The Great Subduction

How the Internet Devours the Past, and Imperils the Future

1. Technofeudalism, or posthuman capitalism?

One among us, as regular readers willl know, published a book in 2022 entitled The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. In it you may find, at least in passing, an argument against excessive interference by governments in the way the tech companies manage their user interfaces, their algorithms, their metrics and engagement parameters, and so on. It was argued that while the tech giants are indeed exploitative, rapacious, attention-fracking pirates, the one thing that is worse than that is state control of the internet. The book’s author was writing from a broadly left-libertarian soft-anarchist perspective, with no small admixture of communitarian sympathy, and with a particular animosity to bloated state bureaucracies, which he has been heard to describe, in person if not in print, as “the heart of darkness”, and as “inimical to the survival of the human spirit”.

We were reminded of his arguments in that book when we read, more recently, Yanis Varoufakis’s noteworthy new intervention in the same debate, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023). We have long been intrigued by Varoufakis, who, among other things, impresses us as the first prominent Marxist intellectual in an awfully long time who looks like he could easily beat your ass in a street brawl — nay more than that, he looks as if his origin story must involve some sort of lab leak of ultraconcentrated testosterone. This book in particular, however, also impresses us in how vividly it lays bare the essential points of difference between the left-libertarian and the Marxist, and reminds us once again that “What could go wrong?” is just not a question that comes quickly to the mind of the latter sort of thinker when reflecting on the possible benefits of nationalization.

Varoufakis would love to see the social-media companies seized, and then run, by the state. This would, sure enough, likely be the occasion of some desperately needed reforms: demanding algorithmic transparency, for one thing. Varoufakis also thinks it would represent an opportunity to push towards interoperability: if you have a million followers on X, but you determine that you don’t like that platform anymore, then you could in principle take them over to another platform that serves your needs better. You could go where you wish to go, without losing your audience or, with increasing likelihood, the source of at least some portion of your cobbled-together revenues. This would work, he proposes, because each of us would have a single, government-issued, cradle-to-grave online ID, much like the social security numbers and their equivalents that states imposed on their citizens in the previous century, and which now are used not just to help issue us our retirement pittances, but also to track us from moment to moment, and generally to function for us something like the old “internal passports” of the Soviet Union.

Varoufakis seems in certain respects uncertain of his central claim. He wants the economic transformations wrought by our most recent tech revolution both to be an unanticipated new twist in the history of capitalism’s mutations, a form of hypercapitalism that once again proves this economic order’s power to adapt and survive; and he wants it, at least in some respects, to be not a Great Leap Forward for capitalism, but a reversion back to a pre-capitalist order we had previously imagined to be long behind us. What Varoufakis calls “cloud capitalism” amounts to a variety of rent extraction reminiscent of the manorial system of land tenure that “permitted” serfs to live off of the fruits of a feudal lord’s estate, on the condition that they provide to him a share of these fruits. The systems are similar in that (i) de facto and often de jure, the serfs back then, just like us serfs today, really had nowhere else to go; and (ii) the lords themselves are enriched not by owning the means of production, but by owning the “land”, as soil or as cloud, that the rest of us are constrained to work.

So what is it then, supercharged capitalism or atavistic feudalism? (Some further questions might be: When exactly is the revised ETA for true communism now? And why is it that today the Marxists are the best at explaining why, far from capitalism collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, it is now proving so robust and durable that surely defenders of other systems must by now be thinking: how can we get some more of those sweet contradictions for our side?!¹ But we’ll leave these matters for another occasion.) By his own lights, there is no contradiction in saying that our new economic regime is two things at once, while the new prefix on the older of the economic systems is meant to convey this both-at-once status. As Varoufakis explained in a recent interview with WIRED Magazine: “My argument is that we have progressed forward to a new system, which has many of the characteristics of feudalism, but it is one step ahead of capitalism. To signal that, I added the word techno.”

The idea of such a partial reversion is not new of course. Some readers might recall Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel Microserfs, which itself first appeared as a short-story in WIRED, and which, though superficially different, combines two morphemes that occupy the same general semantic space as those in Varoufakis’s title. In an era when Microsoft still dominated the tech world, Micro- could function as a synecdoche for the whole; and what is a serf but the most familiar player in the economic regime whose partial return Varoufakis wishes to signal? But obviously very little of the current economic order had yet fallen into place when Coupland was writing: his microserfs were just cubicle workers with Word files open on their desktops, of the sort whose plight has more familiarly been both mocked and bemoaned in, say, Office Space (1999). But that is mostly an extinct species by now — though something like it does still thrive for the moment under the protection of the state, for example in the administrative make-work sinecures of the university systems of Western Europe, where you can still find cute desk plaques and break-room fridge magnets and ubiquitous sticky yellow-pad notes and so on, and where dozens of hours are spent fussing over Excel files for every hour spent in the classroom. Otherwise, unlike our prehistoric cubicle-dwelling ancestors, the overwhelming concern today is no longer merely with the dreariness of “the daily grind”. The stakes are much, much higher. We are no longer concerned with grinding, so much as with being ground right out of existence.

Here at The Hinternet we have come to believe that no matter how eager many are today to acknowledge that the transformations currently underway are “a big deal”, just how big a deal they are is almost always understated. It seems to us, in fact, that not only is capitalism likely to survive the present changes, but that it is the only thing that will. It will survive mostly by cutting human beings out of the picture altogether as economic agents, transforming them instead into something much more like a natural resource. In this respect, pace Varoufakis, if in certain respects cloud capitalism reintroduces certain features of feudalism, we would do best to understand the great majority of human beings living today not as analogous to feudalism’s serfs, but to feudalism’s cabbage, turnips, and beets.

The problem is not that we are forced to farm the land —i.e., fill the cloud with our data as an activity akin to labor—, but that we are ourselves being farmed. In this respect, while we always hate to take recourse to trendy academic terminology, we cannot help but suspect that technofeudalism is in fact better described as posthuman capitalism. In industrial capitalism human beings created profit by working the machines. In posthuman capitalism the machines create profit by farming the human beings. We realize this sounds a bit too pithy —like one of those switch-a-roos Chairman Mao used to love to perform to get the peasants hooked on his wit and wisdom—, but we believe we can flesh it out in language that will make our contention broadly plausible.

2. Another Copernican turn? Seriously?

Are things really so dire? One way of taking the measure of our era’s transformations is, perhaps, to consider just how differently our new tech-mediated reality has us thinking today — just how much it has reshaped nearly all of our habits of mind, whether we are aware of this or not (for we generally are not), and in so doing has brought us to the brink of what we here at The Hinternet have taken to calling “epistemic collapse”. Let us consider these transformations under three broad headings: first, the memetic life of “disinformation” over the past decade or so; second, the rise of simulationism as a popular theory of the nature of external reality; third and finally, the changes wrought, by the data-storage revolution, in the way we seek out, through the mediation of screens, stimulating sights and sounds.

These three together might be said to constitute the “epistemology”, “ontology”, and “aesthetics” of the present moment.

Epistemology

Of course, as we write, the antidisinformation industry is shrinking as fast as DEI initiatives. It has come, since November 5, to seem a particularly impotent gesture to continue offering up that reflexive Well actually… whenever we hear someone railing against seed oils or questioning the efficacy of handwashing or whatever. Obviously, well before Trump’s newest victory it was perfectly clear that such maneuvers as these were not at all invitations to Well actually… responses, but rather signalings of social identity, akin to your likely habit —ô esteemed elite demographic, ô valued micromécène— of calling your spouse your “partner”. Are seed oils “bad” for you, or are they “good” for you? Is your spouse your “partner”, or rather your “soulmate” or perhaps, for the “trads” out there, your “helpmeet”? We are sufficiently Sellarsian to understand that the truths to which we commit ourselves derive mostly not from evidence, but from the “space of reasons”, an ultimately normative territory, so that, as a corollary, we should simply take it for granted that any major shift in the prevailing political culture is going, necessarily, to be accompanied by a corresponding shift in the range of things you will find being affirmed as true. A radical shift in the political culture is bound to be accompanied by an exactly commensurately radical shift in truth-affirmations, or, to use our preferred language, derived not from Wilfrid Sellars but from Bruno Latour — in matters of concern.

What few have understood —neither among the crackpots nor in the ranks of the “Trust the Science” brigades— is that human culture has always been remarkably adaptable. That’s why we, unlike chimpanzees, have managed to make virtually every terrestrial niche our home. What “should” we be putting in our bodies? Well, seal blubber, if you’re an Inuit, but yams if you’re an Igbo.² Both sides of our political divide have utterly failed to understand that there are infinite ways to build up social reality by sequences of opposed pairs —seed oils “good”, seed oils “bad”; polyamory “good”, polyamory “bad”; etc.—, and we are never going to arrive at the definitive combination of valences for the members of these pairs. It is intrinsic to our nature to delight in rearranging them, and this constant rearrangement is nothing less than the engine of cultural diversity — and indeed, within any single culture, of political conflict. All of this should be simply obvious — we could recommend books, e.g., by thinkers as different between them as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins, or Clifford Geertz, should you still want persuasion.

Yet for now both sides continue to struggle to get by with what is at least presented on the surface as a variety of straightforward realism, untempered by any consideration as high-level or abstruse as what a dose of dialectics or structuralism would demand of us — “We believe this because it is true. End of story. Full stop.” The epistemic crisis that currently has so many millions of anti-MAGA Americans in such a deep funk is really entirely their fault: they just can’t make any sense of why a different group of people has taken to mongering a different set of apparent facts, when the truth of their own preferred set seems to them to be as plain as day. But if it’s really as plain as day, then why can’t we all just get along?

Ontology

Yes, what a moment! The progressive left continues its impotent appeals to “the world itself”, while at least a certain faction of their would-be usurpers is busily denying that that world is there at all, let alone that it might serve as the neutral arbiter of our truth claims.

Simulationism, to anyone who has studied the interwoven histories of media and of science, is in fact a fairly predictable consequence of our recent technological revolution, and one that is anticipated by previous revolutions. We do not expect to generate much controversy in affirming, with what we take to be the broad historiographical consensus, that there is an important causal link between the print revolution and the rise of secular modernity. The new circulation of books and pamphlets lay at the beginning of a long process that would eventually and inexorably lead to the death of God. And if we had to determine with any precision the moment of death, notwithstanding the lucid prophecies of some philosophers already in the late 19th century, we would ourselves be inclined to place it at the moment of the rise of the moving image.

It was the movies that killed God, even if the likes of Nietzsche were already able to see this coming in the rise of such prerequisite technologies as photography and the realist novel. Now, with the Lumière Brothers —nomen est omen indeed!— and their descendants, we finally had “proof of concept” of humanity’s demiurgic power to “spin out worlds”, even if these were consciously understood as “dreamworlds”, and thus as simply supplementary to the “real” one. New divinities were born, at the top of a new Mt. Olympus called “Hollywood”. When our Founding Editor was a child, one of his classmates was the neighbor of a man who owned a waterbed business, who, late at night, would himself appear on television commercials for his store on the local UHF station, touting the several benefits of sleeping on a bed of water, and the low low prices he had set in order to make this possible for you. That kid, the neighbor of the man from the local TV commercials, was, simply by virtue of this proximity, himself a quasi-divinity. Think about that. Think about how many further rungs in the cosmic hierarchy you would have had to ascend to get, say, to Rudolf Valentino or James Dean, who for their part may in some sense have had ordinary internal organs like the rest of us, a need of daily bowel movements, and so on, but only, it seemed, in one of the manifestations of their being — the one that mattered least to us ordinary mortals. For what the technology of the Lumière Brothers engendered in the century or so after the advent of the moving image was a new race of beings of light, with whom our old loving God of “the Book” simply could not compete.

For a good century or so, cinema entirely shaped the transcendental imagination, created true new divinities, and new demiurges who spun out mundi in mundis. And this remained the true structure of our cosmos until gaming and other still more immersive digital experiences killed cinema as an art form some time around the turn of the millennium — with a few straggling phantoms left behind here and there on the “indie” circuit, and of course a great stupid horde of Titans and Transformers and so on still stomping around Hollywood, gradually turning it to rubble.

It was the motion pictures that killed God, we feel like saying, but it was the internet and virtual reality that killed the external world. (If we think of modernity as the slow killing-off of one transcendental idea after another, then we should also save some space for the demise of the soul, the self, or however you prefer to describe it; but that will have to wait for another occasion.) In the century or so of the supremacy of the Hollywood Empire, there remained a stark division between “above” and “below”. The waterbed guy was above us, and James Dean far above him, simply in virtue of their power, which we wholly lacked, to manifest themselves as beings of light.

In the present era, by contrast, we are all “in it” in the same way, and none of us seems particularly luminous any longer, even if some have a mass great enough to attract sundry smaller bodies into our orbit. This is the dehierarchicalized, and if you like the “rhizomoidal” rearrangement of our social reality that digital technologies have wrought. There is no more above and below, but only greater and smaller clusters of “influence” spread throughout an infinite space — it is hard indeed not to notice here a social echo of the cosmological transformations heralded by Copernicus et al. at the beginning of the modern period. And the way you gain influence, by seeking “engagement” through your various digital interventions, is fundamentally a matter of accruing “points” or other measurables, through a system that was first introduced to us in the form of the arcade consoles on which Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, and Dave Chalmers no doubt spent some portion of their childhoods playing Space Invaders.

So indeed, if we do think like video games today, that shouldn’t be at all surprising, since we thought up video games in the first place. More than that, having thought them up, we permitted them subsequently to structure the entirety of our social reality. And then we find that the theory according to which reality is more “bit-like” than “it-like” is compelling? No shit! Of course we do! Reality has been many things — some cultures, whose primary activity was not playing video games, but tending to domestic livestock, have been more inclined to see it as having rather the structure of a bull. That’s just how our minds work: we take the thing we value most, and we model reality itself after it. But in our present moment this ancient habit comes with a new twist: the thing we value most is modeling, in the most capacious sense of that term, which leaves us in the peculiar situation where our model of reality is not of a bull, or a chariot, or a clockwork or tjurunga, but of another model.

We at The Hinternet find that there are at least some salutary aspects of this shift. For one thing, it is starting to free us from the past four hundred years of “physics envy”: a perverted fetish if there ever was one. But still, we remain perpetually surprised, as in our consideration above of the current moment’s epistemology, by the astoundingly childish realism with which even well-credentialed and well-respected men (it’s almost always men) become fixed in their positions.

Aesthetics

Hollywood still pretends to make movies; the Cahiers du Cinéma still pretend it is a meaningful thing to do to appraise, as the work of an auteur and thus as a driving force of culture, Clint Eastwood’s latest. (In Europe it is mostly state subsidies for culture that explain this cringeworthy lag — there will be “cinema studies” for just as long as there is a portion of the state education budget maintaining them.) The publishing industry still pretends to publish books, even if at this point it should really be obvious to everyone that the “book” is not so much a physical object as a multimedia and mulitsite “event”, most of the instances of which occur in digital spaces. What, we mean, is a book that does not turn up in a Google search? What is an author who is not perpetually beseeching her online “followers” to “go over to Goodreads” and “say some kind words about my book if you have any”? Is it not just obvious that a Yelpified intelligentsia is no intelligentsia at all?

These are transitional objects, transitional practices… transitional people. Like a dwindling population of arboreal creatures now inhabiting a suddenly desertified landscape, we may be sure they won’t be around for long. In the meantime, it would sure be nice if what passes for our intellectual class, instead of themselves hustling up their followers for Goodreads reviews and so on, would begin seriously to consider what new practices, and what new kinds of people (for there will be no new objects, strictly speaking) will emerge from the certain demise of these desert-stranded brachiators.

If we were to pay attention not to the varieties of artistic expression that are yet able to garner the awards and appreciation of the establishment, what we would see is that actual creators have by now mostly reshaped themselves to fit the whole range of possibilities opened up by our data-storage revolution of the past twenty years or so, with profound implications for the future of aesthetics.

The Democrats recently burned through obscene amounts of money paying off sundry “A-list” celebrities to “say some kind words about them”, failing to understand that at this point even the very highest names on that antiquated register are basically non-entities from the point of view of the generation currently set to inherit the world — or at least, if they happen to know who George Clooney is, they are still unlikely to perceive him as a being of pure light, as one would have done in the era of Hollywood’s supremacy. The entire roster of celebrities Kamala managed to bring together was not worth a single appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. For a good long time we ourselves disdained even to acknowledge Rogan’s existence. We were intellectuals, and he rabble. Even now not one of us has ever heard a single minute of his podcast, but we understand enough by now about his chosen medium to dare to venture a few words about the significance of his rise to the role of at least a partial kingmaker.

Podcasting, like YouTube “reaction” videos, or long-form roleplay ASMR, or any number of other new genres, is born directly out of the data-storage revolution, that is, out of the sudden astronomical increase in the practically free availability of practically unlimited online space for anyone who wants it. You can now go online and find two-hour videos of people making linguopalatal click sounds with their mouths. There is a whole genre of videos of people who will help you go to sleep by narrating only the most soporific information they can find. We at The Hinternet are fairly astute media archeologists (i.e., we’ve watched a lot of YouTube lol). We have thoroughly studied recordings of human endeavor from the first century or so following the introduction of the technologies that made this possible. And there is nothing that comes even remotely close to a two-hour video of click sounds until sometime in the middle of the past decade.

Don’t you understand how big that is? There is now, suddenly, a vastly more comprehensive range of representations of human life, in all its variety and monotony, than ever existed before in the history of our species. We are indeed fast approaching another sort of singularity than the one most frequently discussed, where “being” and “being represented” will become coextensive — which is to say it seems inevitable on our current course that in the near future every moment of our individual lives will be recorded as a matter of course. At such a moment, it is nothing short of absurd to keep pretending that books and movies can have any hope of remaining the same thing they once were, of occupying the same place in our culture. The reigning aesthetics of the very near future, whether the funding bodies and the prize-givers and the red-carpet marchers and so on can see it yet or not, is ambient, mundane, sprawling… and open-ended as life itself once was.

Let us, in the next section, begin to imagine what steps might be taken to protect at least some of the structure of the world as it had been known up until the present century, notwithstanding the immensity of the transformations we have already considered.