Originally published in Media Theory Vol. 8 No. 2 (2024), Korinna Patelis’s essay, “Have I Got News for You: The Road to Neo-feudalism,” offers a highly original critique of contemporary leftist propositions about the death of capitalism and the ushering of what they term ‘”techno-feudalism.” Situating her analysis within Greece’s political landscape and Syriza’s rise, the author highlights significant epistemological gaps in discussions by figures like Varoufakis and Morozov and how romanticized notions of feudalism obscure deeper class and political dynamics. Her approach is historically informed and theoretically rigorous, connecting Hegelian dialectics and Marxist thought to real-world political dynamics and digital policy debates. Patelis’s text effectively challenges orthodox leftist views spreading like wildfire via social media posts amd memes, prompting readers to reconsider assumptions about neoliberalism, technology, and collective political agency.
“The wishes of the romanticists are very good (as are those of the Narodniks). Their recognition of the contradictions of capitalism places them above the blind optimists who deny the existence of these contradictions.” V. Lenin
“It is as if the left’s theoretical framework can no longer make sense of capitalism without mobilizing the moral language of corruption and perversion.” J. Morozof
At times of a major overhaul across disciplines, a novel concept has surfaced to occupy center stage across political theory, media, and sociology, and, due to Varoufakis, in real politics too: Neo-feudalism. Kotkin (2020), Zuboff (2019), Dean (2022), Necke (2019), Kuttner (2020), Morozov (2022), Hedges (2018), Durrant (2022), Milanovi? (2016), Graeber (2011), Streeck (2014), and more all negotiate the end of capitalism and what the future will be, as did, in a less direct way, Žižek (2012), Brown (2005; 2015), and Piketty (2013). In the light of tectonic shifts in technology such as the rise of A.I., good old bureaucratic specialization, as well as major restructuring in academia, gloomy scholarship has already flooded academic publishing with titles mostly claiming we are going back to when Lords ruled. A look at book titles negotiating Neo- feudalism is indicative. Kotkin (2022) uses the expression “warning”, Bridle (2018) “Dark Ages”, Zuboff (2019) “Surveillance”. These approaches were published after pessimistic works on digital capitalism, which coined terms such as “precariat” and “platform capitalism” (Srnicek, 2017), or employed the term “underpaid” (Scholz, 2016), dominated scholarship. By comparison, Neo-feudalism is equally melancholic; it does not however embrace dialectics, all too often employing vocabulary referring to aristocracy1
So first the bad news. The word ‘lord’ — not the Hegelian term2, or any understanding of it in dialectics, Marx or after, but the word, central to the powers and politics of empires, discourses about history, the future and Europe’s demise — doesn’t really translate. The word dominates in territory unfamiliar to left-wing theory: Neo- feudalism; unlike the term always attached to its ‘bondsman’ counterpart, which remains alarmingly absent from the discussion on what the future will be. Unfortunately for authors participating in the debate, the word lord resurrects times of estates, heritage, manor land, houses, plantations and most importantly times of landowners, the privileged, elite, honored, victorious, royal, special, powerful, in the country or in the colonies; it evokes land, heritage, feuds, quarries.
This article critically approaches the discussion on Neo-feudalism, in scholarship and in politics; it questions how it is structured weaving in an interdisciplinary culturalist understanding of digital policy, the politics of Grexit, the rise of nationalism in Europe and epistemology. The discussion between Morozof, Varoufakis, Zubof, Kotkin, and Durrant has matured, yet approaches suffer from very basic issues when it comes to method. This article focuses on how Marxist and Hegelian method and epistemology are hijacked along the way to frame the Neo-feudalism debate, as if we all have a relationship to history by virtue of using terms describing feudalism as an historical era. It argues that the debate on Neo-feudalism doesn’t open the black box of commercially produced epistemologies soaking our everyday lives; 30 years after the Web. It builds its critique from the wealth of theory produced back in the nineties, in which scholars and activists warned that technoliberalism and its naturalisms would frame key concepts in the advent of the digital, forming production and supply.
Authors, referred to in the Neo-feudalism debate as the “90’s crowd”, warned of the consequences that the No.1 U.S. policy export, binarism – the future vs the literally natural – would monopolise screens for ever. Scholars including Terranova (2004), Barbrook and Cameron (1996), Kember (1991), Lovink (2003), Patelis (1999), and many others, whose approaches can be read in Read Me! Read Me! Read Me! (Bosma et al, 1999), produced by Autonomedia, of course, disagreed among each other. They came from very different theoretical traditions already suffering specialisation in the academy, hence the different conceptualisations of neoliberal capitalism and its powers, which cannot possibly be exhausted in this article. Critical attention however, back then, was united in the critique and rejection of the dominant ideologies. The edited volume Future Natural, which includes pieces by Žižek (1996), Hayles (1996), Ross (1996), Terranova (1996) and others, best represents the epistemological critique fueling the arguments on epistemology presented here, as does critical theory and the work of Gillian Rose, particularly Mourning Becomes the Law (Rose, 1996).
The unfamiliar politics of digital policy in the E.U., which essentially began back during anti-globalisation times are also brought in, as scholarship on globalisation and its discontents has formed the politics of European integration. Under Syriza’s governance, in 2015, as many times before, the European Left and GUE/NGL3 members were aware of financial style nationalism threatening European integration and struggled against it in A.I., digital market and blockchain policy politics. Often used by smaller member states, such nationalism, weaponises Keynesianism as the primary foe against deregulation in order to externalise politics; it advances a ceteris paribus in which moralism reigns4.
Syriza
In 2015, the rise of Syriza in Greece marked a significant moment for the left globally; a euro-communist party leveraged global dissent against neo-liberal capitalism and austerity. The word ‘lord’ is first aired internationally by Varoufakis, as soon as he becomes the Minister of Finance. Varoufakis introduces the word as part of a broader discourse which addresses the E.U. as a new kind of aristocracy, way before the publication of his scholarly work on Neo-feudalism. ‘lord’ is central to his Grexit infatuation and is set to speak about bureaucracy and corruption in Brussels. It is promoted by Greek ghost-writers cum social media experts across global media. The word suspiciously debuts, without hyphenating it to the end of capitalism or technology just months after election campaign history is made by the official party campaign whose slogan was Hope Is on the Way Syriza (2015). In late 2014, Syriza’s innovative use of Marxist and Leninist terms as keywords in its digital campaigns set a new precedent in Greek politics as Syriza became the first party in Greece to invest in social media campaigning amidst otherwise very terrestrial politics. By strategically buying cheaper leftist keywords and avoiding overpriced nationalist terms, Syriza effectively communicated its message to a broader audience. Way before Varoufakis assumes office these are auctioned away from overpriced nationalist right-wing terms, across platforms, a unique campaign practice abandoned ever since.
Indeed, the official political communications strategy during and after the victory built on a very different discourse, one that approaches Greece, debt and the struggle of Greek people as being similar to Latin American struggles. The hashtag #thisisacoup rises to the top of Twitter during the negotiations. The painful tension between Tsipras and Varoufakis ever since, is well documented, particularly as Grexit was never on the former’s drawing board5.
This all brings me to the real bad news: in discourses forming the dystopian conversation on Neo-feudalism, the word ‘lord’, dominates; and even when in reference to the end of globalisation, scholars appear oblivious to its alleged universalities, particularly since the focus of analysis is the digital domain and its domination by the Big Tech giants. The piece by Morozov, ‘Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’, published in the New Left Review in 2022, is indicative and important as it sparked a debate amongst theorists approaching the digital, and also constitutes the dominant way within which approaches to capitalism and its future mediations are being framed. In the article, Morozof claims to summarise and critique all that is false in conceptualising Neo-feudalism. Morozof features the term “reason” in the title, on the way to certifying that the digital economy is here to stay. Before we look at arguments presented per se, it is important to highlight the standpoint from which he summarises and addresses the issues at stake. Morozov asserts the epistemological consensus in the conversation, which is that scholarship from around these parts, monopolised by decades-old US-produced research technologies, is “local” and that “Empire” merely constitutes a historical reference to who was conquering whom back in the day, Wallerstein notwithstanding. That “we” are not connoted, let alone conceptualised, even for the purpose of being disfranchised, is not addressed, not through casual references to cold war investment in science and technology, political turbulence, local revolutions, national struggles and/or the Orthodox Church; we are not absent, just not relevant enough to be dismissed.
The epistemologies embedded, discussed in detail here, essentialize deregulation, romanticize the advent of neoliberal capitalism, and discount conflict of any kind: partisan, institutional, name it. The structural part of the contradictory universalities developed is good old Clinton-style digital market determinism, the body of technoliberal dichotomies hardwired just about everywhere since the infamous Telecommunications Act of 1996 (United States Congress, 1996). The Act, heavily criticized by activists and scholars such as Horwitz (1989), Mosco (2002), Schiller (2001), and Herman (1996), was literally the second act in the history of the U.S. about media and telecommunications6.
In the debate on Neofeudalism, just like in the 90’s, technological determinism is back, the dominant discourse echoes binarisms such as digital/physical, unregulated/ regulated, global/local, despite decades of scholarly criticism. In turn, free market messianism, the idea that the market and the web are one, so neatly packed in conceptualising big tech, platformisation and generic dystopia (and not only in Zuboff), is employed to certify that those who were not part of the supply chain for decades, and who didn’t lead platform capitalism, clearly don’t get Uber, let alone how disciplinary inquiry should be structured to theorise powerful capitalist economies and call it a day (or not). The understanding is that a pivotal change is at stake, therefore method ain’t something “we”, being less powerful, do. Moreover, that we should stick to what we have always been good at from culturalism to Arab Springs, obligated to service specializations of Ivory Tower-converted precarious digital humanities; after all, The Wealth of Nations (2012) is an original English creative work, the U.S. invented platforms, and Hayek was all about the L.S.E. (Hayek, 1944).
Before I develop the argument, as well as how it fits into a larger thesis on Neo- romanticism and the politics of comradely defeat which I aim to present here, and at the risk of being too ironic in a scholarly article, I have to spell it out: round these parts, the word ‘lord’ (over/techno/digital/algo/EU/you-name-it), is never accidentally lost in translation; it sharply disciplines those formerly under Ottoman rule, reminding us that it was the Ottoman non-translatable term “Çiflik” that structured life round these parts, and that until Neo-classicism turned its ever-so admiring, ever-so smothering gaze upon us, anything Christian didn’t really rule round these parts. The best representation of this is the plans hatched by King Otto, the first – Bavarian – monarch of modern Greece, to build his palace – currently the country’s parliament building – on the Acropolis rock, just a hundred years before Nelly’s, the Greek Leni Riefenstahl, produced her visuals. Comrades round these parts cringed at the face of Varoufakis posing in his garden overlooking the rock for Paris Match.
Philhellenism was a colonial process: Shelley’s ‘Hellas’, Lord Elgin, Odessa, Sarajevo haunt politics, notwithstanding the septimal edition of Dream Nation. Gourgouris spectacularly argues Greece is part of a paradoxical process when it comes to national identity. It’s the crucible of western civilisation and its weakest member at the same time (Gourgouris, 2021). PhDs on Republican style committees in Mariupol back in the 19th century are produced round these parts, nationalisms lurk around, as does Classicism and its research funding. This is why this article ironically casts the term ‘Lord’, to mock the introduction of terms that are not fit to really conceptualise Neo- feudalism if solely embedded in historical descriptive jargon, lacking method or a critical understanding of the formation of nations states round here.
Good news
Let me then, first splash the good news in radical style: this is an article about how the ‘Lord’ resurfaced in a Neo-romantic mode during Grexit and then Brexit on the way towards dominant approaches to digital/techno/neo/you-name-it feudalism. One might question the choice of the word ‘Lord’ as a central term in this critique. The response to such an objection is twofold: first, the term is deliberately chosen because many authors seem unaware of why it should not be used outside of a dialectical context, which underscores the irony of its adoption. Second, the majority of authors use the term, whether hyphenated or not.
This article is essentially about the cultural and class politics of an imagined place called Neo-feudalism (and its platforms) – a mystical habitat of collective defeat and cherished melancholy. Neo-feudalism is where the desire to imagine a radical future is recast as a lack in a Neo-romantic fashion, a land where, to paraphrase to G. Rose’s 1996 book tittle, Mourning has already become the Law. In Neo-feudalism the desire to command history, to imagine the mode of production, accumulation, extraction and tell the future, advances a nostalgic turn back to times of “local” struggles for a nation state, bank and currency. Times when central bankers didn’t have to contain the elation of trading, parallel currencies were not cryptos, and the banking world was in its inception. Times where economics reigned, wealth was said to be abundant. The future, in Neo-feudalism, is about the loss of collective power; it bewitches and strategically enchants defeat in order to nostalgically command a turn back in time; the objective is to enclose change, command history, create fake temporalities, hence it’s a Neo-romantic project.
The enclosure formed is the core of the argument presented here, particularly as its economic reductionisms and borrowed rationalities urgently require a comradely response precisely because they make it extremely hard to orchestrate a communist one. The left must identify and cast a critical eye on how the desire to go Back to the (dystopic) Future is organised, how defeat and revolution are bewitched in Neo- feudalism; it’s an evident urgency as these facilitate authoritarianism and lead the way to nations breaking bad.
My point, clearly, is not that the personal is political, feudalism ain’t a bad future cause it’s imagined from a tinted (liberal or libertarian perspective), Ottomans extracted value in a different way, or the hegemonic radical understandings needed to overcome technocapitalism today are neo-Luddism like back in the 90s. My point is the exact opposite, that precisely because technoliberalism is employed in reference to the transformations at stake, Neo-feudalism is a Neo-romantic project. By situating discussion in some imaginary urgent need to call it a day, to deal with the future, to deal with the revolution, to deal with unions and Big Tech, or the exact opposite to deal with instability, to assert force, to reassure economy, rationality, science; what is certified is that these are “the times”, that history and us – once again that amorphous universal subject – are having a moment, whether this is relationship / conversation / exchange / invasion / stock market crash / pandemic.
Greece is necessarily involved, as it has been inherently privileged since the late 19th century. The idea and the ideals of the West, its liberties and its prosperity are carved onto the Acropolis rock like Byron’s name on Cape Sounion; that Varoufakis can heroically charm left-wing audiences globally is not accidental. On the contrary his royalist spectacle invested in Neo-romanticism, his Grexit global media addresses alarmed comrades across the nation, with the Palace in the background, Oxbridge accent, Paris Match photo op by the Parthenon, celebrate his access, class and family privilege, animating a non-sovereign past of looting, of whitening of marbles, revolution and other liberal fantasies.
Here comes the essential news
European royalties and their hierarchies created this side of Paradise; Macedonia got its nation state name during Syriza governance in 2018 and yes “Balkanisation” was not coined around these parts; B927 notwithstanding. Round these parts, the West (Wild or not) is all about metaphysics, precisely because decades of nation formation (and their revolutions) can’t and shouldn’t be collapsed into any East/West canon, let alone historical progress.
It is by discounting centuries of scholarship addressing “Westernness” and its romanticisms, whether by totally ignoring it, as in the case of the majority of theorists Morozov addresses, as well as or pigeon-holing such research under postcolonial studies, that the West and its romanticisms reappear centre stage in Neo-feudalist land precisely because liberty, money and science are indispensable parts of the 19th century affair. It’s by questioning the underlying hegemonic epistemological assertion which casts Neo-feudalism as a place where method isn’t something “we”, scholars from the Near East, have ever or could ever master, that the West, Epistemology and its melancholies are triggered, history, its Spirits and futures, are skilfully announced.
The enclosure attempted structures uprisings as “a romantic affair” by virtue of embedding them in some alleged dialectical process; Bolsheviks, the ghosts of change, lurk around, flesh aestheticised. In other words, in Neo-Feudalism, the “event” is constituted through a natural relationship to history, it exists by virtue of necessarily relating to time, even worse to something witnessed, observed or not, deduced or not. An amalgam of century old concepts, references, discourses, styles and most importantly contradictory empirical epistemologies are introduced. The harvesting of familiar constructed rationalities – notably numbers, predictiveness, probability, game theory, engineering and so on – are also employed hand in hand with multiple reductionist reifications of classic economics bundled with derivative scholarly economic theory and maths. They are invested in so that a confusion and false abstraction dominates, financial jargon is name-dropped, whether this is currency, GDP, sec filing or just talking big tech investments. Historical and geographical facts evaporate, sometimes as colourful and specific, sometimes as art, often as regulatory detail, or bureau-technocratic information, technical specification. Dualism and reductions also engulf ideology as the words left/right are used as generics to further strip the discussion from history. Linearity and its temporalities, the elements for imagining a future appear as a way to command changes caused by abundance; performativity scripted vis a vis bankrupt Reaganite acronyms. Varoufakis’s8 ‘Toward a Theory of Solidarity’ (Arnsperger & Varoufakis, 2003) is not very far away from Durant’s response when he writes “… unlike the existence of God, however, the characteristics of a mode of production can be theoretically and empirically investigated by rational means’” (Durrant, 2022). Snobbery becomes axiomatic, conceptual issues and categories are substituted by dot.com era digital revolution messianism, narratives of inevitable change. Epistemologies are cherry picked and introduced for the purpose of casting a mist over the critical realm, whether through omission, contraction or just description. Grexit being cast as an event and not a bureaucratic negotiation is a prime example of this.
The regression demanded explicitly ignores currencies and the making of the Balkan world. In not talking about currencies, central banks and the turbulent romantic years during which European empires fought Ottomans, we are told to approach the future as a hazy past, colonial and/or closer to the Wild West than what historically did happen in the Balkans back then. The connotation is that capitalism, including its neoliberal instance, developed in some cultural and power void. Classics are not seen with a good eye round these parts particularly since they are partial to contemporary Greece in line with antiquity and not Greece, the only Greece, the nation state that exists. Take the example of the drachma: Greece’s first currency was named by the Germans after the ancient currency; the English and French back then had no say in the matter. That is, the drachma was ‘re-introduced’ by the Germans, who named it after the ancient currency. The noun comes from the verb ‘adraxno’, to grasp, referring to an object large enough to fit in a man’s hand whose value was as large as the palm of a man’s hand. Apart from the obvious connotations, the resurfacing of any conversation about the drachma associates Greece with the traumatic years of its early formation as a nation and with its bankruptcies (Bintliff, 2007).
This is where the plot thickens and not only for those formerly under Ottoman rule: it is impossible for one to detach The West, its liberalisms and libertarianisms – or even worse their Californian ideology editions – from metaphysics, let alone introduce them into the way materialism, and even temporalities, are understood and approached. Regulation, a key neoliberal abstraction, and its bureaucracies – deregulation being the most obvious one – are being used to introduce ethics as opposed to, of course, metaphysics. This is familiar territory: it’s literally the way e- commerce, the prime U.S. export, was embedded in the term digital. Put even more simply, the West is attached to messianic anxiety on both sides of the Atlantic, Internet evangelism, the West’s recent ideological journey through capitalism – techno- liberalism and techno-libertarianism – formed around such messianism, resurrected the US economy in the midst of invasions round these parts. We, that 90s crowd of “internet” scholars skilfully sketched in the background, organised Cyber Salons, produced volumes of research to epistemologically deal with and conceptualise virtual/techno/cyber against the U.S. industry-promoted “digital”, to struggle against such advances. We also are all too familiar with techno-politics extracted when method goes down the drain for technophilia to veil neoliberalism. This is not only because we got PhDs after Iraq and before Bologna, nor because we remember Sarajevo, went to Seattle or are more radical.
It’s mostly because the alleged technological paradigm shift established the double naturalisms constituting the hegemonic idea of “digital”, demanded that the internet literally be the free market. Manufacturing temporalities around such naturalisms has been core business for digital capitalism, for example, the auctioning and triggers built in Big Tech algorithms, as with of course the commercial A.I. currently dumped. They always did time because they didn’t have space. The request to quantify, commodify, automate and base production of anything digital on redundant neuroscience epistemologies essentially unleashed neoliberal capital and its accelerations on to anything orthodoxy kept away from them.
In other words, every single market determinist, messianic discourse and its naturalistic positivism, obsession with the extraction of value and accumulation which was in place during the deregulation of the industry frame discussions of Neo-feudalism. The same applies to the creation of the high-tech capitalism whose foundations remain unquestioned in Neo-feudalist discourse. Which brings me back to the real bad news: the epistemologies embedded in Neo-feudalism, discussed in detail here, don’t just accidentally ignore the state as noted by Morozov’s summary. They gain from rogue states, are meant to discount invasions and wars. They invest and instrumentalise to further detach history from political theory, opening the way to magically transform concepts into categories, for example “surveillance”.
For Neo-feudalism, the feud – virtual and non – actually exists and is one. It is perceived through the orthodox double naturalism in the U.S.-led dominant perception of the Internet, therefore what is owned/exploited by the lord is “land” as opposed to country. Nature and the internet are understood as one, romanticised as a future to be concurred; empiricism is employed to ascribe all sorts of attributes to this newly discovered object, including of course life, selfishness, movement, freedom (the Lockean individual). The original metaphors and epistemological dichotomies through which these intertwine reappear in the Neo-feudal imaginary vis a vis anchoring the project to one of these, hence the term digital economy surfaced. In Neo-feudalism such naturalism is strengthened, embroidered with good old money trees. The desire to turn back to when colonies were bounties, wealth was to be harvested, jungles to be researched, natives awaited equilibriums, abundance was to be ruled is constantly sketched through reference to banks printing money, cryptos. Furthermore, in techno-liberal and techno-libertarian approaches, naturalism, when it comes to economics, feeds the empiricism in dramatically different ways because these are dramatically different political theories used in very different ways in the last 30 years. Neo- feudalism transforms the business of engineering the future through crypto or parallel currencies and discussing D.A.O.s 99 into understanding politics and commanding history as included in the East/West discursive canon, unless trading just about everything became universal at some point. Which is why left/right dominates, leading to further reductionisms.
The core news
The other side of this, is a naturalism which forgets about military technology and represents uprisings as a matter of body-to-body heroic revolution, animating real violence, strife, crusades. The ceteris paribus, produced through sketching the native indigenous heroic noble upriser, totally ignores the collective subject. Consider Morozov on Varoufakis:
“Rare is the person who could expertly comment – in a single interview! – on the rise of NFTs and their origins in the virtual worlds of gaming, the logic of the emerging regime of techno-feudalism, and the folly of El Salvador’s Bitcoin-heavy negotiating tactics with the IMF. Luckily, we have found this person in Yannis Varoufakis, the prominent economist, politician, and public intellectual, who is also former Greek finance minister…” (Varoufakis, 2022).
So core to all above is the way the collective subject is bewitched so as to not even be designated, which also renders analysis impossible. How could we critically discuss method and epistemology as separate, and even worse: how can we do that if “we” are the most discursive and bewitched part? We are bewitched to animate fake temporalities, forming the idea that time is commendable, and that history is observable, behaving like nature, and most importantly change is never the revolution. Neo-feudalism is the land where history has ended, because the collective subject should not be imagined10, not even connoted as “we”, it’s the place where dialectics and historical materialism are coined as heritage to be displayed and romanticised. The automatic reaction to attempting a radical criticism is to question the use of “we” and substitute it with “who is we?”, going into a discussion on method. Precisely this is the point. Syntax throughout the texts automatically discounts method, hence the use of the term “desire”, and not ideology / discourse / name-it in the criticism offered here. And by syntax, before we even discuss epistemology any further, I am also being literal: “the subject”, subjective pronouns, if it is and how it is declined, the nouns used, its attributes, as well as the metaphors about its habitat, its composition or where it might appear to have no analytical clarity exactly because they are meant to kill method. All this makes it hard to read the argument when you are from these parts – subjectivity notwithstanding. The issues involved unfortunately include the impossibility of geographically or otherwise defining if, where and when all this is happening, or has happened outside “Empire”, courtesy also of the repetition of the term “platform”, and the constant association of most things digital to feuds. Enquiry appears confused, presented emotionally so that it’s detached from metaphysics to re- introduce antinomies.
Expressing a classic Christian Democrat style parliamentary anxiety dominating E.U. technology debates, Neo-feudalism, instead of running the mile between metaphysics and techno-liberalism, gives licence to authors to discount method. The left 11 throughout Neo-feudalism related theory doesn’t really connote a collective subject; the collective subject, if mentioned, whether party, union, activist organisation, government, is abstracted and observed, imagined through the antinomies of some desired faux blend of Habermasian technopia and Neuromancer dystopia, courtesy of radical media scholars investing in datafication as a lucrative research field – Adorno notwithstanding. It is thus not surprising that the equilibrium asserted, left and right, bundles just about every foe of neoliberal capitalism into this “left” as a category – policy makers, intellectuals, lawyers, governments, constitutional writers, judges, activists, Syriza, cyberpunk writers, Podemos, Seattle. Understood as one, they are stripped of any collective power, mainly because they are seen as detached from collective decision-making structures and organisation. Such paralysing conceptualisation asserts that technoliberalism and technolibertarianism can, should, and will produce the same dystopias.
Snobbery becomes axiomatic, which is why Morozov’s critique axiomatically adopts the desire, reverses it and recasts it as lack. The spirits of change, history’s real aristocracy of uprising, those people that did revolution, the Bolsheviks, are firmly introduced to establish just about everything imagined as radical here. Concepts such as ‘exoticism’, used to curate in Documenta Athens for example, are promoted so as to discount our orthodox critical tools, and underline that we need other ways to comprehend what is happening. Another example would be that Rosa Luxembourg’s speech was performed in Greek 500 metres away from Syriza Headquarters. From Tirana to Marioupol, nation state creation is romanticised as is violent recent Balkan political history romanticised, no tech around, even when addressing Tito. What emerges, inscribed in the structure, which of course has processed legitimation as redundant on the way, is defeat; the urgency to acknowledge Neo-feudalism as a place is all about basically saying that the proletariat is necessarily contingently already replaced by the Serf. The hyphens are kept for the lord, Neo-luddism notwithstanding.
Epilogue
The bureaucratic negotiation for Grexit articulates the left’s melancholy112 to become part of the Neo-romantic feudal imaginary in which technology is the foe of a radical future and defeat is a given; the “this is a coup” hashtag rising to #1 of Twitter on the 19th of July notwithstanding. Politicising the future in and for itself needs to be called out exactly because Syriza was privileged as a desired collective subject in Europe; hence the call for commanding the future in a better way. However, and although it’s no news that economists, in the most classic sense of the term, are privileged in Neo- feudalism, this does not automatically place them in a conversation with Marxism, even if they have read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Dick, 1968), hence the problem with the periphery/centre discursive canon; it universalises something it can’t, but should desire to: method. In other words, joined by ex-bankers, high on monetarism, fleeing Wall Street, it seems that economists have literally universalised and fixed the collective subject, scorned Das Kapital Volume 2, and introduced currency decolonisation and 19th century related fixations, in the name of engineering the future in a post-state, cyberpunk fashion. Apparently, we, comrades, in parties, universities, streets and governments, academics, globalisation movements, even the 90s critique, name it, belong to a THX 1138 (1971) dystopia.
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