How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy

(Hardback)

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Inequality, stagnant productivity, endemic instability... The new economy has not arrived. Algorithms are ubiquitous, but this does not mean that capitalism has become civilized. On the contrary. Instead, as a result of the digitalization of the world, a great regression has occurred. The return of monopolies, the dependence of subjects on platforms, the blurring of the distinction between the economic and the political: the mutations at work are transforming the quality of social processes and giving a new relevance to feudalism. Techno-feudalism reconfigures a history if the Silicon Valley consensus and highlights the five paradoxes that undermine it. The central thesis is then unfolded, punctuated by developments on GAFAs, global value chains or the Chinese social credit system. Large firms compete in cyberspace to gain control over data sources. Subjects are attached to the digital glebe. In the emerging economic order, capital is moving away from production to focus on predation.

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The technofeudalist model involves establishing a monopoly position and using sophisticated data extraction to secure it... Durand invokes the world of Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 dystopian sci-fi film Alphaville, in which a dictatorial sentient computer rules society down to the most personal decisions. -- Malcolm Harris * New York Magazine *
Durand has provided a very insightful view of finance-driven capitalism over the last three decades. Why was it able to prosper alongside sagging investment and plummeting productivity gains The answer, argues Durand, lies in the tight connection between the shareholder value principle and the globalization of the real economy. -- Michel Aglietta

Author Bio

Cdric Durand is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Geneva and a member of the Centre d'conomie Paris Nord. He is the author of Fictitious Capital. How Finance Appropriates Our Future. He is a regular contributor to the online journal Contretemps and to Sidecar, the blog of the New Left Review.