Preface
1. Hesiod’s Lament
Father’s friends
A child’s introduction to historical materialism
From heat to light
A most peculiar introduction to capitalism
An equally odd introduction to money
Free to choose? Or to lose?
Father’s question
2. Capitalism’s Metamorphoses
Retrieving the irretrievable
Technostructure
Attention markets and the Soviets’ revenge
The audacious Global Plan
Mad numbers
The fearless Global Minotaur
From uncontrollable discontent to controlled disintegration
The Minotaur’s favourite handmaidens: neoliberalism and the computer
Back to your question
3. Cloud Capital
Commanding capital
From Don to Alexa
Singularities
The birth of the internet commons
The New Enclosures
Cloud capital: beginnings
Cloud proles
Cloud serfs
Wither markets, hello cloud fiefs
Back to your question
4. The Rise of the Cloudalists and the Demise of Profit
The secret of the new ruling class
2008’s unintended consequences
Poisoned money, gilded stagnation
How profits became optional for the cloudalists
Private inequities
Back to your question
5. What’s in a Word?
Rent’s revenge: how profit succumbed to cloud rent
Capitalism on steroids?
The technofeudal method to Elon Musk’s Twitter madness
The technofeudal underpinnings of the Great Inflation
Back to your question: is capitalism not back on track?
6. Technofeudalism’s Global Impact: the New Cold War
Technofeudalism with Chinese characteristics
Technofeudal geopolitics: The emerging ‘threat’ of China’s cloud finance
Technofeudal geopolitics: How Ukraine helped divide the world into two super cloud fiefs
The spectre of technofeudalism over Europe, the Global South, the planet
Back to your question: who wins and who loses?
7. Escape from Technofeudalism
The death of the liberal individual
The impossibility of social democracy
Crypto’s false promise
Imagining Another Now
Democratised companies
Democratised money
The cloud and the land as a commons
A cloud rebellion to overthrow technofeudalism
Back to your question, one last time
Appendix 1
5. CRISES
Appendix 2
Influences, Readings and Acknowledgements
Notes