Technofeudalism PDF Download

Author: Yanis Varoufakis
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1685891233
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
In a revelatory and pathbreaking work, the #1 international bestselling economist opens our eyes to the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world . . . “The Thucydides of our time.” —Jeffrey Sachs Big tech has replaced capitalism's twin pillars—markets and profit—with its platforms and rents. With every click and scroll, we labor like serfs to increase its power. Welcome to technofeudalism . . . Perhaps we were too distracted by the pandemic, or the endless financial crises, or the rise of TikTok. But under cover of them all, a new and more exploitative system has been taking hold. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies after the crash of 2008 went to big tech instead. With it they funded the construction of their private cloud fiefdoms and privatized the internet. Technofeudalism says Yanis Varoufakis, is the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world, and is the greatest current threat to the liberal individual, to our efforts to avert climate catastrophe—and to democracy itself. It also lies behind the new geopolitical tensions, especially the New Cold War between the United States and China. Drawing on stories from Greek myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men, Varoufakis explains this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power, and, ultimately, what it will take overthrow it.

Author: Yanis Varoufakis
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612199569
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
What would a fair and equal society actually look like? The world-renowned economist and bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis presents his radical and subversive answer in a work of speculative fiction that recalls William Morris and William Gibson The year: 2035. At a funeral for Iris, a revolutionary leftist feminist, Yango is approached by Costa, Iris’s closest comrade, who urges him to carry out Iris’s last wish: plough into her secret diaries to tell their story. “But”, Costa insists “leave out anything that might help Big Tech replicate my technologies!” That night Yango delves into Iris’s diaries. In them he discovers a chronicle of how Costa’s revolutionary technologies had unveiled an actually existing, fully democratized, postcapitalist society. Suddenly he understands Costa’s obsession with the hackers trying to steal his secrets. So begins Yanis Varoufakis’s extraordinary novelistic thought-experiment, where the world-famous economist offers an invigorating and deeply moving vision of an alternative reality. Another Now tells the story of Costa, a brilliant but deeply disillusioned, computer engineer, who creates a revolutionary technology that will allow the user a “glimpse of a life beyond their dreams” but will not enslave them. But an accident during one of its trial runs unveils a cosmic wormhole where Costa meets his DNA double, who is living in a 2025 very different than the one Costa is living in. In this parallel 2025 a global hi-tech uprising, begun in the wake of the collapse of 2008, has birthed a post-capitalist world in which work, money, land, digital networks and politics have been truly democratized. Banks have been eliminated, as well as predatory, data-mining digital monopolies; the gig economy is no more; and the young are free to experiment with different careers and to study ”non-lucrative topics, from Sumerian pottery to astrophysics.” Intoxicated, Costa travels to England to tell Iris, his old comrade, and her neighbor, Eva, a recovering banker turned neoliberal economics professor, of the parallel universe he has discovered. Costa eventually leads them back to his workshop in America where Iris and Eva meet their own doubles, and confront hard truths about themselves and the daunting political challenge that "the Other Now" presents. But, as their obsession with the Other Now deepens, time begins to run out, as the wormhole begins to deteriorate and hackers begin to unleash new attacks on Costa’s technology. The trio have to make a choice: which 2025 do they want to live in? Varoufakis has been claiming for a while that we already live in postcapitalist times. That, since the 2008 crisis, capitalism has been morphing into technofeudalism. Another Now, a riveting work of speculative fiction, shows that there is a realistic, democratic alternative to the technofeudalpostcapitalist dystopia taking shape all around us. It also confronts us with the greatest question: how far are we willing to go to bring it about?

Author: Milkyway Media
Publisher: Milkyway Media
ISBN:
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 21

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Buy now to get the main key ideas from Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism In Technofeudalism (2024), Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism has been replaced by a new, more exploitative system. In this new era, workers are subject to intense surveillance and control by algorithms. Power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of a few Big Tech giants, leading to a technologically advanced form of feudalism. Varoufakis explains the profound implications of this system for society as a whole and outlines how we can reclaim power from this new ruling class.

Author: Joel Kotkin
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1641772859
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging. The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes—a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates. Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers—a vast, expanding property-less population. The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them—if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them.

Author: Yanis Varoufakis
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1473545684
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
**THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER** The most recognisable economist on the planet, Yanis Varoufakis, puts forth his case to reform an EU that currently fails it weakest citizens. In this startling account of Europe’s economic rise and catastrophic fall, Varoufakis pinpoints the flaws in the European Union’s design – a design thought up after the Second World War, and one responsible for Europe’s fragmentation and resurgence of racist extremism. When the financial crisis struck in 2008, the political elite’s response ensured it would be the weakest citizens of the weakest nations that paid the price for the bankers’ mistakes. Drawing on his personal experience of negotiations with the eurozone’s financiers, and offering concrete policies to reform Europe, the former finance minister of Greece shows how we concocted this mess and points our way out of it. And The Weak Suffer What They Must? highlights our history to tell us what we must do to save European capitalism and democracy from the abyss. With the future of Europe under intense scrutiny after Brexit, this is the must-read book to explain Europe's structural flaws and how to fix them. 'If you ever doubt what is at stake in Europe - read Varoufakis's account' Guardian

Author: Michel Luc Bellemare
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780978115173
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 630

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Book Description
With blunt unvarnished realism, it is high-time anarchist-communism steps out from amongst the shadows and finally asserts itself as the most viable revolutionary option and antithesis to totalitarian-capitalism, that is, techno-capitalist-feudalism. After its 150 year long-march, through dense theoretical jungles, voluminous analyses, and multiple pragmatic interventions, anarchist-communism has reached the point where it is now able to throw-off the theoretical muck and political chains of past eras and assertively establish itself on firm ground. Its own firm revolutionary ground, devoid of any crutch. Despite many historical detours, anarchist-communism can now affirm with confidence its own political economy, possessing its own rules, its own logic, and its own terrain of study and method of attack, separate of Marxism. In short, scientific anarchist-communism is the vanguard of radical political economy. That is, scientific anarchist-communism is the new cudgel and information-bomb of the new post-industrial, post-modern anarcho-proletariat, namely, those post-industrial, post-modern proletarians dying on the front-lines of socio-economic transience, poverty, and unrecognition. No longer beaten-down, scientific anarchist-communism now takes its first steps into the new world, dodging bullets, criticisms, and the old clichés. Knowing it can always bend thought and action from now on, it blasts away any counterpoints on its own terms with rigor and certain iron will, since it is today the real proletarian revolutionary force. It is the anarchist power to be reckoned with, structural-anarchism. Make no mistake, we are inescapably immersed in granular trench-warfare against totalitarian-capitalism in and across a litany of micro-fronts. These granular power-struggles are constant, disorderly, and continuously changing their stripes and/or constructs. Consequently, workers have to adapt and change plans, since totalitarian-capitalism is well-equipped to absorb direct conflict into its logic of operation, which always invariably guarantees the accumulation, extraction, and centralization of profit, power, wealth, and private property in service of a ruling capitalist aristocracy. In consequence, we must fight, fight conceptually and fight materially, fight any way we can, since we are fighting for our lives, regardless of the ballot box. Thus, we attack. We attack from the polarities of theory and praxis forever locked in power-struggles. Now open, now hidden, we are caught in a long drawn-out war of attrition, trench-warfare against the logic of capitalism, ad infinitum. This is our destiny. Power resides on the streets. And there on the streets, power is found, picked up, and dusted-off when the ruling aristocracy drops it in haste when it is inadvertently forced into a calculated retreat by the strategic onslaught of the general strike and rampant demolition. Subsequently, this text is a power-tool able to shred through the complex entanglements of capitalist ideology. The text unburdens the reader of the heavy ideological baggage and workload crushing him or her into a lifetime of subservient obedience and docile compliance. Capitalism is totalitarian. It inundates everyday life like 1930's fascism. Thus, the capitalist aristocracy will not give up its ruling supremacy willy-nilly, without firing a shot. The capitalist aristocracy will have to be dismantled piece by piece, street by street. And only the purifying benediction of anarchist revolution, universal and permanent, can exorcize the demon pestilence called, totalitarian-capitalism. Tearing it out finally from the sickened womb of socio-economic existence, so as to cast it down from where it came, pure nothingness. Capitalism does not need workers. It is its own gravedigger. And already, it digs its own baroque grave, six feet deep. All it requires now is a bullet to the head. And it falls in.

Author: Philip Mirowski
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781683026
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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At the onset of the Great Recession, as house prices sank and joblessness soared, many commentators concluded that the economic convictions behind the disaster would now be consigned to history. Yet in the harsh light of a new day, attacks against government intervention and the global drive for austerity are as strong as ever. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste is the definitive account of the wreckage of what passes for economic thought, and how neoliberal ideas were used to solve the very crisis they had created. Now updated with a new afterword, Philip Mirowski’s sharp and witty work provides a roadmap for those looking to escape today’s misguided economic dogma.

Author: Cédric Durand
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1804294381
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The promise of the New Economy gone, we have regressed into the age of 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.

Author: Yanis Varoufakis
Publisher: Vintage Books
ISBN: 9781784705756
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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'Why is there so much inequality?' Xenia asks her father, the world famous economist Yanis Varoufakis. Drawing on memories of her childhood and a variety of well-known tales - from Oedipus and Faust to Frankenstein and The Matrix - Varoufakis explains everything you need to know in order to understand why economics is the most important drama of our times. In answering his daughter's deceptively simple questions, Varoufakis disentangles our troubling world with remarkable clarity, while inspiring us to make it a better one.

Author: Yanis Varoufakis
Publisher: Zed Books
ISBN: 9781780320144
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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In this remarkable and provocative book, Yanis Varoufakis explodes the myth that financialisation, ineffectual regulation of banks, greed and globalisation were the root causes of the global economic crisis. Rather, they are symptoms of a much deeper malaise which can be traced all the way back to the Great Crash of 1929, then on through to the 1970s: the time when a 'Global Minotaur' was born. Just as the Athenians maintained a steady flow of tributes to the Cretan beast, so the 'rest of the world' began sending incredible amounts of capital to America and Wall Street. Thus, the Global Minotaur became the 'engine' that pulled the world economy from the early 1980s to 2008. Today's crisis in Europe, the heated debates about austerity versus further fiscal stimuli in the US, the clash between China's authorities and the Obama administration on exchange rates are the inevitable symptoms of the weakening Minotaur; of a global 'system' which is now as unsustainable as it is imbalanced. Going beyond this, Varoufakis lays out the options available to us for reintroducing a modicum of reason into a highly irrational global economic order. An essential account of the socio-economic events and hidden histories that have shaped the world as we now know it.