“…The thesis is simple. Industrial civilization is running up against its biophysical limits and its own complexity, and the people who benefit most from the current order are not preparing a just transition or a new social contract. They are building cloud‑castles and data‑fiefs on top of a crumbling base, locking in forms of extraction and control that will keep them comfortable for as long as possible while the rest of the structure buckles. Collapse, but with VIP seating.
From Capitalism to Digital Lordship, or a Very Persuasive Cosplay
Yanis Varoufakis gave the current version of this story its most popular label when he argued that capitalism has already died and been replaced by something worse, a system in which “cloudalists” like Amazon, Meta, Apple and Alphabet no longer behave like firms in competitive markets but like lords who own the terrain itself. We are not their customers so much as their tenants and serfs, forever posting, scrolling and buying on platforms whose rules can be changed overnight. The core of the argument is that these firms do not primarily profit from exploiting labor in production, in the classical capitalist sense, but from charging rent on access to digital space. They sit astride the chokepoints through which attention, communication and commerce must flow, and they tax every crossing.
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Meanwhile, collapse research points out that in prior civilizations, elites often responded to emerging stresses by doubling down on extraction and repression rather than sharing power or resources. It worked, for a while. Then it didn’t. Our elites are repeating the pattern, but with better gadgets. Surveillance systems that would have made twentieth century dictators swoon are now quietly integrated into smartphones, city cameras and data brokers’ servers. AI tools can filter, flag and predict dissent. Autonomous systems are being developed for border control and policing. The apparatus of a digital autocracy is being built in peacetime, under the logo of consumer convenience.
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Collapse theory has a dark sense of humor about all this. Its more sardonic voices like to point out that every ruling class in history thought its particular arrangements were the culmination of rational progress, right up until the moment they were not. The Roman aristocracy did not plan for a world in which their villas were ruins picked over by peasants. The coal barons of the nineteenth century did not imagine a world where burning their product would destabilize the jet stream. The technofeudal elite does not plan seriously for a world without high bandwidth, cheap chips, predictable seasons and functioning grids, even though those things rest on ecological and material conditions that are now visibly eroding. They are very good at modeling other people’s risk and very bad at relinquishing the power and wealth that would have to be given up to reduce it. That, more than any abstract limit, is what makes the future feel narrow…”