The 2000s shift from capitalism to ‘Cloudism,’ described in Yannis Varoufakis’s Techno-feudalism: What Killed Capitalism as a shift from terrestrial capital to so-called ‘Cloud capital,’ was already augured by manual labour’s representing less of the economy than digital labour and by the prominence of the virtual implying less of the actual. Of course, in a sense, ideas have always represented the bulk of value, so this is nothing new, nor is it problematic as such. The problem lies elsewhere.
A Cloud that never rains
Varoufakis’s claim is that Cloud-capital-owning Big Tech firms do not have to worry about making money because, under current conditions, central banks will not stop printing money. Moreover, the economy is today structured in such a way that capitalists (producers and sellers) have to use Big Tech platforms to be competitive, and so these platforms effectively extract rents and suck up the constant supply of money printed by governments.
This being the case, these firms can dedicate themselves to ensuring their ongoing dominance by finding ways to control people, a project in which governments are also largely interested. Their chief method of doing this is by using algorithms and big data to capture attention and predict behaviour.
It is here that the cloud turns out to be hostile to the ground, so to speak; the virtual becomes a sinister counterpart to the actual: The tendency here is not to generate value through ideas (which may be more or less worthy), but to generate control and market dominance through distraction, noise, and content. Consequently, a market for data—the value of which consists in predicting people’s behaviour—develops, the main aim of which is not so much to get people to buy this or that, but to keep them on the reservation of the Big Tech/central bank nexus.
The noise of attention-capture, along with the data of control-seeking, is unlike any natural cloud. After all, the purpose of the Big Tech-central bank nexus is to retain rent-payers and thus vacuum up the endless stream of central bank liquidity. This is a cloud that does not rain down on the ground, but instead absorbs the ground’s moisture—a vampire cloud, akin to the abducting UFO so prominent in the contemporary imagination and around which there has always been a faint aura of messianic hope. What is the myth of an advanced civilisation of space aliens rocking up to rescue us from ourselves if not a materialistic parody of true religion?
It makes sense, then, that the ideological manifestation of Cloudism is the systematic deconstruction of identity (the evaporation of moisture from the terrestrial; as Marx said, “everything turns into steam”). Oddly enough, it is at precisely this juncture that some Marxist critics of late-stage capitalism, or contemporary Cloudism, tend to align with the very cultural currents that serve to reinforce the system.
Communist dualism: waves vs. particles
The simultaneous validity of understanding light as both a wave and a particle is suggested by Varoufakis as a workable analogy to the dual nature of labour as both “experiential” and “commodity”—what Marx termed “labour” and “labouring power” respectively. In Techno-feudalism, Varoufakis writes:
Herein lies capitalism’s secret: the uncommodifiable sweat, effort, inspiration, goodwill … of employees are what breathe exchange value into commodities that employers then flog to eager customers—this is actually what makes the building or restaurant or school desirable. … Employers … cannot buy the effort put in by unskilled, manual labourers. They can only buy their time, during which to pressurize them … to work hard … This is, indeed, the secret power of employers: to extract any surplus, either from highly skilled or from uninspired, repetitive, robotic work, they must pay for their workers’ time (commodity labour) but cannot actually buy their sweat or flair (experiential labour).
But this, Varoufakis thinks, is no disadvantage:
You might think it extremely frustrating to employers that they cannot buy the architect’s eureka moment, the waiter’s spontaneous smile, the teacher’s tear[s] directly … On the contrary … it is ultimately they who pocket the difference between the … wages and the exchange value of the commodities created thanks to their experiential labour. In other words, labour’s dual nature is what gives rise to profit.
Given the author’s rejection of commodity labour, the analogy of labour’s “dual nature” to the two ways of understanding light (wave and particle) bespeaks a problematic dualism: the rejection of particle in favour of wave, of noun in favour of verb, form in favour of flux, focus in favour of fervour, the masculine in favour of the feminine—or, in neo-Platonic terms, the rejection of the Greek peras (πέρας) in favour of apeiron (ἄπειρον), that is, of the divine masculine limit in favour of the divine feminine expanse.
Perhaps it is this tendency in Marxist or post-Marxist thought that sustains the prejudice according to which increased global integration of social and economic processes is considered ‘progress,’ simply the direction in which things ought to move. Even if this occurs in the form of globalisation (that is, as exploitative global capitalist markets), a Marxist scholar will generally accept it as a fait accompli that must later be flipped into its virtuous counter-image. Globalisation, he believes, will alchemically transmute into internationalism.
But in reality, international economic integration depends on, among other factors, political will. It is not only the product of humanity’s cumulative increase in techno-scientific knowledge (which is often assumed to be a neutral basis on which to judge human progress). Ha Joon Chang writes:
The biggest myth about globalization is that it is a process driven by technological progress … However, if technology is what determines the degree of globalization, how can you explain that the world was far more globalized in the late 19th and the early 20th century than in the mid-20th century? … Technology only sets the outer boundary of globalization … It is economic policy (or politics, if you like) that determines exactly how much globalization is achieved in what areas.
As for whether capitalist globalisation (or communist internationalisation) is good or bad, one criterion by which to judge this is whether the overarching unity it generates is hospitable to that which it contains.
Identity and the commons
Does a federation preserve and help its constituent states prosper, or does it dissolve and despoil them? Does it deliver preservation and prosperity, or dissolution and despoilment? Is the family deprived of its natural functions by the state? Is national culture undone in a homogenising monoculture? Or, to the contrary, does the principle of subsidiarity prevail? Do we get hospitality or homogeneity—embrace of communities or their entropy?
Of course, a new unity will always transform its parts, but we must preserve that which we alter. The prejudice that integration within wider circles is always better than the integrity of narrower structures (that the wave, fluid and ample, is better than the particle) goes a long way to explaining why intellectuals on the Left are often so allergic to that discourse, which today is best suited effectively to resist oligarchic exploitation. Their pathologizing of discussion about national preservation, local particularity, and natalism helps oligarchs secure cheap labour.
Today, a political-economic oligarchy has engaged in the world-historic, unprecedented mobilisation of human ‘resources’ from the global economy’s periphery (the Global South) and has promoted the demographic collapse of populations living in the system’s core. Given this, it isn’t serious to pretend that opposition to mass migration is a bigoted ‘false consciousness’ that can be pedagogically and pedantically finger-wagged away.
Consider Varoufakis’ condemnation of the enclosure laws and state abolition of the commons that led to industrial capitalism’s rise a few centuries ago: he compares this to how certain corporations are now enclosing the virtual commons. It is true that some resources were, and are, available to all (protocols like the hypertext transfer protocol (http) are, indeed, effectively collective human property). But what was enclosed in the 1700s was also village-level, community property that did not belong to all, but to some. As Nobel Prize-winning social scientist Elinor Ostrom showed, when the commons are sustainable and succeed in perpetuating themselves throughout generations, it is because certain design principles are observed, among which is a strong in-group/out-group distinction. This means that there is a clear limit on who can use the common resource pool and take part in decision-making concerning its management.
My point is that, when avoiding oligarchic takeover, it is not only on behalf of the total human collective that property should be secured, but also of the particular human community. The commons are the anti-egregore; they follow from neighbourhood and village councils—in which sociability and deliberation are consciously exercised—and not from isolated, individual, half-unconscious click-prompts on the Internet.
The Cloud that beams you up
Today, Varoufakis emphasises, our desires are no longer determined by an ad man working at a marketing firm but by algorithms. These algorithms feed us back to our desires; they recommend products based on what we have previously shown an interest in, and so they tend to lock us into echo chambers of our own design, like a manifestation of our collective egoistic mental compulsions. The egregore of esotericism, a ‘group mind’ or ‘collective consciousness,’ takes on a cybernetic body woven into algorithmic automation.
This can result in political polarisation. Varoufakis is right that Cloudism thrives on animosity, partly because hatred galvanizes people and retains their attention, generating clicks, and partly because online media allow people to indulge in aggression without risking a physical confrontation.
In terms of ‘official’ systemic discourse and the kind of animosity that is promoted, Cloudism has thus far clearly aligned itself with ideological currents seeking to disconnect individuals from inherited identities. This is why Varoufakis calls Techno-feudalism what others have called Woke Capitalism. Varoufakis suggests that wokeism is partly a way to keep the Left embroiled in (non-class-centric) debates while galvanising the Right. Indeed, conservative voters are often offered culture-war symbolic tokens of allegiance by politicians who then fail to follow through and, in any case, don’t represent their voters’ economic interests.
But beyond even the strategic play to distract Left and Right from class and economic issues, Big Tech’s hostility to accounts of reality that might prevent consumers from thinking of identity (even gender identity) as a commodity, as a buyable good, represents the essence of its victory over culture. Woke individualism isn’t just a battlefield strategy; it’s what Cloudist victory looks like; it’s the Soma on which Cloudism’s Brave New World would run.
Its tendency is dual: first, to reduce unities to their parts (e.g., ‘there is no such thing as a nation, only a long line of assorted tribes—nay, individuals—mingling in a given space’); and second, to deny particularity in favour of abstraction (e.g., ‘one can claim no normative status for traditional marriage because love is love and desire is desire’).
It is between the reduction to parts and the abstraction to generality that we find the neglected realm of the particular. This makes sense for a vampiric cloud sucking up all the moisture from the lifeforms beneath. In contrast to both reductionism and abstraction, the definiteness, coherence, and beauty of particular things invite us into aesthetic contemplation.
Of course, if a thing (a person, a family, a community, and so on) has a definite character and is coherent in itself, it becomes difficult to control and so does not serve the interests of Cloudism. Furthermore, the aesthetic contemplation just mentioned elicits a kind of vertigo in people used to compulsively seeking out distraction, novelty, and stimulus—a psychological habit inculcated in us by the constant churning of ‘content’ by platforms that prioritise capturing our attention.
We have before us, therefore, a spiritual and psychological fight against distraction and in favour of the beauty of particular things; an economic fight in favour of personal integrity and purchasing power as well as a renewed commons; and a political fight in favour of nationhood or local rights against the global monoculture.
In all these, we face off against the great woke egregore in the sky—a false god living in his Cloud, his UFO—and against his priesthood, the central bankers who syphon off our purchasing power into ever more printed money, like a sacrificial bonfire’s smoke ascending to feed the beast above, a terrible child sacrifice, since it is future generations they are indebting.
The religion of the algorithm-egregore god, up on his UFO, is a gnostic cult (I mean this in the colloquial sense of gnostic; dualistic). If digital means finger (digit) and manual means hand (Latin manus), and if virtual implies less of the actual, we can understand technology as reducing the degree to which activities require human engagement—reducing us from hand to finger, so to speak—which either means that human beings are freer to do more and engage the rest of themselves (the rest of the hand) differently; or it means their total bandwidth of activity atrophies over time. Digital labour is great, unless you aren’t also lifting weights, hunting, or some other such activity.
Those who resist the algo-egregore cannot themselves be dualists who imagine experiential labour abolishing commodity labour in the Marxist fantasy of an internationalist flux respecting no forms (no borders, etc.); they must rather be defenders of particular identity and local commons, on the basis of which a virtuous version of commodity labour can exist and the duality can be reconciled.
