According to Varoufakis, capitalism is dead, and what is coming next is worse. The former Greek Minister of Finance argues in his new essay that technology, dominated by unscrupulous billionaires with excessive political power, is enslaving us.

Yanis Varoufakis’s father was a chemical engineer who worked at a steel plant near Athens. On one occasion, he brought home several pieces of different metals and showed them to young Yanis to share his fascination with them. Those metals and humanity’s ability to transform them into tools and objects, he explained, had allowed humankind to leave prehistory behind and reach modernity. Varoufakis’s father was a communist. Although he was disappointed by the direction taken by the Soviet bloc countries and well aware of the harms industrialization had caused to many exploited workers, he was convinced that if humanity could master technology, it could emancipate itself and live with prosperity, freedom, and equality.

Partly due to his father’s teachings, young Yanis would become a controversial left-wing economist, a leader of a new Marxist school of thought, and the author of bestsellers such as The Global Minotaur (Capitán Swing), in which he developed a complex—and highly debatable—theory about the role of the United States and the dollar in the European financial crisis of the past decade. Later, after being appointed Greece’s Minister of Finance and facing off with the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund, he became a global political celebrity.

However, Varoufakis proved to be a far better intellectual and activist than politician, and after resigning after just six months, he returned full-time to writing and lecturing. He published several irrelevant books on the future of capitalism, such as Economy Without Neckties and And the Weak Suffer What They Must?, as well as brilliant memoirs of the negotiation period with the Troika, Adults in the Room (all published by Deusto). He also created an international progressive network and a political party active in Europe and Greece, neither of which has produced any significant political results. Like many leftists of his generation, his career has been a strange succession of great successes and terrible failures.

Now, Deusto Publishing has released another of his thought-provoking books: Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, written as a long letter to his father, in which he tells him that his emancipatory dream has failed. Humanity has not only failed to master technology but, in recent years—with the rise of the Internet, smartphones, social networks, and large digital corporations—the exact opposite has happened. Technology, dominated by unscrupulous billionaires wielding disproportionate political power, is enslaving us all.

The book clearly showcases the virtues and shortcomings of Varoufakis: he is capable of making debatable yet intelligent and original diagnoses, but his proposed solutions are often unfeasible and potentially catastrophic.

The main thesis of Techno-Feudalism is bold and provocative. According to Varoufakis, capitalism is dead and has been replaced by a new economic system in which we are mere serfs. The economy is no longer governed by markets and competition—the essence of capitalism—but by technological monopolies that prevent us from operating outside their boundaries, capture our income, and make us work for free. “Every time we connect to enjoy the services of these algorithms, we have no choice but to make a Faustian pact with their owners,” Varoufakis says. “To use the personalized services offered by their algorithms, we must submit to a business model based on collecting our data, tracking our activity, and invisibly filtering our content. Once we do that, the algorithm sells us products while selling our attention to third parties.”

Thus, economic activity is no longer free, as it supposedly was under capitalism, and it has also shifted to the cloud, where new rules of production prevail. “Cloud capital,” he writes, “can reproduce itself without wage labor. How? By forcing nearly all of humanity to contribute to its reproduction—for free!” We are all, then, serfs of the cloud, which, Varoufakis explains in some of the most challenging yet intriguing and debatable passages of the book, has benefited from the monetary policies implemented by central banks to pull the United States and Europe out of the financial crisis fifteen years ago.

What solutions does Varoufakis propose? A radical change in the nature of money, businesses, and labor relations, and the transformation of the cloud into a digital equivalent of a public square controlled by citizens. But for this, he says, an unprecedented coalition is needed—one that goes beyond the traditional leftist proletariat (“factory workers, machinists, teachers, and nurses”) and includes the proletarians of the cloud and the serfs of the cloud—that is, all the world’s citizens. “Only a grand coalition that includes them all can weaken techno-feudalism sufficiently,” he declares.

“It may seem like a difficult task—and it is,” he admits. Indeed it is. Because even if Varoufakis were right in his diagnosis—and at times he is quite convincing—imagining a political plan that necessarily involves all the citizens of the world rising up against Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, or Google is not just impossible—it is almost worse than proposing no solution at all.

Ramón González Férriz (Granollers, Barcelona, 1977) is a Spanish journalist, editor, and writer specializing in politics and culture. (Alianza Editorial) He is a regular contributor to El Confidencial (elconfidencial.com) and serves as editorial advisor at the consulting firm LLYC (LLYC). Throughout his career, he has been associate editor of the magazine Política Exterior, director of the weekly Ahora, and head of the Spanish edition of Letras Libres. (Alianza Editorial) As an author, he has published works such as Los años peligrosos. Por qué la política se ha vuelto radical (2024) and La trampa del optimismo. Cómo los años noventa explican el mundo actual (2020). (Alianza Editorial)