In recent years, there has been much talk about the death of capitalism—whether that death is imminent, in process, or something that has already happened. In the latter category, we find economist, former Greek Minister of Finance, and current Secretary-General of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025  Yanis Varoufakis. Varoufakis, certain that capitalism is dead, argues in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism that capitalism has been superseded by “cloud capital,” “cloud rents” and AI-guided electronic surveillance. This, Varoufakis tells us, is not a good thing.

According to Varoufakis, technofeudalism is more exploitative than neoliberal capitalism:

“Whereas capitalists can only exploit their employees, cloudalists benefit from universal exploitation, i.e. cloud serfs work for free to increase the stock of the cloud capital which allows cloudalists to appropriate more and more of the surplus value that the capitalists extract from employees already converted into cloud proles whose work is guided and sped up by cloud capital.”[1]

A “cloudalist” is someone who owns and controls a digital trading platform (Amazon, Alibaba, Shopify, Facebook/Meta, Apple, Google, etc.) —- all “fiefdoms” that charge “cloud rent”. Renters are vassals in relation to feudal overlords, and everyone else is merely a serf in a system that forces all to contribute unpaid labor to the cloudalists. Thus, the “bedrock” of technofeudalism is nothing less than “sanitized tech-terror.”[2]

As traditional markets are decimated, sellers must rent space on digital trading platforms. And anyone who owns a digital device ends up renting space in the cloud simply to store their stuff. We rent space for email accounts, and for file, document, and photo storage, to be accessed by tablets, phones, computers—for everything we need to live. Cloudalists manipulate and exploit us through AI-mined data, ever expanding the machine’s ability to execute its mission while ever contracting the remaining sphere of human freedom and autonomy.

Let’s think about some of the implications. Dragnet data collection yields a near-omniscient vantage point that exceeds, by an inestimable magnitude, that of Bentham’s panopticon. It’s no wonder that the generators of large language models behave as if they’ve created a new life form, with consciousness, volition, and desire. There is even talk of granting rights to AI. The irony and sadism of such verbiage is palpable in a society in which humans themselves languish in a dystopian netherworld of wholesale violation of even their most basic human rights. Assertion of “life creation” is without doubt useful in decentering responsibility away from the primary beneficiaries of a system that has jeopardized human freedom and dignity in ways that we are only beginning to understand.

It may be impossible to know if Varoufakis is correct. But it is certainly arguable that we have moved beyond neoliberal capitalism and are now confronted with something even worse. I’d like to outline some of the effects of this shift on human consciousness. They include nothing less than the psychological foreclosure of the future.

I have argued elsewhere that neoliberal rationality leaves us with nowhere to go, and that, as material conditions become progressively constricted, thinking itself runs up against an endless logical loop of cognitive dissonance. This endless logical loop is the result of attempting—and failing—to figure out how to surmount structurally imposed conditions of precarity. When housing and health care, for example, are commodities rather than basic human rights, there is no way to guarantee that one illness or accident will not strip one of the means to pay for them. This is particularly true when medical procedures are unconscionably expensive, and bankruptcy—with or without health insurance—is a real concern. The only way around the endless logical loop of cognitive dissonance is to engage in magical thinking, to have recourse to the fictional narrative of unlimited individual possibility, or to try to stop thinking altogether.

The endless logical loop is centered on attaining something resembling individual security. Psychological foreclosure signals something more collective: a sense of generalized confusion; loss of control, hope, and the ability to imagine a livable future. It’s about a collective failure to envision not only the good life—eudaimonia—but any real life at all. It’s about forced participation in a system that we know is killing untold species, including our own, and rapidly destroying the planet. The endless logical loop signifies the zero-sum game of capitalism, with a few winners and many losers. The psychological foreclosure of the future signifies the collapse of civilization generally. In this scenario, we are all losers.

This foreclosure would be anything but inevitable if there were a conceivable way to subvert the system. Varoufakis argues that we cannot go back: “there will be no return to the good old bad old days” for the simple reason that “torrents of central bank money have already built cloud capital up to critical mass.”[3] And the long-term ramifications appear predictable—and inexorable. So it’s not simply the hegemonic nature of cloud capital that induces psychological foreclosure, but this fact in conjunction with the realization that the only conceivable trajectory for all possible futures has been reduced to the spinning out of the implications of the ascendancy of cloud capital.

What are these implications? We can extrapolate from existing conditions: exponential increases in wealth and power for the (very) few, with no possibility of meaningful gains for the many. Rather, more scarcity, deprivation, trauma, powerlessness, and death. Our remaining freedom will hang by a tenuous thread as we fruitlessly struggle to surmount the unpredictable and largely unknown algorithmic interventions and feedback loops of an AI-fueled system. This only conceivable trajectory signifies the psychological foreclosure of the future.

The notion of psychological foreclosure was foreshadowed in 2014 by David Graeber in Debt: The First 5,000 Years: “In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures.”[4] Graeber concludes that the capitalist era has been eclipsed by “managerial feudalism.”[5] The loss of possible alternative futures is also a central focus of Neil Vallelley’s Futilitarianism.[6] Similar themes are found in Precarity Lab’s “Digital Precarity Manifesto”[7] and Technoprecarious.[8]

One prominent effect of cloudalist hegemony is the fact that technofeudalism has positioned itself to do nothing to avert impending climate disaster, as its online platforms and weaponized AI suck down ever-expanding megawatts of electricity. This is but one aspect of poly-crisis inflamed by the inferno of technofeudalism, arguably sufficient in itself to induce the psychological foreclosure of the future.

The implications of technofeudalism are clearly economic, political, and social. But they are also metaphysical, resulting in what Varoufakis calls “the death of the liberal individual,” given the loss of privacy and the implicit mandate which follows from such loss: “Every choice, witnessed or otherwise, becomes an act in the curation of an identity.”[9]

We can go further. The death of the liberal individual signals not only the death of authenticity, but the death of the possibility of authenticity: every possible world is circumscribed within the domain of cyberspace, that echo chamber and hall of mirrors within which AI-generated content and everything else are now, in many instances, indistinguishable. In this world, privacy is remembered only as a relic of the twentieth century. Does the epistemological conundrum of distinguishing between truth and simulacra become more or less pressing in a world in which all possible alternative futures are increasingly inconceivable?

The inconceivability of possible alternative futures means the de facto eradication of any viable conception of freedom itself, or of the individual who might exercise it. Any notion of collective governance is relegated to the realm of fantasy, as the balance of power between the cloudalists and the vassals and serfs is on the order of the Hobbesian Leviathan who gains strength and power relative to the masses through their very acts of feckless resistance. Varoufakis is right: technofeudalism is not good news. It is, rather, a movement away from collective governance, away from freedom and dignity, away from values that embrace life.

Thinking implies transcendence toward an imagined future rather than the false transcendence of a future imaginary. We are left with Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle. In the society of the spectacle, Debord writes, “no one can any longer be recognized by others,” and “every individual becomes unable to recognize his own reality,” given that the spectacle supersedes consciousness itself.[10] Debord (1931-1994) was writing before the age of the internet. Today, it is the mass spectacle of the technofeudalistic age, ensconced in cyberspace, that supersedes consciousness, manipulating not only all aspects of material reality through surveillance and rents, but through the subversion of consciousness by means of technologies that are not and cannot become conscious. The system itself subverts all other possible futures through the algorithmic subversion of human autonomy.

There will be no Dave Bowman to shut down the machine when HAL-9000 takes command. Even the recognition of the takeover will be subverted into a spectacle of no resemblance. This is the psychological foreclosure of the future.

Is such foreclosure a foregone conclusion? Will technology push us, inexorably, beyond logic and meaning? Or will new forms of human solidarity, rooted in compassion and empathy, rise inextinguishably from the exquisite corpse of the technofeudalistic age?

 

Notes:

[1] Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (London: Melville House, 2024), 238.

[2] Varoufakis, 131.

[3] Varoufakis, 146.

[4] David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2014), 382.

[5] David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 175-189.

[6] Neil Vallelly, Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021).

[7] Precarity Lab, “Digital Precarity Manifesto,” Social Text 141, Vol. 37, No. 4 (December 2019), 77-93.

[8] Precarity Lab, Technoprecarious (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2020). Contributors to this book include Cassius Adair, Iván Chaar López, Anna Watkins Fisher, Meryem Kamil, Cindy Lin, Silvia Lindtner, Lisa Nakamura, Cengiz Salman, Kalindi Vora, Jackie Wang, and McKenzie Wark.

[9] Varoufakis, 180-183.

[10] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy Perlman and Jon Supak (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), paragraph 217.