government censorship, and governments can certainly close down any website they don’t like. But only temporarily. Just as the forerunner of the Internet, ARPANET, was devised by the military to route around bomb damage to any node, so the Internet can equally route around censorship damage. Besides, the Net is global, whereas governments are local, and what one government dislikes another will frequently allow or ignore. China, so keen to imprison radical Internet users, is nevertheless in a minority of one where censorship is concerned, and its control of internal information flows is haemorrhaging at a thousand different points.

Monitoring of users worldwide is easily countered by the rapid growth of “anonymiser” sites (e.g. www.anonymiser.com), which strip out your personal details and let you roam without fear of identification. Autocensorship software is notoriously unreliable and it is easily outmanoeuvred. Besides, the rich themselves are not keen on government control. A book called Friendly Spies quotes the IBM office in Paris as having done a set of experiments to demonstrate the fact that the code keys they were required to share with the French government were being used for industrial espionage purposes (quoted in GIP).

It may not be states we have to worry about. The omniscient state may be an obsolescent dinosaur in any case, as capitalism militantly embraces the ‘free’ market and multinationals grow so powerful that “an estimated one quarter of all world trade now consists of sales between subsidiaries of the same firm” (Alvin & Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War, 1993).

  “The flow of information into or out of a nation can no longer be effectively controlled by the state; information is everywhere and accessible. To participate in the burgeoning economic benefits of world commerce means adopting practices that undermine state control . . .” (Carl Builder, Strategy analyst, RAND Corporation).

Riccardo Petrella, a former science and technology director at the European Commission, predicts the collapse of the nation state and the rise of a ‘hi-tech archipelago’ of city-states in conjunction with multinational companies, while Warren Christopher, former US Secretary of State, predicts “5000 countries rather than the hundred-plus we have now” and George Yao, Singapore deputy PM, foresees the disintegration of China into hundreds of city-states. (Quoted in Toffler).

Today, cutting edge; tomorrow, garbage

Were this to occur, it must be a disaster for fascist ideology, since it gives the nationalists just what they think they want, and lets them choke on it. People might fight for the right to be called Basques, Latvians or Chechens, but it is hard to imagine them fighting over Coke or Pepsi in the same way. In any case, war is likely to become increasingly hard to justify when the global working class is just that, global. Much of the hate propaganda necessary to stoke public sympathy for a war will be impossible to foist on an internationalised class which works together, online, every day of the week.

The String Vest of Secrecy

Even secrecy is on the wane in the future, if one believes the former science adviser to President Reagan, G. A. Keyworth. Pointing to the fact that traditional intelligence gathering has been on the monumental scale (the US Government produced 6.3 million classified documents in 1992 alone) and involves a huge industry of chaff sorting and “analysis paralysis”, he says: “The price of protecting information is so high that classification becomes a handicap”. Meanwhile Robert Steele of US Intelligence, a critic of the secrecy industry, says: “The hidden costs of secrecy are so immense they often outweigh the benefits by a wide margin.”

Steele and others argue for an open system, with very little secrecy. It is surprising what is already in the public domain. Larry Seaquist of US Naval Intelligence reports that they get more useful information from one Internet PC than all their private and highly secret SPARC workstations put together. There are already few things which are really secret, even if we might wish they were. An underground nuclear cookbook called Basement Nukes prompts Michael Golay, professor of nuclear engineering at MIT, to say: “What’s classified today is how to build a good weapon, not how to build a weapon.” In a wider sense, the Internet will by its nature militate against the holding of secrets, for risk-free disclosure is a button-press away for any individual and information sharing has long been the accepted mode of transaction online. The global brain, one might say, will steadily illuminate its own dark areas. Capitalist ideology, insofar as it depends on secrecy, is due for a hammering.

Paddy Shannon

(Next month: we continue the discussion of the impact of the Internet on capitalist ideology.)

Link to part 3

GLITCH 

As if to prove that computer technology is not infallible, in Part I of this series the first two paragraphs on page 9 of the January Socialist Standard , were garbled as a result of the unexplained introduction of material from another article. The garbled passage should have read:

Yet talk of “boxes” is itself an obsolescent concept, as Xerox have perfected “e-paper” (Observer, 22 August) and research continues towards wristwatch computers and even brain implants, giving rise to talk of “synthetic telepathy” in the more distant future. And as science revolutionises the Internet, so the Internet is revolutionising science. With the spatial decoupling of the scientist from the task, the so-called “collaboratory” is born, enabling multiple users to share a singe physical resource, enhanced productivity with no travel time, and participation by experimenters in multiple, geographically-distributed projects.

Our apologies to readers and the writers—Editors. 

Cooking the Books: Profit-sharing Aussie-style (2021)

The Cooking the Books column from the April 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

When in February Facebook temporarily stopped Australian users seeing, posting or sharing articles from Australian newspapers there was widespread condemnation, and not just from Australia. Most presented it as a case of the people versus a tech giant. Julian Knight, the Tory chairman of the House of Commons Digital, Culture and Sports Committee, declared ‘We represent the people and I’m sorry but you can’t run a bulldozer over that’, adding, sounding like a left-wing activist, ‘and if Facebook thinks it’ll do that it will face the same long-term ire as the likes of big oil and tobacco companies’ (reut.rs/38n7cQJ).

The GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple) tech giants are unpopular in left-wing circles for a number of reasons: being multinationals, their tax-dodging, and for the way they mine their users’ personal information to attract advertisers by allowing these to aim ads tailored to the individual user. So, many anti-corporation activists joined in the dispute on the side of the Australian government. In fact, however, the issue was not the people versus a tech giant but a conflict of interest between two groups of capitalists over sharing out the revenue and profits from advertising.

Facebook depends for a large part of its income on selling space to advertisers. So do newspapers. As Facebook and Google’s audiences are larger and growing these tech giants have been more successful than newspapers whose sales have been dwindling. Some, however, of the advertising is placed alongside articles produced by newspapers. Newspaper owners have long complained about this:

  ‘For years, news organisations around the world have been pushing for fairer profit-sharing between themselves and the likes of Facebook and Google on news content distributed on social media platforms. Some of the industry’s leaders, like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, have won government support to propose relevant regulations’ (bit.ly/3qty4F9).

It was no accident, then, that the first move to try to force Facebook and Google to share some of their profits should have come from Australia as who there says ‘newspapers’ also says ‘Murdoch’. In April last year the government responded by proposing a law to force Facebook and Google to share some of their advertising revenue with Australian news corporations. Google complied but Facebook put on a show of strength. The government compromised by amending the legislation to provide for voluntary revenue and profit-sharing agreements to be tried first. The first one that Facebook negotiated was with Murdoch’s News Corp. The details have not been disclosed but no doubt Murdoch will be satisfied with his share.

That the issue was not one of the people versus a tech giant but one capitalist group against another should have been evident from the fact that the legislation was introduced by an openly pro-capitalist government which had no particular ‘ire’ against big corporations. Far from it. It was acting on behalf of one. Just as governments in Britain, Canada and other countries will be if/when they introduce similar legislation.

The Australian government made no attempt to disguise what it had in mind:

  ‘Australian authorities say they drew up the legislation to ‘level the playing field’ on profits between the tech giants and struggling publishers. Of every A$100 (£56; $77) spent on digital advertising in Australian media, A$81 goes to Google and Facebook’ (bbc.in/3kWcVSI).

Activists who joined in the chorus against Facebook were being used to help pick chestnuts out of the fire for the newspaper corporations, while Julian Knight is just a windbag.

Northern Exposure (2017)

From the June 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have a long history in the north of Britain. The Party’s first ever meeting was in Bolton, Lancashire. To many people, the north conjures up images of slate-grey skies, broad drawls and coal faces, ranks of pokey houses stretching down hillsides, wasp-tongued matrons, factories, fog and squalor. It’s an old stereotype now permanently fossilised into a soap opera, but in truth you can still find traces of it if you go to some north-western former mill-towns on a bad weather day.

The north was certainly grim once. Slum clearances beginning in the 1930s gave way to out-of-town ‘modern’ housing estates and tower blocks in the 1950s that became the new slums, their windswept Brutalist architecture growing graffiti, syringes and crushed Special Brew cans like urban weeds. The pubs closed in all the poorest areas as cheap ‘offies’ stole their business and communities disintegrated to the point where even the concept of ‘community’ disappeared. Sink-estate lad-gangs exercised their ire on each other in mass battles while litter filled the streets and parks like tumbleweed, left by people with no cause for civic pride. Mothers called their wayward children in for tea with the universal war cry “You! Fookin’ get in ‘ere, now!” On Friday nights at chucking-out time the streets filled with strobe-flashing squad cars and riot vans. Not that the north was anything special in that respect. The same scenes could be found repeated all across the south like a low-rent franchise chain. The Sex Pistols, a London band, captured the mood of the country in enraged 4-chord rants and razor-slashed fashion statements. If the 1930s was ‘Love on the Dole’ the 1970s was just the dole. In the Thatcher years that followed, the rage boiled over.

Socialist Party members went out postering for meetings with buckets of wallpaper paste and brushes, furtively throwing up hand-drawn posters while keeping a lookout for coppers. Risking arrest was part of the deal. Splattered in sticky slop we afterwards went and had a pint of fizzy keg ale until the nerves had subsided, hoping the meeting attendance would justify the effort, though often it didn’t. Every available wall and window of every closed-down shop was festooned with layers of posters, the new atop the old, screaming the political life of the towns, the concrete and sheet-steel social media of the 1980s. We had an ‘honour’ policy not to cover over in-date posters from other groups, even the Trot groups, though they didn’t always return the favour. We took the Socialist Standard round the pubs, selling dozens of copies to half-pissed would-be rebels, disaffected Labourites and the occasional bemused National Front supporter. Meetings reflected the age – fiery speakers and no-quarter rhetoric – which visitors either warmed to enthusiastically or cowered from in fright. It was crude, and sometimes as ugly as the concrete shopping arcades. But there was no doubt that it was alive, that the towns were alive, that politics had two fists and was prepared to use them.

And then it all changed. A creeping gentrification took over the country. Our council stopped the flyposting with a simple trick. If you flyposted a meeting for a named pub, the council threatened to fine the pub £400, and £40 for every day the posters stayed up. The pubs promptly panicked and refused to host any political meetings. Fearing retaliation by far-right groups, the pubs also banned paper sales. Councils started refusing to allow paper sellers on the streets, ordering the police to move them on, while privately-owned shopping precincts insisted on trading licences which they then refused to grant. The handful of council-maintained public noticeboards, now the sole locations for legal advertising, became warzones of competing groups. All ‘honour’ policies went out of the window in a Darwinian fight for exposure. Finally the council, reacting to alleged citizen complaints that the noticeboards were unsightly, removed them altogether.

Complaints to our local council about the dereliction of their civic responsibilities yielded the response: “Why don’t you use the internet?” Yet when the council wanted to advertise its own programme of arts events it ignored this passive medium and instead planted giant billboards mounted on lampposts all along the main thoroughfares. Calling attention to this hypocrisy had no effect. Asked who at the council was responsible for the implementation of the Local Government Act which included a responsibility for community group support, council staff had no clue, and less interest. They didn’t much care that local groups could no longer advertise their meetings to the general public. It wasn’t their concern if the democratic process had effectively been silenced. People preferred their home videos anyway, didn’t they? No wonder public meetings went out of style, and radical politics went underground.

Nowadays, when you look at some parts of the north, you see an aspiration to ape the more prosperous bits of the south: private houses which were once council houses, expensive cars in drives, well-kept lawns, litter-free streets, boutique shops, gastro-pubs, hair and nail bars, upscale vernacular new build, and money. But the walls and the windows are blank and silent. Nobody has got anything to say, or any way to say it. Everywhere the debate has moved online and left the quiet towns to their dormitory slumbers. The physical landscape has been lobotomised in the interest of taste, of civic pride and good appearances. A digital generation has grown up with no experience of public meetings, and no exposure to open debate. Instead, all the talk today is of virtual echo-chambers where people only hear the sound of their own opinions reflected back at them. Even where people still gather in the few remaining pubs, they’re all simultaneously on their phones as if checking in with a higher power. If they talk at all, it’s mostly a confection of airy gossip, TV catch-ups and supercilious wise-cracking. People don’t want to argue politics because they don’t want to upset anyone, because it’s more important to have friends than to challenge them. Victorian taboos have returned for the Facebook era.

This is the creeping censorship of the modern capitalist elites. This is how they win, not with well-marshalled facts and arguments, because they haven’t got any, nor even with ‘alternative facts’ and bogus propaganda, because people are learning not to trust them. They win when they seduce us into a suffocated torpor, our class consciousness sapped by attention-deficit amnesia, our hunger for change sugar-soaked in celeb culture, vacuous clicktivism and pseudo-radical posturing. They don’t have to be right, they only have to shut us up with a barrage of noise until we forget that we had anything to say.

Times change, fashions change, but the class struggle is still the class struggle, and we are still there, even if we’ve given up the sticky paste and brushes and the crappy hand-drawn posters. We’ve had to find other ways to operate, but we still meet and discuss and we still manage to have a laugh or two along with it. Capitalism won’t give up, but neither will we. So here’s our message to new readers. Wherever you are, north or south, if you’re the kind that doesn’t give up, come and find us, help us, and join us. It’s the only thing that will work. In the end, it’s how socialism will win.

Paddy Shannon

TV Review: The digital watch (1999)

TV Review from the December 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a sad fact that as the 1990s come to an end most viewers and critics think that the standard of television output has been lower in Britain during the last decade than at almost any other time in living memory. The sixties had The Avengers and The Prisoner, the seventies had Dad`s Army and Fawlty Towers, the eighties Only Fools and Horses and the "golden era" of British soap—but what did the nineties have?

The television industry in Britain, previously cited as the best in the world, has lost its way at the same time as the entertainment industry the world over has seen a dumbing down of its output of truly mammoth proportions. While almost everyone now concedes that the quality of TV programmes has dipped, there is, bizarrely at first sight, far more TV about than ever before. Indeed this may appear to be one of the problems.

Not only has quality perceptibly fallen, the quality that remains is now spread across a myriad of different channels. Today, despite the ongoing technological revolution in broadcasting, there is probably less new, quality TV across the sixty or seventy channels now available than there was across just three or four channels in the past. Broadcasting in the UK is now spreading itself very thinly indeed, and it shows.

There are two main reasons for this, both of them connected. One is the arrival of satellite—and now digital—television. Digital television service provision in the UK is currently a duopoly. It is an industry dominated by Digital Sky Broadcasting and its newer rival OnDigital, though as with most duopolies there is a fair degree of collusion and co-operation between the two. As digital TV is not restricted by the technical limits imposed by the normal UHF television waveband, they have been able to multiply the provision of TV channels in Britain several times over, presenting their subscribers with pick-and-choose portfolios of channels dedicated to drama, comedy, music, sport or whatever may take their fancy.

Unfortunately, these channels are heavily dominated by advertising in the main, even more so than their terrestrial rivals. Some of them undoubtedly provide a good service for the sections of the TV audience they are marketed at—Sky Sports being probably the most obvious example—but they generally offer low-grade television and repeats of popular old favourites such as those now offered by UK Gold and Granada Plus. Even Sky`s in-house Channel, Sky One, offers next to no new programming at all. It is recycled fayre, cheap and advertising-driven, with the bottom-line of one of the world`s biggest multinationals rarely out of sight and mind.

Down, down, deeper and down 

The other reason for the spread of low-quality TV has not been so intrinsically related to the arrival of new technology. Instead it is a phenomenon reflective of what is happening right under our noses in capitalist society. This is the lack of social cohesion and direction evident in a society now based on little more than the commodification of our everyday lives and the anarchic rule of the market.

Not only is there a lack of a coherent future for people to forge or identify with today and for programme-makers to tap in to, there is even a lack of a shared sense of past too. As society becomes more disparate, its members more "classless", isolated and bombarded by a sustained attack of cultural ephemera, "market segmentation" becomes all important: commercial exploitation based on the sustenance of diversity and division in previously homogenous markets. Class is no longer important in this scenario, instead we are defined by the lager we drink or the shade of lipgloss we wear.

As a result of all this only two types of new programme get made with any frequency. These are either highly specific, and necessarily low-budget programmes aimed at the plethora of culturally transient activity in existence at any one time, or generic blockbusters of various sorts aimed a mass audience on the basis of the rule of the lowest common denominator—trashy dramas, increasingly repetitive soaps and anything else which, whether by chance or design, achieves a high enough market share to warrant being flogged to death, from docusoaps to celebrity cookery programmes.

Hence the state of UK (and indeed, world) broadcasting at present—a massive proliferation of channels with a parallel proliferation of trash. Finding low-grade dross or endless repeats is no real problem now, finding new quality programming which has required some sort of sustained investment most certainly is.

Of course it need not be like this. Digital television in particular offers huge scope for the democratisation of broadcasting, with hundreds of channels catering for all tastes and perspectives, properly produced and free from the dead hand of the advertising people. Perhaps at some point in the new millennium society will be able to mould and create a worthwhile broadcasting system which is a fitting use of the advanced technology now at our disposal, and which can inform us, entertain us and empower us in equal measure. If the market economy is to survive for much longer though, we shouldn`t really be counting on miracles, should we?

Dave Perrin

Clicktivism (2013)

Book Review from the July 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Digital Revolutions: Activism in the Internet Age, by Symon Hill. New Internationalist Books

The title of the book is self-explanatory, unlike the chapter titles such as Chapter 4 ‘We are Next!’ It focuses on a short period but in comprehensive detail. The back blurb explains that the book ‘takes a detailed look at the uprisings that have rocked the world since 2008 and looks at the part that the new media have played in their unfolding.’ There is a degree of presumption about the reader’s politics (and a whiff of reformism) when early on it reads, ‘In 2008, an economic crash exposed the truth of a system in which the wealthy benefit and the rest of us pay for it,’ and ‘corporations have continued to wield unaccountable power,’ and later on ‘something was very wrong … bankers had gambled with money that they did not own.’

The main crux of the book is a riposte to both digital luddites and digital utopians (who Hill labels extreme and ‘two ridiculous arguments’), aiming to strike a balance between the two. To the digital utopians Peter Tatchell, writing in the Foreword, observes ‘Digital Revolutions do not make social revolutions in and of themselves.’ Symon Hill writes, ‘There are cyber-utopians who attribute the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and anti-austerity campaigns and other global movements entirely to technology … with little, if any, reference to the economic factors and human complexities that have triggered unrest, protest and change.’   ‘At the other extreme of the debate are those who think that the internet has made no difference at all … Some even argue that the internet is undermining activism.’ Click ‘Like’ if you agree, presumably.

Ironically, Hill fails to mention, it’s the digital-luddites who are a newer phenomenon than the digital-utopians. Twentieth-century digital-utopians argued that the CIA-funded Radio Free Europe would topple the Soviet dictatorship, or that satellite TV would topple post-Cold War dictatorships.

Hill, associate director of the leftwing Christian think tank Ekklesia, writes ‘The core principle with which I have approached the book is not a belief about the internet but a conviction about power. Liberation comes from below and never from above.’ Why social change does not come from above could be an interesting discussion, but convictions need no explanation: ‘This book does not focus on presidential campaigns or Wikileaks, important though they are.’

To his credit, he goes on to acknowledge that power from below has in the past and can in the present and future challenge unjust and oppressive systems. He first mentions the printing press and its effect in the 17th century, but throughout, there is care taken to argue that the cause has been economic, not technological. He even goes so far as to agree with another writer that there is no causal link between social protest and communications technologies.

He refers to Tim Gee's model of counterpower, in which movements can use 'Idea Counterpower', 'Economic Counterpower' and 'Physical Counterpower' to challenge the power of ruling elites and argues that the internet is relevant to all three forms. One might be inclined to agree with the digital luddite Evgeny Morozov (writer of The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World) who argues that the internet is counterproductive for building physical counterpower. Hill does not overstate his case, quoting critics of net utopians who thought camera-phones would reduce police brutality.

Some obvious advantages are pointed out, for example the ability to rapidly organise and assemble via Twitter using locations revealed at the last minute without requiring leaders to issue instructions, an ability which favours non-hierarchical horizontalism networks with no ‘ringleaders.’  Although all 145 UK Uncutters who occupied Fortnum and Mason were arrested and locked up overnight, Pussy Riot have been imprisoned for much longer.

In fact, you begin to suspect problems with the organisation and the politics (irrespective of the internet) when you read passages such as this, that after police had responded with water cannons and tear gas ‘... the Tahrir protesters met to talk about their demands. Some seasoned activists [thought that] things should be taken in stages … Socialist [sic] campaigner and blogger Gigi Ibrahim explained ’but the people around us in Tahrir Square, the majority who didn't belong to any political group, were chanting for the removal of the regime. So we knew at that moment that we couldn't ask for less … Several hundred activists are thought to have been killed.’ This was all back to front, taking action first, then establishing minimum (not maximum) demands afterwards.

The interests of powerful minorities have always been opposed to democracy and equality. ‘Astroturfing’ refers to political, advertising, or public relations campaigns that are designed to mask the sponsors of the message to give the appearance of coming from a disinterested, grassroots participant. Although Hill is critical of astroturfing's success, with questions over the Arab Spring and the closure of London Indymedia, one can't help wonder whether the internet as a tool still favours the powerful. Hill uses Marx's class analysis favourably, to ‘go beyond clicktivism (online activism)’, which is touching on the real cause of social change, class struggle.

DJW