How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism
Cedric Durand, Verso, £18.99

THE term Techno-feudalism that appears in the title of Durands’ book is a new kid on the block in left-wing economic analysis. It represents the idea that capitalism “has been replaced by something worse,” to quote its best-known populariser, Yanis Varoufakis. 

The New Left Review ran a debate on this in 2022, and critics such as Evgeny Morozov pointed out (see a recent piece in The Jacobin) that overestimating the radical nature of the current digital upheavals cited risks disarming long-standing critiques of capitalism. As earlier works like Lenin’s Imperialism show, capitalism has changed from its early small-factory basis into a tightly integrated and highly monopolised global economy, but this does not mean it is no longer capitalism.

However, while the last of the four sections in this book gives a neutral overview of that discussion, the book title is misleading in that it is not primarily concerned with what techno-feudalism may or may not be, but with analysing the last 50 years or so of the world economy and the role being played by digital technology. Here it is less speculative and more interesting.

The first section takes on the Silicon Valley ideology of start-ups and creative entrepreneurs and points out that this only relates to a short period in the 1990s. If we see digital technologies as information automation, paralleling the material goods automation of the 18th century and onwards, then monopolisation has been very much more rapid. 

Neither has the initial US ownership of these technologies done much to halt its continuing decline: in 1980 the US global GDP share was 21.32 per cent, while by 2023 it had dropped to 15.4 per cent. While US digital technology does still dominate much of the word, China, in particular, has created its own digital technologies, hence the moves against it.

Durand points out that the idea that individuals will be empowered and supported, and that digital technologies extend democracy, is another myth. From the resurgence of casual labour of the 19th century through platforms like Uber to the tyrannical monitoring of Amazon warehouse or call-centre workers, the opposite is true. Increasing use of algorithmic management removes human managers and any possibility of human flexibility from workplaces just as the machine dictated work in factories.

The second section of the book addresses digital domination and extends this critique with some interesting and worrying examples. 

Most of us know that a low financial credit rating, generated by data from our purchases and repayments and maintained by information monopolies like Experian, can impact our ability to take out loans, from buying a car to a phone contract. This concept has been extended in many parts of China to a social credit rating, reflecting “how good” a citizen you are. Durand points out that in 2018, 17.46 million Chinese were prevented from buying airline tickets and 5.47 million from high-speed train tickets due to their scores. Presumably “good citizens” are not dissenters either.

The last two sections are more theoretical, looking at the owners of big data as the new rentiers, and drawing parallels with aspects of feudal societies. However, the key conclusion is that the technologies that are being used to concentrate wealth in ever-fewer hands and to dominate and subjugate whole populations, could be used differently. 

Where market enthusiasts claimed that only price systems could regulate economic activity in (somewhat!) effective fashion, it is now clear that digital technologies could be used to run societies efficiently for the benefit of the many and not the few. The ability to reconcile local and democratic decision-making with global planning is there for the taking. 

The central question, becoming ever more acute, is who owns and therefore controls digital technologies.