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.
Most Hong Kongers ignored the elections for its Legislative Council (LegCo) in 2021 and did so once again on Sunday. Unlike in 2021, moderate democrats who pledged their allegiance to Beijing were absent from the ballots this year. The electoral system overhaul is apparent revenge by Beijing for the democracy movement. On Sunday, the Hong Kong “patriots-only” election of the LegCo had a record-low turnout in the five geographical constituencies, with only 1.3 million people casting their ballots on the only seats that most Hong Kongers are eligible to vote for. Blank and invalid votes were up 50 percent from the previous
President William Lai (賴清德) attended a dinner held by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) when representatives from the group visited Taiwan in October. In a speech at the event, Lai highlighted similarities in the geopolitical challenges faced by Israel and Taiwan, saying that the two countries “stand on the front line against authoritarianism.” Lai noted how Taiwan had “immediately condemned” the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas and had provided humanitarian aid. Lai was heavily criticized from some quarters for standing with AIPAC and Israel. On Nov. 4, the Taipei Times published an opinion article (“Speak out on the
More than a week after Hondurans voted, the country still does not know who will be its next president. The Honduran National Electoral Council has not declared a winner, and the transmission of results has experienced repeated malfunctions that interrupted updates for almost 24 hours at times. The delay has become the second-longest post-electoral silence since the election of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez of the National Party in 2017, which was tainted by accusations of fraud. Once again, this has raised concerns among observers, civil society groups and the international community. The preliminary results remain close, but both
Beijing’s diplomatic tightening with Jakarta is not an isolated episode; it is a piece of a long-term strategy that realigns the prices of choices across the Indo-Pacific. The principle is simple. There is no need to impose an alliance if one can make a given trajectory convenient and the alternative costly. By tying Indonesia’s modernization to capital, technology and logistics corridors, and by obtaining in public the reaffirmation of the “one China” principle, Beijing builds a constraint that can be activated tomorrow on sensitive issues. The most sensitive is Taiwan. If we look at systemic constraints, the question is not whether
RSS