In Paul’s depiction of the law, we are bound to serve some form of the Law (e.g., the Master, the superego, the conscience, the father) but this authority, even in Paul’s description is amorphous. We mistake the law for God, or we imagine that the symbolic order holds out life, while it offers only death and a futile servitude. The ultimate master, the force behind all fear and striving, is fear of death, but as in the Garden, the symbolic order, the knowledge of good and evil, the manipulation of the law, seems to hold out the possibility of life through the law. We would inscribe ourselves into the law, so as to attain life, but as Paul notes, “the law deceived and killed me” (Rom. 7:8). As Slavoj Žižek describes, “we are condemned to domination—the Master is the constitutive ingredient of the very symbolic order, so the attempts to overcome domination only generate new figures of the Master.”[1] With the internet and information technology dominating the economy, the symbolic order (the desire of the law) threatens to shape desire in a more controlling and explosive manner. The techno-oligarchs presume to have access to the mind and soul of the masses, such that they can manipulate desire through controlling the algorithms of consumption and want. No longer is it a straightforward master/slave sort of exploitation, or exploitation of workers by owners, but the enslavement is more insidious. It is a psychological enslavement and exploitation based on personal choices and production of data. It is no longer the body of the slave as commodity, but the mind and identity of the individual that is exploited.
Among the key theorists who have recognized this process is Yanis Varoufakis, who argues that capitalism is morphing into techno-feudalism.[2] We are toiling away in the fields staked out by Google, Microsoft, Meta or Amazon, but what is ultimately being mined from our toil, along with our identity, is our wants and desires. We are data-producing subjects confined to an infinitely reflexive world of personal choices. Our desire is the commodity that is being mined and shaped. “Not capital as we have known it since the dawn of the industrial era, but a new form of capital, a mutation of it that has arisen in the last two decades, so much more powerful than its predecessor that like a stupid, overzealous virus it has killed off its host.”[3]
Capitalism depended upon profit and markets, which the techno-fiefdoms have replaced with digital platforms; all who enter pay a form of rent, what Varoufakis calls “cloud rent.” The owners in traditional capitalism, owned the land, the machinery, the buildings, and the means of transport, but the owners of cloud capital own and control digital information. Just as modern physics, after Einstein, recognized that the physical universe is mostly a dynamic of information, so too in the modern economy, information is capital. Whoever owns or controls the code is the final arbiter of power.
Capitalism is already a departure from traditional economies tied to materiality, in that capital is not just another commodity, but its exchange value is intrinsic to human desire and activity. Capitalism decoupled power from land or various material goods. As is evident with Bitcoin and its offspring in the digital age, capital “is, above all else, a reflection of our relation to one another and to our technologies; i.e. the means and the ways in which we transform matter.”[4] The step from capitalism to techno-feudalism is that as in the feudal age, the techno-barons own information just as the landed gentry once owned and controlled the land but the difference is that there is no end to the capital to be generated. There is no end to the depth of exploitation and control.
Varoufakis illustrates the difference with the common household tool Alexa:
It means that what begins with us training Alexa to do things on our behalf soon spins out of our control into something that we can neither fathom nor regulate. For once we have trained its algorithm, and fed it data on our habits and desires, Alexa starts training us. How does it do this? It begins with soft nudges to provide it with more information about our whims, which it then tailors into access to videos, texts and music that we appreciate. Once it has won us over in this manner, we become more suggestible to its guidance. In other words, Alexa trains us to train it better. The next step is spookier: having impressed us with its Capacity to appeal to our tastes, it proceeds to curate them. This it does by exposing us to images, texts and video experiences that it selects in order subtly to condition our whims. Before long, it is training us to train it to train us to train it to train us … ad infinitum.[5]
This infinite loop in the algorithmic network, an unseen force in the cloud, guides our behavior and choices, such that owners, manufacturing and curating our desires, directly profit through this manipulation.[6] Our identity is literally relinquished, through ID codes, purchasing records, familiarity (on Facebook and X) with whom and what we like. Every thought, every thing you have paid attention to, every opinion, is tracked, such that Apple, Google, Facebook, and X, know you and remember you better than you do.
The constant surveillance, the presumption of ownership over one’s life, the daily indignity of giving up something of oneself, and ultimately the fact of being rendered servile and brainwashed, describes a form of impoverished enslavement. It is as if the techno-oligarchs have claimed ownership of the law, and benefit according to how many cycle through the sequence of desire, sin, and death, Paul describes in Romans 7. The biblical picture of the loss of identity is not dissimilar though more exhaustive, in that pursuit of life through the law not only renders one a subject of the law but it identifies the deadly emptiness. The more one attempts to gain control the tighter the bind to the symbolic order, which contains only death in spite of or due to the effort expended. This also means that the salvation which Paul describes, perhaps more than at any other time, is a literal suspension of the economy which binds us in this modern age.
(Register now for the course Colossians and Christology which will run from June 3rd to July 29th https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
[1] Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (p. 20). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
[2] Yanis Varoufakis, Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism? (New York: Vintage, 2023). Thanks to Matt Welch for pointing me to Varoufakis.
[3] Varoufakis, x.
[4] Ibid, 17.
[5] Ibid, 54-55.
[6] Ibid, 55.