Photo Credit: Melville House Publishing
The digital revolution may be turning waged workers into cloud proles, who live increasingly precarious, stressful lives under the invisible thumb of algorithmic bosses…. But that’s not the most significant fact about cloud capital…. The true revolution cloud capital has inflicted on humanity is 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.
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Technofeudalism made things infinitely worse when it demolished the fence that used to provide the liberal individual with a refuge from the market. Cloud capital has shattered the individual into fragments of data, an identity comprised of choices as expressed by clicks, which its algorithms are able to manipulate. It has produced individuals who are not so much possessive as possessed, or rather persons incapable of being self-possessed.
Excerpts from Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis, published by Melville House Publishing, UK & USA, 2024, pp. 88 & 182.
DEFINITIONS OF TERMS USED IN BOOK
Technofeudalism: Term used by author to describe the economic system we live in today. To call it hyper-capitalism, or platform capitalism, or rentier-capitalism would miss the great transformation of our society currently underway. Capitalism’s profits and markets are being replaced by cloud rent, in which Apple played a leading role.
Cloud Capital: The physical agglomeration of networked machinery, software, AI-driven algorithms, and communications hardware crisscrossing the whole planet and performing a wide variety of tasks.
Cloudalists: The technofeudal ruling class and owners of cloud capital: Steve Jobs (Apple), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Google), and Elon Musk (Tesla).
Cloud Fiefs: Digital trading platforms on which buyers and sellers are matched by the algorithms of cloud capital. The Apple Store was the first cloud fief.
Cloud Proles: Waged workers driven to their physical limits by cloud-based algorithms used in factories, warehouses, and other workplaces. All in the name of efficiency. The Amazon warehouse is a well-known example.
Cloud Serfs: Persons unattached to any corporation (non-workers) who chose to labor long and often hard, for free, to reproduce cloud capital’s stock. Our posts, videos, photos, reviews, and lots of clicking make digital platforms (cloud fiefs) more attractive to other users.
Cloud Rent: Payment cloudalists extract from the vassal capitalists for access to cloud fiefs. Wealth produced by unwaged third-party developers, from whose sales the cloudalists extract a fixed cut, is not profit. It is cloud rent, the digital equivalent of ground rent. For example, Steve Jobs invited “third-party developers” to use free Apple software with which to produce applications (apps) for sale via the Apple Store. This cost a 30 percent ground rent paid to Apple on all their revenues.
Vassal Capitalists: Capitalist producers who, to sell their commodities, must pay cloud rent for access to the cloudalists’ cloud fiefs.
Yaris Varoufakis is an economist, political leader, and a sought-after keynote speaker on global finance and an acute analyst on the changing political landscape and how economics are evolving. Born in Athens in 1961, he served as the Minister of Finance for Greece in 2015. Before entering politics, he worked for many years as a professor of economics in Britain, Australia, and the USA. He is co-founder of the international grassroots movement DiEM25 and an economics professor at the University of Athens.
He is the author of numerous bestselling books: Adults in the Room (2017), a memoir of his time as finance minister, and an economic history of Europe, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? (2017). His latest book Raise Your Soul! (2025) tells the story of the last 100 years through the voices of five remarkable women.
Three Worlds One Vision 
It’s all rather beyond me. I steer clear of most of it
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A chilling and clarifying way of naming what so many of us feel but rarely articulate: we are no longer simply “users” of platforms, but unpaid workers who help reproduce the very systems that enclose us. Varoufakis’s distinction between cloud proles and cloud serfs captures both sides of this new order—those driven to exhaustion by algorithms at work, and those of us who donate our time, attention, and creativity to keep the cloud fiefs thriving.
Thank you for sharing these excerpts and definitions; they make the contours of technofeudalism much easier to see—and harder to ignore. The scariest realization is that it seems we’ve long passed the point of no return.
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Thank you for bringing this work to my attention, Rosaliene. I should read it. Cloud technology is just technology, as is AI, ML, IOT, etc. Very useful at that. But hard to handle for the human race, which is prone to subjecting itself to structures, authority and what they decide are truths. I can recommend a brilliant recent essay for The Guardian by Cory Doctorow, focusing on AI (companies)
I hope this link works: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other. If not, the essay, titled Why AI Companies Will Fail, by Cory Doctorow, was published in The Guardian (online edition) on January 18, last.
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I have taken note of the books you propose by Yanis Varoufakis, this very interesting man! Thank you very much, Rosaliene.
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It’s a whole other language that I am merely an an unpaid worker in a workforce that I don’t understand. The book sounds very eye-opening. Thanks for the introduction to it. Maggie
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