Description

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The New Economy never arrived, instead we have regressed towards darker times. Have we already entered the age of techno-feudalism?

Inequality, stagnant productivity, endemic instability: The new economy of the nineties promised a new era of freedom and prosperity fuelled by technology and innovation. It didn't deliver. Certainly, algorithms are everywhere, but this does not mean that capitalism has become civilized or provided for the 99%.

In the hands of private corporations, the digitalization of the world drives us toward an even darker future. The return of monopolies, the dependence of subject-citizens on platforms, the blurring of the distinction between the economic and the political all epitomize a systemic mutation. Information and data networks push the economy in the direction of the feudal logic of rent, dispossession, and domination of the many by the few.

Techno-feudalism offers a fresh genealogy of the Silicon Valley consensus and its aporias. It disentangles the principles of an emerging system-wide rationale. Large firms compete in cyberspace to gain control over data sources. In this new economic order, capital is moving away from production to focus on predation. Acclaimed political economist Cédric Durand's devastating critique of our current Silicon Valley dominated economy points the way toward the systemic changes we need to build a more just society.

About the Author

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Cédric Durand is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Geneva and a member of the Centre d'économie Paris Nord. He is the author of Fictitious Capital: How Finance Appropriates Our Future. He is a regular contributor to the online journal Contretemps and to Sidecar, the blog of the New Left Review.