[Sorry for the delay on this post, friends! Substack had technical difficulties and wouldn’t upload my podcast yesterday, and customer service is just a chatbot these days… next day, works fine! Argh.]
Hello Friends!
Welcome to Bright Green Futures, Episode Twenty: Technofeudalists vs. Solarpunk
I created Bright Green Futures to lift up stories about a more sustainable and just world and talk about the struggle to get there.
This episode, we’re going to talk about the ideological war that’s rising up all around us, pitting the status quo against our collective desire for a better greener world.
Capitalism vs. Solarpunk
Often we call the war capitalism vs. solarpunk. Or we might call the antagonists fascists or Neo Colonialists or TESCREALs. Maybe their ideology is authoritarianism or their economics are Technofeudalism, a form of cloud-based capitalism from Yanis Varoufakis’ provocative book, which we’re going to talk more about. Maybe you think that better world will have anarcho-syndicalism or socialism or simply a restoration of our tattered democracy in nations that purport to have it.
We’re struggling to name the sides of this ideological war, even though we increasingly feel the heat of it as the stakes mount: it’s a polycrisis, and it seems like every aspect of our hyper-connected world is in need of some kind of fix or solution, if not revolution. We struggle for easy-to-name ideologies for either side because the polycrisis is so far-reaching, the world is not reductively simple, the sides are still lining up, and especially in terms of the climate crisis, the ground is constantly shifting (sometimes literally), and the future is brightly and terrifyingly unknown.
But I want to take a stab at it, and especially discuss Varoufakis’ book because some recent events are giving edges and clarity to the fight, and I’m honestly surprised how well solarpunk holds up as a counter narrative, an opposing vision to the capitalist hellscape. And I think that means something, that rigor, despite it still being (possibly) a small-ish movement.
We’ve talked extensively about solarpunk and hopepunk and hopeful climate fiction narratives on the pod, so I’m not going to recap all that here. But I highly recommend you follow Not Yet Weathered on TikTok, or at least watch her pinned video about how solarpunk is inherently political as a refresh.
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(Full Disclosure: I’ve followed her for a while but I was delighted to see my story Seven Sisters and other Imagine 2200 stories pop up in this TikTok. Sometimes I forget what a small world solarpunk really is.)
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
The full title of Varoufakis’s book is Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, and for those not familiar, he’s a Greek economist and politician, previously Greece’s Minister of Finance who negotiated on behalf of the Greek government during their debt crisis. He’s also a bit bombastic, somewhat over-the-top in rhetoric and personality, and there were several times while reading the book that I was scribbling mad disagreement in the margins.
But what I like is that’s he’s not afraid to give a name the rise of Big Tech, and in addition to providing some great historical context to the evolution of money, markets, and economies, he’s genuinely framing a new narrative about rent-seekers (or feudalists) vs. capitalists (ie those with capital). There’s a difference between a billionaire who owns Walmart (a traditional capitalist) and a tech billionaire like Bezos… or even a billionaire hedge fund manager.
Varoufakis posits that what makes them different isn’t the industry they dominate but the rent they can extract. Amazon skims money off every transaction (and extracts pay-to-play advertising as well). Social media billionaires make money exclusively from commanding your attention and get essentially free labor from everyone who posts. They don’t need factories or (much) physical labor. They insert themselves into every tiny corner of our lives and skim off unbelievable amounts of money. And now with AI, the extraction and monetization of not only our labor but our data is ramping up to hyper speed. Varoufakis’ book came out in 2023, and I think he actually underestimates the impact of AI as a rent-extraction technology.
Nevermind that generative AI is over-hyped and may well be on the cusp of an epic bubble, Varoufakis gets credit for naming and illuminating technofeudalism before the AI wrecking ball really got started.
Extracting Rent
The reason why rent-extraction is important and not just another name for status quo “capital making more capital” is this idea of tech companies essentially enclosing, or capturing, the digital commons. The original success of feudal lords relied on enclosing the physical land commons and extracting rent from the serfs for the privilege of working so they could eat. Enclosure of the digital commons by companies like Facebook and Amazon and Google has allowed them to becoming unfathomably rich by rent extraction alone. No factories. No labor—or we freely give our labor every time we post. Capitalism is still here, but now it’s super-powering the technofeudalists, increasing their “cloud capital.” Tech companies extract rent but, beyond being exponentially thirsty for data centers and electricity, they do not use capital to produce goods. Amazon doesn’t care if you, the small business owner, are selling books or birdbaths, they get their cut—because Bezos is a feudal lord, not a businessman, not even a capitalist in the traditional sense.
You’ll have to read the book to get all the details and nuance—and again, there’s much I disagree with, especially when it comes to what to do about these new capitalists who have transcended the need to own things or make any profits at all. It’s not like these people are a surprise, despite the new name—corporate overlords that are more powerful than nation-states have been foretold in endless cyberpunk stories. Yet, in the last twenty years, we’ve slid right into that dystopia, greased by endless cat memes, hot takes, and doomscrolling. I’m as terminally online as anyone else, and I’m posting this as both a podcast and a newsletter, later to be shared on every social media from Mastodon to Tiktok, so don’t think that I’m holding myself out as some kind of paragon of digital virtue. That’s not the point, at all. The point is that the enclosure of the digital commons and employment of us all as digital serfs and digital proles happened without our consent.
And Varoufakis does do a decent job of explaining how we got here.
But how do we get out? And what does an alternative world where the cloud capitalists aren’t extracting all our attention and data and every living thought 24/7 actually look like? How can we keep them from becoming so powerful that they can command loans from banks and nation-states to buy whole social media platforms like Twitter? Or instruct presidential candidates to select one of their chosen venture capitalist politicians for Vice President?
JD Vance is a red flag in almost any capacity, but the unholy alliance of technofeudalist billionaires and America’s fascist wing is a whole dashboard of red flags. As was Trump offering to give oil and gas executives whatever they wanted in exchange for a tidy billion-dollar campaign donation.
On the other side of the US presidential campaign, even more illuminating things were happening. It was as recent as 2016 that America had decided that a woman presidential candidate was too screechy with too many emails to be elected. We had all the standard misogyny playing out as predictably as ever: America still could not grapple with the idea of female leadership in general, much less this woman in particular. Yet in 2024, Harris’s boisterous laugh is an asset. Sexism in America is still strong, but eight years of the grossest misogyny possible endlessly on display on the right, plus the loss of actual rights with overturning of Roe v. Wade, has made JD Vance’s attack on cat ladies unimaginably bad politics. And it has made picking Tim Walz for VP, the model of non-toxic masculinity that instantly makes him Everyone’s Midwestern Dad They Wish They Had, spectacularly good politics.
What is happening here?
Remember the Tiktok about solarpunk being inherently political? Solarpunk values are becoming popular again. Being joyful and warm and wholesome is good politics. Kindness and cooperation are being openly praised. The word hope is suddenly in vogue. The same thing in the zeitgeist that has been bubbling up hopepunk story lines and solarpunk values like radical compassion is now manifesting in the social-political realm. It’s suddenly weird (not cool) to be a horrible alt-right troll who retweets disinformation and hates everyone… even if you’re a billionaire.
The entire tech industry has been taking a black eye for years, with the negative effects of social media becoming more well known, and importantly, felt. And now with AI, the outrage is fresh and personal. The shine is coming off tech billionaires as well, with Elon Musk in particular becoming so unpopular with his public slide into fascism and transphobia, that it’s impacting his companies’ bottom line. A friend of mine texted me his de-branded Tesla, saying it was his “small protest.” When people are looking for a way to say “I’m not that kind of person” because of the car they bought before the CEO became toxic, you know something is happening.
And yet, for all the backlash, the dominance of cloud capital is growing. In many ways, tech holds us hostage, just as the serfs had little choice about working the land for their feudal lords. Today, people are absolutely sucked into making and consuming content, for the likes and subscribes and views and followers, not to mention the sparkly promise of monetization and actual human connection. Indeed, a host of small creators are making a living off their digital labors, and it’s become as common to have a favorite podcaster or youtuber as it is to have a favorite TV show, perhaps even more so. And yet the dark circus is still there and growing—the ever-present algorithm controlling what you see, harvesting your data, feeding you ads, instigating hate shares and profiting from propaganda. Elon Musk has a whole network for that. Facebook openly admits they’ve scraped everything since 2007 to feed into their AI. Everywhere, the tech enthusiasts and tech optimists are shouting in your face “adapt or die!” by which they mean buy their latest version of crapGPT shoved into an app. Or their webinar about how to get rich. The entire edifice is made of scams and crimes alongside real people desperate for authentic connection in an increasingly fragmented world.
As traditional media erodes even more, the rise of the technofeudalists—the rentiers with their claims on your attention and free labor—can seem unstoppable.
And yet.
And yet.
The counter-narrative is rising. It’s endlessly amusing to me how joy as a strategy is utterly baffling to the Republican party. How legions of people who’ve never donated or campaigned before are volunteering and actually engaging in the political process because they sense something has shifted.
Solarpunk as Exotic Mushroom
Solarpunk itself, as a self-identified movement or genre of stories, is very small. And yet it’s just one manifestation of a much larger phenomenon. Mushrooms maybe have fruiting bodies which pop up everywhere after the rain, but the mycelial network has been there all along, tirelessly weaving itself through the soil, connecting the plant roots and doing the endless reproductive labor of providing nutrients and communication. Solarpunk is a single exotic mushroom but the underlying movement is stronger and more widespread than we know.
Millions of people are asking themselves what they can do to fight the climate crisis. Millions more have already stepped up, finding their passion in rewilding their yards or making their own clothes or setting up a Free Store in their neighborhood. My middle kiddo just moved out to California and outfitted their entire apartment from their local bustling Buy Nothing group. My youngest is a fan of thrifting and recently set up a new place in a similar way. At a local craft show, I discovered a young woman who takes donated teapots, jars, and bowls and drills holes in the bottom to make them into upcycled planters. She calls her thriving enterprise “Not a Pot” and she’s diverted hundreds of items from the landfill and given them new homes.
People aren’t waiting for a better world. They’re using the tools they have—even the technofeudalist ones—and their imagination and they’re finding answers to the question: What can I do about this huge problem, this polycrisis, this world with the changing climate that’s getting worse every day?
They find their own solutions, but real recognizes real—when they find solarpunk stories or that Tiktokker who says “solarpunk is political, besties, lean in” or they find Andrewism on Youtube talking about Library Economies, they realize they’re not alone. They understand that joy is infectious and empowering. That they can refuse the options offered and do something completely new, opting out of capitalism by doing something as simple as getting their desk from a reuse shop or taking the branding off their car.
Solarpunk, when people discover it, offers a cohesive vision, bringing together things like community and kindness, reuse and resistance, repair culture and solidarity. What’s more revolutionary than shopping local instead of Amazon? Or using the technofeudal domain of TikTok to talk about radical politics?
I’ve often said on the pod that I’m not the genre police—we’re all co-creating this genre together. We all get to decide what it is and what it isn’t. It’s so perfectly “on brand” (to use capitalist terminology) for solarpunk to be a collective effort. It has the strength of something we’ve built together, proof-tested by many hands and minds. It has resilience because it is positive and life-giving and affirming of all the best things humanity has to offer.
All that other stuff—the capitalists and technofeudalists, the manosphere and wannabe fascists—is super mal-adaptive for living in the 21st Century. It is, in fact, super weird to want to bully everyone around you and bring your AR-15 to the deli and insist that your emotional fragility is somehow “strength.” Especially when we’ve got Tim Walz right there, embodying what it looks like to be a man who exuberantly loves your family and supports a Black woman for president.
It won’t be easy, friends. We’re right at the beginning of a huge pivotal historical shift, and I’m not talking presidential elections. I’m talking about the whole of how we run societies, how we navigate technologies, how to deal with AI and the technofeudalists, how to fight the capitalist overlords and the oil and gas companies, and how to reconnect with and try desperately to save the biosphere before we kill off ourselves and everything else. We have tremendous work to do to get to that greener, healthier, more joyful, more sustainable world.
But we have started.
The more we see one another working toward the same goals, the more we figure out how to work together.
And that, my friends, is all it takes.
Bright Green Futures is a weekly newsletter/podcast. Check out the Featured Stories and Hopeful Climate Fiction lists for further reading. The best way to support the show is to subscribe and share the stories with your friends.
LINKS Ep. 20: Technofeudalists vs. Solarpunk
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis
Ep. 20: Technofeudalists vs. Solarpunk