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How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism

The Making of the Digital Economy

Author Cédric Durand
Translated by David Broder
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Hardcover
$29.95 US
Verso Books | Verso
On sale Sep 03, 2024 | 240 Pages | 9781804294383
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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.
Preface to the English-Language Edition

Introduction

1. The Poverty of the Californian Ideology
2. On Digital Domination
3. The Rentier Class of the Intangible World
4. The ‘Techno-Feudal’ Hypothesis

Conclusion: Fortunes and Misfortunes of Socialisation

Appendix I
Appendix II
Acknowledgements
Index
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.
Cédric Durand View titles by Cédric Durand

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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.

Table of Contents

Preface to the English-Language Edition

Introduction

1. The Poverty of the Californian Ideology
2. On Digital Domination
3. The Rentier Class of the Intangible World
4. The ‘Techno-Feudal’ Hypothesis

Conclusion: Fortunes and Misfortunes of Socialisation

Appendix I
Appendix II
Acknowledgements
Index

Author

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.
Cédric Durand View titles by Cédric Durand

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