How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism
The Making of the Digital Economy
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Average rating4
15
The Making of the Digital Economy
Ratings1
Average rating4
The rise of the IT industry in the nineties promised a new era of freedom and prosperity. It didn't deliver. Certainly, algorithms are everywhere, but capitalism is no more civilised than ever. In fact, in the hands of private corporations, the digitalisation of the world drives us towards a darker future. The return of monopolies, the dominance of a few platforms, the blurred distinction between the economic and the political all epitomise a systemic mutation. Information and data networks push the digital economy in the direction of the feudal logic of rent, dispossession, and personal domination. How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism offers a fresh genealogy of the Silicon Valley consensus and its contradictions. It disentangles the principles of an emerging systemwide rationale. Large firms compete in cyberspace to gain control over data, and ordinary people are increasingly at the mercy of tech giants. In this new economic order, capital is moving away from production to focus on predation.
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This is one of those books that does not miss a beat in its full revealing of history, context and philosophical expertise in analysing the political. Succinctly written, it can be addictive and frustrating to read it as it sinks and sinks into the depths of what we all live yet either not acknowledge or ignore. Whether Technofeudalism really is something new, or a mutation of late stage capitalism due to ICTs is to be seen. But that privacy has a value is daily strongly eroded and replaced with algorithms based on political and social ideologies is the most obvious point of this book. Its tremendous impacts in the industry are visible but I would also like to understand what has been left behind with the introduction of the digital?
