For the past six years, every Black Friday — that made-up carnival of consumption — Amazon workers and their allies have mobilized across the world in coordinated strikes and protests. At first glance, these disputes look like the standard struggle between a giant capitalist employer and the people who keep it running. However, Amazon is no ordinary corporation. It is the clearest expression of what I call technofeudalism: a new economic order in which platforms behave like lords owning the fiefs that have replaced markets.
To appreciate Amazon’s extraordinary power, we must recall the system it is helping to bury. Capitalism relied on markets and profit. Firms invested in productive capital, hired workers, produced commodities and lived or died by profit and loss. The emerging order is one in which the most powerful capitalist firms have exited that market altogether. They own the digital infrastructure that everyone else must use to trade, work, communicate and live.
Amazon sits at the apex of this new order, because it owns the cloud computing platform — Amazon Web Services (AWS) — upon which other technological firms, such as Uber, rely, but also large parts of banking, healthcare, logistics, public administration, media and education sectors. Once these businesses are embedded in AWS, switching costs become prohibitive. Firms thus become vassals on Amazon’s vast cloud fief and surrender their customers’ data. The European Commission on 2020 charged Amazon with using the sales data of other sellers to illegally gain an advantage in the European marketplace.
Illustration: Yusha
Amazon fuses logistics, cloud infrastructure, data extraction and algorithmic command into one vertically integrated system. Inside Amazon’s warehouses, technofeudal domination takes a more visceral form. Workers are subjected to minute-by-minute surveillance: handheld scanners and other devices track their movements; algorithms measure their pace, track productivity and monitor behavior.
However, Amazon has said that claims of excessive surveillance are “factually incorrect,” and any recording was necessary for ensuring safety and efficiency in its operations.
Consumers, too, are drawn into the system. Each click, scroll, search and purchase on Amazon trains its algorithms to predict our needs and manipulate our desires. We, effectively, labor so that Amazon’s cloud capital accumulates. Each time we buy, Amazon can take as much as 40 percent of the sale price from the sellers in what I call cloud rents.
Governments have a job, ostensibly, to regulate behemoths such as Amazon, but they are also becoming its serfs as public institutions run their data and communications on Amazon servers.
The Guardian said key British ministerial departments that have contracts with AWS include the Home Office, the Department for Work and Pensions, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the Ministry of Justice, the Cabinet Office and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Unsurprisingly, cloud capital has invaded battlefields and the shadowy world of surveillance. Amazon Rekognition, launched in 2016, was aimed at law-enforcement bodies including the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Palantir — the surveillance firm that produces software used in everything from counterterrorism to predictive policing to ICE’s deportation machine — has a partnership with AWS. Amazon is also directly involved in Project Nimbus, the 2021 cloud contract through which Amazon and Google provide the Israeli state with advanced cloud computing, artificial intelligence and secure data storage.
Amazon is a technofeudal rentier owning the digital infrastructure on which privateers, states and societies depend. Thankfully, there are signs of a pushback. The campaign that brings workers and citizens together every Black Friday — Make Amazon Pay — recognizes this transformation. What began as a fight for workers’ rights has grown into a coalition of unions, climate campaigners, tax justice groups, digital rights advocates, and migrant and Palestine solidarity networks. They understand that Amazon’s reach extends across logistics, finance, governance, ecological destruction, surveillance and war.
Its demands — decent wages, safe workplaces, collective bargaining, climate action, tax justice, curbs on Amazon’s vast water consumption, an end to its entanglement with surveillance agencies and military operations — are integrated. Together, they map the much needed unified resistance to technofeudal domination.
In the early decades of industrial capitalism, cross-border worker solidarity was hard. Today, the resistance to cloud capital can use its own tools to coordinate at planetary scale. Campaigns such as Make Amazon Pay offer a glimpse of the alliances required to confront our new cloudalist overlords. It might be only a beginning — but it is a hopeful one.
Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of the European Realistic Disobedience Front and author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.
A gap appears to be emerging between Washington’s foreign policy elites and the broader American public on how the United States should respond to China’s rise. From my vantage working at a think tank in Washington, DC, and through regular travel around the United States, I increasingly experience two distinct discussions. This divergence — between America’s elite hawkishness and public caution — may become one of the least appreciated and most consequential external factors influencing Taiwan’s security environment in the years ahead. Within the American policy community, the dominant view of China has grown unmistakably tough. Many members of Congress, as
The Hong Kong government on Monday gazetted sweeping amendments to the implementation rules of Article 43 of its National Security Law. There was no legislative debate, no public consultation and no transition period. By the time the ink dried on the gazette, the new powers were already in force. This move effectively bypassed Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. The rules were enacted by the Hong Kong chief executive, in conjunction with the Committee for Safeguarding National Security — a body shielded from judicial review and accountable only to Beijing. What is presented as “procedural refinement” is, in substance, a shift away from
After declaring Iran’s military “gone,” US President Donald Trump appealed to the UK, France, Japan and South Korea — as well as China, Iran’s strategic partner — to send minesweepers and naval forces to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. When allies balked, the request turned into a warning: NATO would face “a very bad” future if it refused. The prevailing wisdom is that Trump faces a credibility problem: having spent years insulting allies, he finds they would not rally when he needs them. That is true, but superficial, as though a structural collapse could be caused by wounded feelings. Something
The shifting geopolitical tectonic plates of this year have placed Beijing in a profound strategic dilemma. As Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) prepares for a high-stakes summit with US President Donald Trump, the traditional power dynamics of the China-Japan-US triangle have been destabilized by the diplomatic success of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in Washington. For the Chinese leadership, the anxiety is two-fold: There is a visceral fear of being encircled by a hardened security alliance, and a secondary risk of being left in a vulnerable position by a transactional deal between Washington and Tokyo that might inadvertently empower Japan
RSS