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The Feudalism of the 21st Century: Cloud Capital and Technological Barbarism

Profits turn into rents, markets fade into platforms, and cloud capital spawns new digital fiefs. The mutation of capital no longer produces renewal but a technologically advanced barbarism: domination without life, simulacra without continuity.

Defining capitalism

It all depends on how capitalism is defined, for different people conceive of it in different ways. The economist holds a Marxist definition of capitalism, although not everyone shares it. Some people think: “Oh, the market, buying and selling. Not having the State tell you what to buy and how much to pay for it. That’s capitalism, isn’t it?” It is not. Capitalism is a system based on the private ownership of the essential means of production, and one that relies on the extraction of profits from surplus value, from the exploitation of wage labour and from markets (Marx, 1867).

From feudalism to capitalism

The central point in the transition from feudalism to capitalism was this: the process of commodifying land as a result of enclosures, expelling peasants, and commodifying labour. During feudalism, land and labour had no markets. Workers worked, but could not resign. They did not receive a wage; rather, the feudal lords sent the bailiff to collect rents.

Optional markets, central rents

Thus markets and profits, the two pillars upon which capitalism rests, are today optional and, in fact, somewhat secondary. In place of profits appears central bank money combined with cloud rents: the 40% of the price paid on Amazon retained by Jeff Bezos; the surpluses gained by private equity firms. Three companies — BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard — hold significant stakes in most S&P 500 firms, giving them systemic influence (Fichtner et al., 2017). Yet they do not own 90% of all companies, as is sometimes claimed.

Digital fiefs

Amazon, Alibaba, Uber are not markets in the classical sense. They are platform-fiefs, places where buying and selling occurs outside of traditional markets. They are digital fiefs owned by a techno-feudal lord who collects rents. Uber owns no cars, just as the feudal landlord did not till the soil: he merely collected. That is what Uber, Airbnb and Amazon do. Other authors prefer to speak of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016) or surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), stressing that this is not an historical rupture but an internal mutation of capitalism.

Mutated or radicalised capitalism?

According to this critical perspective, if capitalism’s two pillars are replaced by rents — principally cloud rents — and digital platforms, all grounded in cloud capital, what emerges no longer resembles capitalism. It could have been called digital capitalism, cloud capitalism, rentier capitalism (Standing, 2016). But according to this view, it is important to stop using the word capitalism. Others, such as David Harvey, argue instead that what we are witnessing is the radicalisation of neoliberalism and financialisation, a new phase of capitalism that preserves its exploitative essence (Harvey, 2014).

Algorithms as the new land

Amazon is a clear example. With Amazon Basics it copies best-selling products and sells them cheaper thanks to privileged information. It holds the keys to the public square and the data of everything that happens within it. Uber accumulates data that no competitor could easily replicate. In both cases, algorithms and information become the new digital land, in which one must dwell to survive, whether as capitalist or as vassal of the cloud. Zuboff (2019) interprets this as the rise of a new regime of power in which personal data becomes raw material for accumulation.

Socialism or technological barbarism

Rosa Luxemburg long ago posed the alternative: socialism or barbarism (Luxemburg, 1916). For this critical current, what we face is a technologically advanced barbarism. Capital has triumphed, not because the left or organised labour defeated it. For a long time it was believed the proletariat would be capitalism’s gravedigger, as Marx and Engels wrote. It was not. Rather, capital itself did the work. Like a lethal virus killing its host, capital mutated into cloud capital and weakened the very capitalism from which it sprang.

The 2008 crisis and new feudal lords

Thatcherism and Reaganism freed bankers from New Deal constraints. Since then, banks have created money from nothing. After the 2008 crisis, 35 trillion dollars were printed in the name of the bankers. That money did not feed productive investment or wages, but asset prices and above all the excessive growth of the tech giants. Krugman (2012) and Stiglitz (2019) have underlined that such interventions strengthened financial and technological capitalists without benefitting the social majority. Cloud capital would have been built anyway, but not at this speed. The financialisation of the world and the post-2008 response accelerated the process. Thus were born the new digital feudal lords.

The United States and global order

The other part of the story is the role of the United States. After the Second World War, it created a centrally planned global capitalist economy, with fixed exchange rates and the dollar at the centre. Over time, its trade deficit became structural, but far from weakening its hegemony, it strengthened it. Brenner (2002) has shown that American globalisation produced a pattern of accumulation that rendered Europe and Asia dependent on the US trade deficit. Others, such as Eichengreen (2011), argue that this dependence also contains vulnerabilities and cannot be considered a deliberate strategy.

Europe in the austerity trap

The eurozone is another example of this trap. The euro was seen by unions and progressives as a shield against national devaluation, but it became a prison of permanent austerity. Greece and Italy have lost 35% of nominal wages since 2007. Millions of young people have emigrated. Traditional left-wing parties have lost political centrality across much of the continent. Some analyses suggest Europe risks becoming irrelevant in the global game, trapped in internal divisions. Piketty (2019) stresses that austerity fractured democratic legitimacy, though he still sees a possible turn through greater fiscal and solidaristic integration.

Conclusions: existential pathology

From my perspective, this phenomenon cannot be understood solely as an economic process. If some economists speak of the mutation of capital, I interpret it as a vital collapse. The key lies in the continuity between intention, existence and consequence, which describes the arc of the living: what is said or projected (intention), what comes into being (existence), and what finally occurs and endures (consequence). Cloud capital severs this sequence; it breaks the natural transition between word and life, between creation and descent. I do not see this as simply the death of capitalism nor as another phase in its evolution. I understand it as an existential pathology: cloud capital not only reconstitutes a digital feudalism, it dismantles the very pulse of life. Every digitalised transaction, every rent extracted without living labour, represents an emptying of the bond between human being, time and community. What arises are simulacra of life. A “like” on social media: a signal that appears as recognition but creates no durable ties. A purchase on Amazon: an immediate transaction, without human encounter or communal bond. The Uber driver: a worker connected to an algorithm without a visible employer. In all these cases there is activity, movement — but no vital continuity. What is generated is appearance of life, not real life. What distinguishes real life from simulacrum is precisely the capacity to generate continuity, reciprocity and community through time. That is why I affirm that technological barbarism is not only a political metaphor: it is a collapse of the continuity between intention, existence and consequence. The current system does not produce life but simulacra of life. It is capital without a soul. Critique cannot be confined to figures or markets; it must recover the pulse of the living as foundation. In this sense, the task is not only political or economic, but existential. Only from here can a true path out of barbarism be conceived.

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