Let's Read 'Technofeudalism' Together

We've arrived at our next stop in The Occasional Learner's Book Club and it's a treatise on the end of capitalism leading to our present hell.

As the title of this post indicates, we now have the next book we’ll be reading for the book club: Yanis Varoufakis’s ‘Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism’. Varoufakis is the former Minister of Finance for Greece, now an activist and academic. The book’s central argument is described as such:

Perhaps we were too distracted by the pandemic, or the endless financial crises, or the rise of TikTok. But under cover of them all, a new and more exploitative system has been taking hold. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies after the crash of 2008 went to big tech instead. With it they funded the construction of their private cloud fiefdoms and privatized the internet.

Technofeudalism says Yanis Varoufakis, is the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world, and is the greatest current threat to the liberal individual, to our efforts to avert climate catastrophe—and to democracy itself. It also lies behind the new geopolitical tensions, especially the New Cold War between the United States and China.

Drawing on stories from Greek myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men, Varoufakis explains this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power, and, ultimately, what it will take overthrow it.

We’ll be recapping the book and hopefully interview here live on Substack Varoufakis on August 25th (TBD, but this is the goal). This book has been on my radar for some time and came highly requested. I can think of no better moment to pull the trigger on this than right now.

As soon as interview and discussion times are made official, I’ll update everyone. Until then, happy reading!