The concept of technofeudalism conjures pre-theoretical images of a Mad Max–type world in which feudal lords control the labor capacities of serfs through a combination of direct coercion and control over some extremely scarce productive asset. Economists Cédric Durand and Yanis Varoufakis broach tamer versions of this idea.

Their story goes something like this. The technofeudalists are data-empowered capitalists like Amazon, Facebook, and Google, which have, through private ownership over the cloud, appropriated the bulk of the digital space required for all of us to work, communicate, commute, and organize. By dint of that control, they can extract massive rents from the users of their platform technologies and from capitalists who make money by writing apps sold in their digital fiefs. To this structure of ownership correspond two classes: cloud proles and cloud serfs. The proles are the propertyless workers who are exploited through the use of algorithms — think Uber, Lyft, and Grubhub. According to Varoufakis, this contrasts with “the conversion of billions of us into willing cloud serfs volunteering to labour for nothing to reproduce cloud capital for the benefit of its owners.” Cloud capital exploits both the cloud prole (its employee or subcontractor) and the cloud serf (the consumer).

This development, we are told, was spearheaded by central bank panic. Following the 2007–8 recession, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank started increasing the money supply and cutting interest rates. This massive capital injection flowed into the hands of the cloud capitalists, inflating their net worth and allowing them to tap into consistent superprofits. By supplanting profit with cloud rent, technofeudalism “killed capitalism” and replaced it with something less productive and more parasitic. Or so the narrative goes.