‘Cloudalists’ and digital serfs: capitalism’s new disguise?

Capitalism isn’t dead, though many are rushing to write its obituary. It’s alive and kicking, powered by AI, vast data centres – and multi-billion dollar infrastructure investment.

From Paris to Madrid, Rome to Berlin, a medieval spectre haunts the European left, and it’s wearing a Silicon Valley hoodie – ‘techno-feudalism’. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, de facto leader of French leftwing party La France Insoumise, has called for a tax on the profits of what he calls our new ‘digital lords’. Yet the same Mélenchon also tweets that ‘AI is not external to capitalist reality: it inscribes itself in a techno-feudalism where a few actors capture the rent.’

Profits or rent? Capitalism or feudalism? Like some stray Schrödinger’s Cat wandering the streets of Palo Alto, Mélenchon’s economy exists in two states simultaneously – dead and alive, capitalist and feudal, depending on which rhetorical convenience opens the box.

In Spain, deputy prime minister Yolanda Díaz rails against ‘the techno-feudalism of magnate Elon Musk’, warning that tech billionaires want to transform ‘democracies into corporate monarchies’. Italy’s Green leader Angelo Bonelli accuses that same billionaire of erecting ‘an autocratic neo-feudalism’, urging the country to choose ‘Musk or democracy’.

This outbreak of techno-feudal theatrics is hilariously mistimed, arriving in the middle of the most obscene, AI-fuelled capitalist orgy since the Gilded Age. During Trump’s Gulf tour in May 2025, he secured massive US-bound investments – Saudi Arabia committed $600bn, Qatar $1.2tn and the UAE $1.4tn, with much of it (if it ever materialises) earmarked for AI infrastructure. (This is on top of $1tn Japan promised back in February.) When OpenAI’s Sam Altman floated his $7tn fundraising fantasy last year, it felt like performance art. Now it looks more like a distinct lack of ambition.

Capital frenzy reaching its height

This AI spending tsunami has engulfed all of Big Tech: Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon alone are injecting $320bn into AI infrastructure in 2025, up from $246bn last year. Oracle signed $48bn in new contracts in a single quarter. (…)

Full article: 4 413 words.

Evgeny Morozov

Evgeny Morozov is founder and editor of The Syllabus, a nonprofit knowledge curation service. His latest book (published in French) is Les Santiago Boys: Des ingénieurs utopistes face aux Big Tech et aux agences d’espionnage (The Santiago Boys: Utopian engineers versus Big Tech and the spy agencies), Divergences, Quimperlé, 2024, based on the eponymous podcast.

(1) McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, Verso, London, 2019.

(2) Jodi Dean, Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle, Verso, 2025.

(3) Cédric Durand, Techno-féodalisme: Critique de l’économie numérique, La Découverte, Paris, 2020.

(4) Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Bodley Head, London, 2023.

(5) Inconveniently for Varoufakis, Amazon’s big bet on Alexa hardly paid off, with the company announcing hundreds of layoffs in the Alexa division earlier this year.

(6) Even if we left books aside and looked at online data that was fed into LLMs – eg discussions among programmers about how to solve particular problems related to software development – we would discover that most of them wrote those posts while employed by capitalist enterprises.

(7) This belief in the possibility of honest competition makes him sound like the German ordoliberal economists who sabotaged his career as Greece’s minister of finance.

(8) The best account of capitalist competition is to be found in Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises, Oxford University Press, 2016.

(9) In his alternative conception of techno-feudalism, Cédric Durand explicitly recognises this violent side of capitalist competition, even invoking the writings of Thorstein Veblen on sabotage. However, he ends up seeing this as an aberration in capitalist praxis rather than the most essential constitutive part of it.