HOW SILICON VALLEY UNLEASHED TECHNO-FEUDALISM

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