by CAROLE CADWALLADR
In his new book, Technofeudalism, the maverick Greek economist says we are witnessing an epochal shift. At his island home of Aegina, he argues it’s no longer the global finance system that shapes us, but the ‘fiefdoms’ of tech firms
That could be more delightful than a trip to Greece to meet Yanis Varoufakis, the charismatic leftwing firebrand who tried to stick it to the man, AKA the IMF, EU and entire global financial order? The mental imagery I have before the visit is roughly two parts Zorba the Greek to one part an episode of BBC series Holiday from the Jill Dando era: blue skies, blue sea, maybe some plate breaking in a jolly taverna. What I’m not expecting is a wall of flames rippling across a hillside next to the highway from the airport and a plume of black smoke billowing across the carriageway.
Because even a modernist villa on a hillside on the island of Aegina – a fast ferry ride from the port of Piraeus and the summer bolthole of chic Athenians – is not the sanctuary from the modern world that it might once have been. The house is where Varoufakis and his wife, landscape artist Danae Stratou, live, year round since the pandemic, but in August 2023 at the end of a summer of heatwaves and extreme weather conditions across the world, it feels more than a little apocalyptic. The sun is a dim orange orb struggling to shine through a haze of smoke while a shower of fine ash falls invisibly from the sky. A month later, two years’ worth of rain will fall in a single day in northern Greece, causing a biblical deluge and never-before-seen levels of flooding.
That the end of the world feels just a little bit nearer here than it does in some places may not be coincidental to Varoufakis’s having written a new book called Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Nor that the book comes to the conclusion that capitalism has been replaced with something even worse. Not the glorious socialist revolution that his hero Marx foresaw. Nor some new mutation of capitalism such as the one detailed by Shoshana Zuboff in her surprise 2019 bestseller, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. We’re now in servitude, Varoufakis argues, to the fiefdoms of our new global masters, Lord Zuckerberg of Facelandia and Sir Musk of the rotten borough of X.
When I arrive by taxi at the bottom of the dirt track up to his house, Varoufakis is there to meet me, folded inside a zippy red Mini. “I’m usually on my motorbike,” he says, and describes his “pristine commute” at speed via land and sea that gets him to the Greek parliament in just over an hour. It should also be mentioned that the motorbike and leather jacket didn’t hurt his image as a lefty bad boy, taking on the grey men of global capitalism. To put Varoufakis into context, he was the Greek equivalent of John McDonnell (a close friend) if Jeremy Corbyn (another close friend) had actually been voted into power and if John McDonnell had, in this scenario, been played by George Clooney.
Because in 2015, at the height of the Greek debt crisis, Varoufakis was catapulted from academic obscurity to minister of finance. He said – loudly and repeatedly – that the punitive terms the banks wanted to impose on Greece would lead to catastrophic austerity. A majority of Greeks voted to back him, and for a short time his strategy of simply refusing to agree to the IMF and EU’s terms led to a tense standoff. Right until the moment prime minister Aléxis Tsípras, the man who appointed him, accepted them. Either the only possible action to prevent the country going bankrupt, or a treacherous betrayal, depending on who you choose to believe.
The Financial Times labelled Varoufakis “the most irritating man in the room” during the negotiations, so it’s not exactly a surprise to learn that Technofeudalism is a polemic, a controversialist’s take. And although in 2023 there’s nothing particularly novel or special about hating on tech – hating on Elon Musk is the only rational response to the situation in which we’ve found ourselves – nevertheless, Technofeudalism feels like an important new book.
It’s a big-picture hypothesis rooted in a historical account of how capitalism came into being that describes what is happening in terms of an epochal, once-in-a-millennium shift. In some ways, it’s a relief to have a politician – any politician – talking about this stuff. Because in Varoufakis’s telling, this isn’t just new technology. This is the world grappling with an entirely new economic system and therefore political power.
“Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook,” he writes. “You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”
It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism. And us? We’re the serfs. “Cloud serfs”, so lacking in class consciousness that we don’t even realise that the tweeting and posting that we’re doing is actually building value in these companies.
We’re in his airy open-plan living room where his wife intermittently appears offering water, coffee and snacks and shooing away a large, enthusiastically affectionate labrador. “He’s totally in love with Yanis,” she says. Stratou and Varoufakis are a striking couple, as glamorous as their house, a cool, luminous space featuring poured concrete and big glass windows overlooking a perfect rectangle of blue pool.
“I have no issues with luxury,” he says at one point, which is just as well because the entire scene would give the Daily Mail a conniption, especially since Aegina seems to be Greece’s equivalent of Martha’s Vineyard, home to a highly networked artistic and political elite. Tsípras, the former prime minister and Varoufakis’s nemesis, used to live next door. “He was on the next hill. There’s a symbolically important ravine between us,” he says.
The Financial Times labelled Varoufakis “the most irritating man in the room” during the negotiations, so it’s not exactly a surprise to learn that Technofeudalism is a polemic, a controversialist’s take. And although in 2023 there’s nothing particularly novel or special about hating on tech – hating on Elon Musk is the only rational response to the situation in which we’ve found ourselves – nevertheless, Technofeudalism feels like an important new book.
It’s a big-picture hypothesis rooted in a historical account of how capitalism came into being that describes what is happening in terms of an epochal, once-in-a-millennium shift. In some ways, it’s a relief to have a politician – any politician – talking about this stuff. Because in Varoufakis’s telling, this isn’t just new technology. This is the world grappling with an entirely new economic system and therefore political power.
“Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook,” he writes. “You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”
It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism. And us? We’re the serfs. “Cloud serfs”, so lacking in class consciousness that we don’t even realise that the tweeting and posting that we’re doing is actually building value in these companies.
We’re in his airy open-plan living room where his wife intermittently appears offering water, coffee and snacks and shooing away a large, enthusiastically affectionate labrador. “He’s totally in love with Yanis,” she says. Stratou and Varoufakis are a striking couple, as glamorous as their house, a cool, luminous space featuring poured concrete and big glass windows overlooking a perfect rectangle of blue pool.
“I have no issues with luxury,” he says at one point, which is just as well because the entire scene would give the Daily Mail a conniption, especially since Aegina seems to be Greece’s equivalent of Martha’s Vineyard, home to a highly networked artistic and political elite. Tsípras, the former prime minister and Varoufakis’s nemesis, used to live next door. “He was on the next hill. There’s a symbolically important ravine between us,” he says.
And although Stratou is an accomplished artist, she’s also cursed with some niche internet fame. At the height of Varoufakis’s notoriety, a newspaper report claimed that she was the inspiration behind Pulp’s hit song Common People. “She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge,” runs the first line; “She studied sculpture at St Martin’s College,” is the second. As Stratou did, at the same time as Jarvis Cocker was there, though she gives me a “No comment!” when I inevitably bring it up. “It’s the first thing you see when you Google my name,” she says, with irritation, and “who knows where artists find their inspiration?” though Varoufakis seems to be enjoying my line of questioning just a little too much.
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