PLANETARY HEALTH WEEKLY

(from the Planetary Health Weekly, Vol. 9, No. 46, November 16, 2023)

How to understand our world today that appears to be in a genuine mess? The Planetary Health Weekly (PHW) lays out so many issues regarding global warming (or the climate crisis) but let’s consider the context in which they occur.

In my 4th blog in April 2022, I pointed out Rudolf Virchow’s statement of 170 years ago: “Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine at a larger scale.” Medicine means public health as that term came into more common use in the 20th century. Planetary health is public health writ globally including the globe itself.

How can we deconstruct politics? Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist who was the finance minister in the government there briefly in 2015 during their crisis said politics is about who has the right to tell whom what to do. It is about power.

In his new book: Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (due to be released in Canada and the U.S. next year but available from other countries) Varoufakis develops an original concept merging feudalism with a range of modern issues about how capitalism is now housed in the cloud which concentrates authority in specific corporate hands who have the power to tell us what to do.

Properly defining a word helps us grasp some concrete reality or specific objective or method of activity. Technofeudalism refers to something that is replacing capitalism today: a system using elements of feudalism commandeered by today’s technology.

Feudalism was how the world functioned for millennia where a lord commanded land and serfs worked the land giving most of the produce to their feudal lord. A few hundred years ago technology released new forms of mechanical power, beginning with the steam engine, that could be harnessed to productive uses. Capitalism was born. That led to many critiques considering socialism as an optional system. The Soviet Union and then China were examples of socialism, combining it with authoritarian rule becoming communism. With the collapse of the USSR in 1991 there seemed to be no alternative to capitalism, that it had triumphed. But every economic and political system has a beginning and an end. Has it come for capitalism?

Much of our own understanding of the world comes from personal experiences we have observed and shared. In the previous blog I mentioned how I discovered I was a socialist as I did not want someone else to make a smaller wage than me. My experience with feudalism came in Nepal where I spent time in the remote eastern hills over 25 years ago. Some men had enormous plots of land which landless peasants tilled to produce rice for the landowner. I recall watching a serf humbly approach his lord with bags of rice he had harvested and submissively turned them over to his feudal master. This was the land rent he paid. Such rent is unearned income, namely the lord did nothing to gain the produce from his land. It was because he owned the land. Such a system still functions in some parts of the world today and may be the basis for a new transformation of global economy today.

Varoufakis says feudal lords exist in the cloud today. Cloudalists, he calls big tech feudal lords, whose data management power command huge resources that we supply – that is we are the serfs in this new system. Huge profits accrue to those who know too much about us. Examples include Amazon who gets others to sell their products to us and commands a portion of the revenue through no work of its own. Tik Tok, is another successful Chinese cloudalist that sells our paleolithic emotions for profit to advertisers. Others such as Google, Meta (formerly Facebook) and Microsoft are highly successful here. He calls the new system technofeudalism which is replacing capitalism.

Where does technology come in? Recall the internet which began some thirty years ago. It was a capitalism-free-zone lacking a profit-generating market where horizontal communication, a digital commons, took place uncommodified, that is, without advertising. Call it ‘Internet One’. Along came ‘Internet Two’ which created fences, or enclosures, which hale back to the origins of capitalism. The growth of Internet Two was helped by the global banking crisis of 2008. In response central banks began printing money in abandon and giving it to the banksters. These criminals used it mostly to buy back shares of their stock thereby increasing its value and their bonuses. Financialization created the wealth pump.

Internet Two’s boundaries required you to hand over your identity to the lords in the cloud. Algorithms monitor who and where you are, what are your likes, and plays upon your emotions. The technology becomes the source of cloud capital. Cloudalists are the feudal-like lords such as Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Bill Gates playing the technofeudalism game. The algorithms reprogram themselves to follow your whims. The iPhone gives you more computing power in your palm than took us to the moon. Using smart phones, you surrendered yourself to the iCloud where you inadvertently toiled for no wages.

Companies that produced stuff in the capitalist system, such as cars, clothes and candies could not keep up with the profits generated in the cloud. Private equity funds began raiding such companies, re-packaging them and selling them to the cloudalist investors.

What is the relevance for greening the planet? Yanis Varoufakis suggests technofeudalism will make human survival more difficult. He cites two political obstacles. One is the New Cold War (between U.S. and China). He believes we can only hope for two separate green transitions, one in each super-cloud fiefdom. He fears this will play into the hands of fossil fuel conglomerates which will play one off against the other allowing them to keep drilling.

The less obvious obstacle relates to electricity ‘markets.’ There can never be actual markets here as only one electricity cable enters your home or business. This is the definition of a natural monopoly. If the government has the power to control this monopoly it could work. However, governments these days are bent on privatization to create competitive electricity markets to provide you with the cheapest possible electricity. But this becomes a rentier capitalist’s dream. There are no government-owned power companies in the United States (except the Tennessee Valley Authority set up as part of FDR’s New Deal 90 years ago). The rest of the world is similar as so-called public-private partnerships dominate. Our energy systems have been surrendered to oligarchs who have a vested interest to entangle energy in the web of financialization which adds to cloud finance capture. This makes it almost impossible for us to choose energy practices that might avert climate disaster.

Varoufakis is trying to convey to the young that the greater the power of the cloudalist class and the faster the march of technofeudalism, the less we the people can do to avert climate catastrophe. The critical issue is can the young resist technofeudalism and how? The ultimate question. Efforts such as the Extinction Rebellion offer hope.

The solution is people-power. To begin we should democratize the workplace. Have Democracy at Work as Richard Wolff puts it. Varoufakis believes having a cloud currency controlled by us allowing digital payments for products we purchase could end the surveillance system that has befallen us. More on this to come.

Stephen Bezruchka, Seattle, Washington