Nowtopian

Recent additions to Democracy Wall on Valencia Street.

I’m immersed in reading all the time, and much of what has attracted my interest in the past year or two are books that try to explain how the structure of capitalism is mutating during this violent, chaotic and barbaric time. No doubt we left Fordism behind decades ago, the system of blue-collar factory work with steady jobs and union contracts, with a growing white-collar administrative sector equally protected by lifetime employment in major corporations. After a half century of neoliberalism (not really a proper category but let’s use it to denote the period since the late 1970s as a place-holder for now) that saw the conclusion of the Soviet-U.S. Cold War, followed by the steady disintegration of the liberal state, we find ourselves between the rock of neo-fascist revanchism and the squishy nothingness of what used to be social democratic liberalism.

Further afield, but closer than we think, is the Chinese model, which from a certain point of view looks like a model that has growing appeal for the authoritarians riding Trumpism. Modern China is a state-organized and managed system that allows private capital to pursue rapid, ecologically devastating industrial modernization without gaining political power, that maintains tight control of politics and suppresses overt dissent, and uses advanced smart-phone technology for panoptic surveillance that analyzes private behaviors and preferences almost in real time. Vast military and security bureaucracies guarantee state power for those who sit at the top of the political system, and no room is made for course correction through democratic contestation or public debate. This is remarkably close to what it seems the people around Trump would like to construct with their Gestapo-like masked ICE thugs randomly sowing terror through abductions and disappearances, and campaigns to silence political opposition from strident student activists to weak-tea opposition politicians to conservative judges who adhere to the rule of law.

Sarah Wynn-Williams is a refugee from years of earnestly believing in and working for Facebook. A New Zealand citizen and former diplomat, she ingratiated herself with the company around 2010 and became one of the inner circle, working hard to get Mark Zuckerberg and other executives into direct negotiations with political leaders around the world. Her book, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (Flatiron Books, NY: 2025), has been published but her ability to promote it was blocked by having signed non-disclosure agreements on her way out of the company when she finally quit a few years ago. It manages to be an interesting read even if her puppy-dog earnestness throughout the first 2/3 of the book is painfully naive and embarrassing. She finally grows disenchanted after the umpteenth time that the executive team (including Zuckerberg himself and the detestable Sheryl Sandberg) does something execrable, and by the last chapters she starts making revelations. Turns out Facebook gave their entire corporate approach to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), perhaps illustrating my contention that there is some kind of convergence happening even if there’s an official belligerence and hostility being stoked by Biden, Trump and other nationalists.

As I read through page after page, I see the sort of briefings that would warm the hearts of every government I work with. We never share this type of information, and believe me they’ve asked. But here are detailed explanations of precisely how the technology functions, of algorithms and photo tagging and facial recognition. All the secrets of the trade that I thought would never be revealed to anyone outside Facebook. Facebook is providing engineers to demonstrate, offering ideas on how to adapt the settings to meet the Chinese government’s needs. It’s white-glove service for the CCP. The ugly fact is that these are many of the things Facebook has said are simply impossible when Congress and its own government have asked—on content, data sharing, privacy, censorship, and encryption—and yet its leadership are handing them all to China on a silver platter. (p. 313)

Can it be said that we are at the end of capitalism itself? I don’t think so. But there are interesting writers who argue that the capitalist system is changing how it reproduces itself in ways that might undercut its survival as a coherent system of political economy. The one-time finance minister of Greece during its left-wing electoral success a decade ago, Yanis Varoufakis, has written an interesting book titled TechnoFeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, Brooklyn, NY: 2024) in which he argues that, using the vast sums printed and distributed by central banks in the wake of the 2008 global collapse, and even more than that during the pandemic, cloud computing companies have grown into behemoths (Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta) by repeating a process that took place centuries ago in England. Back then, the actual land was enclosed and turned into private property by the royal barons of the monarchy. Today, the “cloudalists” as he calls them have enclosed the internet and made what should be owned in common their private property. But unlike previous owners of land and factories and other sources of private profit,

“cloud capital can reproduce itself in ways that involve no waged labor. How? By commanding almost the whole of humanity to chip in to its reproduction—for free!” (p. 82) … This is unparalleled. Workers employed by General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, General Motors or any other major conglomerate collect in salaries and wages approximately 80 percent of the company’s income. This proportion grows larger in smaller firms. Big Tech’s workers, in contrast, collect less than 1 percent of their firms’ revenues. The reason is that paid labor performs only a fraction of the work that Big Tech relies on. Most of the work is performed by billions of people for free. (p. 87)

Continue reading Whither Modern Life?