“Imagine a board game whose purpose is to make the player question the inequalities created by private property in the means of production and the order established by capitalism. Then, it becomes part of a global capital cycle with over 270 million copies sold. Here it is: the game that, over the years, has transformed into one of the most profitable products of the very system it criticizes The Landlord’s Game! known to us as Monopoly.”

The Landlord’s Game was initially designed to explain to the public the teachings of American economist and philosopher Henry George, who lived in the 19th century, which seemed outdated. The game aimed to reveal how the aristocratic class, that is, landowners, could earn unjust profits without any effort, simply by renting out their land, and how this situation disempowered and impoverished society. At the core of everything was the Industrial Revolution, which opened the doors to a new era in world history. A century before The Landlord’s Game, in the 18th century, the emergence of steam engines increased production capacity and speed. This led to a greater need for human labor on the production line.

The new era raised an additional question mark for factory owners: “Who will work in the factories?” The invention of massive production lines and brand-new machines quickly led to a shortage of the urban workforce. In response, the wealthy began purchasing land in rural areas where peasants lived and started fencing off the properties. Meanwhile, peasants who continued agricultural activities on shared lands lost their land through the enclosure method called “fencing” leaving them with no choice but to work in factories. Due to this situation, in just 20 years, 150,000 villagers migrated to Washington, D.C., doubling the city’s population.

This rapid population growth brought with it outbreaks of infectious diseases, housing problems, and unemployment. During this period, since taxes were levied per person or on consumption, and there was no income tax as we know it today, factory owners earned millions of dollars annually and paid not a single cent in taxes to the government. Because the government did not collect taxes on production, all tax burdens were placed on consumption and customs duties. In this era, when mercantilist trade was dominant focused solely on selling produced goods by restricting foreign trade high customs tariffs protected large companies. These companies were shielded from foreign competition.

Elizabeth Magie (Lizzie Magie)

This tax system further facilitated conditions for big corporations, allowing monopolistic firms to raise prices at will. Landowners who enclosed land and seized it either used it for their own production or sold it to the public at exorbitant prices. Workers with nowhere to live had to accept high rents, spending all their resources just to survive. Perhaps this was because Henry George’s ideas seemed outdated. Witnessing the unchecked growth of corporations and the people’s existence in poverty, economist George began to envision a system where, contrary to popular belief, the people were not victims. According to his philosophical principles, resources bestowed by nature such as water, air, and land could not be owned by any individual or institution. Land was a resource that people had to actively use in order to sustain their lives. Therefore, the use needed to be regulated by a fair system. This way, everyone could benefit from the land, and no one could unjustly fence off the land. George called this approach the “Single Tax” system.

“Maggie thought she was approaching the problem incorrectly and realized that the real question should be, ‘How can I teach without having people read books?’”

1906 yılında yayımlanan The Landlord’s Game oyun tahtası

According to George, the state did not own the land. However, to ensure equality, the revenue generated from the land also needed to be regulated. If only the base value of the land excluding buildings, factories, or shops was taxed, the state could properly fulfill its contract with society. However, George’s ideas were not aligned with the interests of the wealthy and the state of that era, which existed to protect their rights.

In this society, where literacy rates were quite low, the Single Tax System was supported mainly by academics and a limited segment of people who could see the entire economic order. George emphasized in his books and public speeches that a very large portion of the land belongs to the wealthy, and that the state can survive simply by taxing the rich. The excess revenue from these taxes could be equally redistributed to all citizens under the heading of universal basic income. Moreover, this system would prevent anyone from occupying land without a purpose; otherwise, they would incur financial loss, and the land would naturally be transferred to someone who truly uses it.

Henry George’s supporter, American writer and feminist activist Maggie Lizzie, believed that the Single Tax System could transform their world into an egalitarian one. Rejecting the oppressive norms of her time, Lizzie centered her feminist struggle on economic change. She was a highly proactive and significant figure of her era, conveying her ideas to the public through poetry, articles, plays, group discussions, and comedic elements. Through her work, she aimed to show many women that they were not only destined for household chores but also capable of pursuing fields such as politics, science, and economics. Maggie, with an excellent sense of her society’s pulse, built strong bonds with the lower classes, contrary to the prevailing narrative of intellectuals of her time. She believed she played an important role in building a society without poverty, where people wouldn’t have to work their entire lives just to survive.

In this context, she moved to Washington D.C. in 1890 to advance her struggle. She became a founding member of the Washington Women’s Single Tax Association, established under women’s leadership. To draw attention to the issues of the system, she took action by placing a newspaper ad under the name “A Young American Slave,” selling herself as a form of protest.

Maggie realized after a few years of working with the association that she wasn’t reaching enough people. She began to look for different ways to connect with the working class. In a savage capitalist society where literacy rates are so low and the average working day exceeds half a day, she found that people couldn’t read books, or, even if they could, they didn’t have the time or economic means to do so. Soon, Maggie thought she was approaching the problem incorrectly and realized that the real question should be, “How can I teach without having people read books?” Capitalism, which turned the private ownership of the means of production and monopoly into rules, moves, and outcomes, emerged as a result of such a problem. Maggie thus condensed into a board two different versions of the game: one criticizing the contradictions of the system and the other based on Henry George’s Single Tax System and the social distribution of economic gains.

According to this, either one player or all players would win. The version where only one player wins is called The Future I Fear, and the other is called The Future I Dream. In the fi rst version, where only one player wins, players try to monopolize, so the other players become opponents rather than teammates.

One of the The Landlord’s Game variants played among Quakers; an archival photograph from the Harvey family collection.

Each player buys the land they pass through, then builds on these plots, thereby increasing the money they will collect from other players. The game then enters an endless cycle that lasts for hours. For Maggie, even this length is significant in itself. In this version, as the game progresses, inequality deepens, and the gap between the winner and the loser widens progressively.

“This game, which gradually lost its originality over time, was one day noticed by Charles Darrow, an unemployed marketer, while it was being played on the street by Quakers. Darrow’s friend, impressed by the game, excitedly goes home and mentions it to Darrow.”

In the Future I Dream version, there are rules in which everyone wins and a single tax system applies. This time, the bank represents the state. When a player wants to build a structure on a property, they must pay a certain amount to the bank each turn. Other players who land on this building pay rent to the owner. When the bank’s cash box is full, the accumulated money is distributed equally among all players. In this system, where there is continuous money circulation, everyone gains even if progress is slow. To end the game, all players must at least double their initial money.

The game is designed to make people think, but when it is presented to the public, it doesn’t cause the kind of major breakthrough Maggie was expecting. It doesn’t make headlines or become a topic for the general public. People start playing the game at home, among small groups of friends. Over time, the game, especially on college campuses, circulates from hand to hand, sparking discussions among students.

Thus, The Landlord’s Game spreads quietly but relentlessly, reaching as far as the East Coast of America. After a while, the game also gained popularity among Quakers, a religious community dedicated to teaching God’s word. However, since board games had not yet become an industry, the games were not mass-produced; they were copied by hand. They were passed from person to person. This situation led to the emergence of different versions of The Landlord’s Game over time. The game began to be played with different neighborhood names, varying bank rules, and local interpretations. The each reproduction, the rules stretched, diversified, and transformed a little more.

This game, which gradually lost its originality over time, was one day noticed by Charles Darrow, an unemployed marketer, while it was being played on the street by Quakers. Darrow’s friend, impressed by the game, excitedly goes home and mentions it to Darrow. That evening, they try playing the game with the Future I Fear version. Darrow literally falls in love with the game, and afterward, he and his friend create an exact copy of it at home. The copy they prepared is so similar to the original that even the mistake made when writing the name of the neighborhood where they found the game, Marvin Gardens, is preserved exactly.

The next morning, Darrow and his friend go to Parker Brothers, now part of Hasbro Games, one of the world’s largest game companies, to present the game. Parker Brothers likes the game very much, purchases it from Darrow, and begins marketing efforts. However, the founders of Parker Brothers never fully trusted Darrow, and they even believed that Darrow was not the true owner of the game. This suspicion is not limited to the founders; many people around them also find the situation contradictory and repeatedly warn Parker Brothers. Ignoring these warnings, Parker Brothers tries to cover up the evidence. After a while, during their research on The Landlord’s Game, they come across a patent that Maggie obtained 14 years earlier. To avoid future legal issues, they go to Maggie. They promise not to deviate from the original purpose of the game, and, in exchange for paying her $500, they buy the patent from the original owner. In line with their promise to Maggie, they initially released the game in its original form and maintained this original structure for several series.

However, Parker Brothers’ promise to Maggie was limited only to these few series. Since no marketing efforts were made for the games produced, they gathered dust on the shelves. In contrast, the version of Monopoly that depicted capitalism, called The Future I Fear, was released alongside Darrow and received a massive investment and was officially registered. The company erased the game’s true origins and Maggie’s existence. The marketing department promoted the story that the game was invented by a desperate man, Darrow, who lost his job during the Great Depression, in his basement to entertain his wife and children, as an “American Dream”. When Monopoly became the best-selling board game in history, Charles Darrow, known as the “original inventor’ of the game, was introduced to the media as the first person to become a millionaire by designing a game. He spent the rest of his life in luxury.

“Maggie, who sold her patent for only $500 and, under the agreement, did not receive any royalties, could not earn a single penny from the game’s global success. When she passed away in 1948, despite seeing that the game she designed to warn people had become a ‘symbol of greed,’ she died as a strong woman who refused to give up and continued her fight”

Maggie, who sold her patent for only $500 and, under the agreement, did not receive any royalties, could not earn a single penny from the game’s global success. When she passed away in 1948, despite seeing that the game she designed to warn people had become a “symbol of greed,” she died as a strong woman who refused to give up and continued her fight.

Her obituary in the press did not mention that she was the inventor of the game. The purpose of The Landlord’s Game and the set of rules called the Future I Dream, which reflects Henry George’s theoretical work based on common profit and equal sharing, was completely removed from the rulebook by Parker Brothers. All that remained was the Future I Fear, a simulation of savage capitalism where all players try to ruin each other. Today, Monopoly, which millions of people around the world enjoy playing, was actually the economic system Maggie wanted to warn people about.

The game, originally designed to criticize landowners’ unjust profits and the evils of monopolies, had turned into a tool that teaches people “How to become a ruthless real estate millionaire?” This story would probably have been lost in the unknown parts of history forever. However, in the 1970s, an economics professor named Ralph Anspach designed a game called “ Anti- Monopoly” to criticize the capitalist values of Monopoly…

Anspach was surprised when he faced a copyright lawsuit and began a thorough investigation. Through years of legal battles and meticulous detective work, he discovered Maggie’s story. Today, while trying to spread Henry George’s ideas of equal sharing, Maggie’s story -full of strugglescontinues to shed light on society, even decades after her death, as the creator of the most iconic symbol of capitalism.

Heist of Monopoly: A Stolen Story yazısı ilk önce Context Dergi üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

İbrahim Berkan Karataş, Sociologist, explores the evolution of capitalism into cloud capitalism, the workings of algorithmic forgetting, the dynamics of the rentier economy, Byung-Chul Han’s psychopolitics, and how the digital age has reshaped our daily memories. Inspired by the call to overcome left-wing melancholia and to see the cloud as a shared resource, this insightful discussion features İbrahim Berkan Karataş analyzing the systemic changes brought by techno-feudalism to contemporary society.

Sıla Gündüz: Hello, and welcome. Could you introduce yourself?

İbrahim Berkan Karataş: Thank you for the invitation. I am a PhD candidate in sociology at Marmara University and currently finishing an advanced master’s in Digital Humanities at KU Leuven, though the disciplinary labels matter to me less than the seam where they join: the seam between the empirical study of data and digital systems and a critical theory of the present. What brought me here is a kind of stubbornness, a refusal to grant that anything in the social world is ever merely technical. Behind every interface there is a question of property, of who owns the infrastructure through which we now think, remember, labor, numbers, and speak to one another, and who is made to pay rent for the privilege; behind every promise of convenience there is a question of power, of how domination has learned to present itself as a gift one would be foolish to decline. I try to read data and digital systems against the grain, as sedimented social relations and never neutral givens, and I am drawn above all to the points where the conceptual and the material refuse to come apart, where a single design decision turns out to be a tacit argument about how a person ought to live, or where the vocabulary of innovation dresses up a very old story of dispossession and ownership.

Mustafa Burak Avcı: “Techno-Feudalism” is now widely discussed in academia and in everyday conversation, and we chose it for our magazine’s theme. Before we begin, how does Yanis Varoufakis’s idea of techno-feudalism help us understand the world conceptually? What are your views on it?

İ.B.K: Let me begin by granting Varoufakis his due, because the diagnostic achievement of Techno-feudalism is real and should not be dismissed directly. His central claim is that capital has mutated into what he names cloud capital. This mutation has evicted capitalism’s two organizing principles, markets and profits, from the centre of the system and pushed them to its margins; in their place stand digital platforms that look like markets yet operate as fiefdoms, and a return of rent, specifically the cloud rent that must be paid for access to those platforms. The conceptual gift here is that the argument makes visible something the more cautious vocabularies leave implicit: the personal, quasi-extraeconomic character of the dependence we now live inside. When the App Store levies its thirty per cent, Varoufakis is right to hear in it the cadence of ground rent and not the cadence of competitive profit; when he describes us as cloud serfs producing, for free and outside any labor market, the content and data that valorize the platform, he has named a genuine novelty in the circuit of accumulation.

My reservations begin precisely where his periodization begins. To call this the death of capitalism, to posit rent against profit as the sign of a new mode of production, is, by the measure of Marx’s own categories, a category error, and here Evgeny Morozov’s “Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason” lands its strongest blow. For Marx, feudalism names a mode of production defi ned by a specific mechanism of surplus appropriation; rent, in the third volume of Capital, is not the opposite of profit but one of the forms in which surplus value is distributed among the propertied classes, a point Ernest Mandel extended with his analysis of technological rents as surplus profits internal to capitalist competition. If rent has always been a modality of surplus-value capture, then its return to prominence signals capital’s reorganization, and not its supersession. I find Cédric Durand’s account more rigorous on exactly this terrain: in How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism he grounds the phenomenon in the political economy of intangible assets and intellectual monopoly, arguing that capital has tilted from production toward predation, that the digital boom fuels a rentier economy because the control of information has become the most powerful means of capturing value. That formulation keeps us inside a recognizably capitalist logic even as it registers the feudal coloration of dependence and personal domination. so my stance is straightforward: techno-feudalism is indispensable as diagnosis and contestable as periodization; I keep the cloud capital, I keep the cloud rent, and I let go of the funeral for capitalism.

Berra Çalışkan: The techno-feudalism framework is approaced from various angles, often shaped by political agendas. Some see a new structural crisis or a distinct phase of capitalism; others believe it will alter social relations, change capitalism’s stages, and introduce a new mode of production. What is your perspective, and how do these debates, in both realpolitik and academic circles, affect the phenomenon itself?

İ.B.K: The disagreement you describe is, at bottom, an argument about periodization, and I fi nd it clarifying to hear three distinct answers folded inside it. One answer says we have genuinely crossed a threshold into a new mode of production; this is Varoufakis at his boldest in his 2023 book Techno-feudalism: What Killed Capitalism?, and parts of Cédric Durand’s How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism can be read in the same key. A second answer keeps us fi rmly inside capitalism and treats what we are living through as a new phase or regime of accumulation built around platforms and rent; this is the terrain mapped by Nick Srnicek in Platform Capitalism and by Brett Christophers in Rentier Capitalism, and it hardens into an open refusal of the feudal vocabulary in papers like Nick Gane’s “Capitalism Is Capitalism, Not Technofeudalism” and Jeremy Gilbert’s “Techno-Feudalism or Platform Capitalism? Conceptualising the Digital Society” the latter weighing the two labels against each other and settling on platform capitalism.

“If the left declares capitalism dead, it risks abandoning its most original and effective weapon, the anti-capitalist political-theoretical apparatus built around the wage relation and surplus value, and chasing the shadow of a ‘New Middle Ages’ that the right can colonize just as easily.”

The third answer is more cautious than the other two, and it is the one I find most honest: it speaks of homology and not identity, conceding that the present rhymes with feudalism without having become it. Robert Brenner gives this its sharpest expression in his essay “Escalating Plunder” where he reads the post-crisis bailouts as “predation as a precondition for production,” an upward redistribution of wealth carried out by directly political means; the symptoms recall the feudal past, prolonged stagnation, a parasitic elite fattened by the state, the immiseration of the many, and yet, on his account, capitalism still very much rules the day.

Evgeny Morozov

Even Evgeny Morozov, otherwise merciless toward this feudal-speak in his paper “Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason,” registers this Brennerian instinct as the defensible core of the whole quarrel. I situate myself between the second and third positions: what lies before us is a mutation of capitalism around intangible assets, intellectual monopoly, and rent, and not the arrival of a successor system. Now, to your sharper question about the effect of these debates on the phenomenon itself. The label is never innocent, and this is where the realpolitik enters the picture. Morozov’s political worry deserves to be taken seriously: if the left declares capitalism dead, it risks abandoning its most original and effective weapon, the anti-capitalist political-theoretical apparatus built around the wage relation and surplus value, and chasing the shadow of a “New Middle Ages” that the right can colonize just as easily. Against this, Jodi Dean offers the most generous defence of the feudal vocabulary in her essay “Same As It Ever Was?” and in her work on neofeudalism and communicative capitalism; her point is that the non-capitalist dimensions of the relation, expropriation, domination, force, have grown strong enough that the fi ction of free and equal actors meeting in the labor market no longer holds, and the feudal metaphor names that reality of dependence with a clarity the antiseptic term “platform” conceals.

The debate, in other words, is a strategic battlefield: if the diagnosis is feudalism, the political horizon tilts toward a bourgeois-style revolt against rentiers; if the diagnosis is capitalism in a new key, the horizon stays fixed on the socialization of the means of production, which now means the socialization of cloud capital. I prefer to keep that second horizon in sight.

B.Ç: On Varoufakis specifically, techno-feudalism promises a narrative in which class struggle and social relations are reshaped. How should this mechanism be interpreted? When economic actors deploy both political and economic pressure, what is the appropriate way to interpret “digital serfdom,” and how would you approach analyzing this problem?

İ.B.K: The interpretive key is Varoufakis’s own distinction between the cloud prole and the cloud serf, and I would read it alongside Tiziana Terranova’s older but prescient concept of free labor and Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias’s notion of data colonialism. The cloud prole is the waged worker driven to physical limits by cloud-based algorithms, the Amazon picker whose tempo is dictated by a non-corporeal entity incapable of empathy; here, as Varoufakis honestly concedes, almost nothing is new that Marx had not analyzed in his chapter on piece-wages.

“The cloud prole is the waged worker driven to physical limits by cloud-based algorithms, the Amazon picker whose tempo is dictated by a non-corporeal entity incapable of empathy; here, as Varoufakis honestly concedes, almost nothing is new that Marx had not analyzed in his chapter on piece-wages”.

The cloud serf is the rest of us, producing, outside any labor market and without a wage, the behavioral raw material that the platform then valorizes. The mechanism that reshapes class struggle is the fusion you highlight: economic coercion (the rent extracted from vassal capitalists, the thirty per cent) is welded to extra-economic coercion (the capture of attention, the corvée of unpaid content), so that the site of extraction migrates from the wage relation alone to the totality of social life rendered as data.

My analytical approach refuses to let this dissolve the proletariat into a metaphor. The serf and the prole are both inside surplus-value relations, even if at different moments of the circuit; Couldry and Mejias are useful precisely because they insist that data colonialism appropriates life as raw material whether or not it takes the form of labor, which keeps the question of value open without abandoning it. So I would interpret digital serfdom as predation, in Durand’s sense, layered onto exploitation, and not substituted for it.

The error to avoid is the seduction of the feudal image, which can tempt us into thinking that because the user is not waged, the user stands outside capital (a move reminiscent of Fredric Jameson’s theoretical intervention vis-à-vis Jean Baudrillard in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: what appears to have escaped capitalism must instead be re-situated within capitalism’s own logic); the user stands at a newly opened frontier of capital, one that Marx’s category of primitive or ongoing accumulation, the enclosure of a commons, illuminates far better than any nostalgia for the manor.

Sıla Gündüz: How does this transformation permeate everyday life? Do the economic mechanisms of technofeudalism lead to a shift in how the average person thinks? Could daily life be re-produced in a completely different way through the tools of this transformation?

İ.B.K: This is, in fact, the question that my own empirically grounded research seeks to answer. In “Three Modalities of Algorithmic Forgetting” I argue that the transformation reaches everyday cognition through the infrastructures of memory, and that it does so not through spectacular surveillance but through banal, OS-level features marketed as convenience. I trace three modalities.

Microsoft Recall enacts over-capture: by screenshotting everything, it saturates the record until events drain of meaning, and forgetting is displaced into a private chore of filtering and self-management. Google Ask Photos enacts curated retrieval: it selects and omits by opaque criteria, so that traces remain stored yet, when not surfaced, slip out of practical reach, a condition I describe, following the erasure-studies vocabulary, as a form of operative erasure. Apple Journal enacts preemptive guidance: its prompts steer inscription toward gratitude and the wholesome before the record is even formed, which is forgetting at the point of writing.

The cumulative effect answers your question about how the average person thinks. We are moved from narrative memory, in Paul Ricoeur’s sense, toward what I call query memory: get the fact, retrieve the photo, move on, with the unexpected and the antagonistic unwittingly de-ranked. Bernard Stiegler would call this a transformation of our tertiary retention, the externalized supports of thought; Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism and Eva Illouz’s emotional capitalism name the affective register in which a sanitized past becomes the condition of remaining functional. The thinking of the average person is thereby narrowed, oriented toward wellness and efficiency, and stripped of the capacity to recognize memory as a field of struggle. As for your final question, whether daily life could be reproduced otherwise, my answer is emphatically yes, and this is the whole political stake of the argument: these are design decisions, and design decisions are contestable. The depoliticization I describe is an effect of engineering, not a law of nature, and what engineering has narrowed, collective action can widen again.

“Han’s psychopolitics, for all its diagnostic acuity, carries limited empirical scope; his achievement subject tends to reflect the pathologies of an elite Western academic milieu more faithfully than it captures the lived conditions of globally precarious populations, and his sweeping declarations (‘the Other is completely expelled,’ ‘society is completely transparent’) trade nuance for emphasis.”

S.G: How accurate is it to interpret today through Byung- Chul Han’s perspective? Can the transformation of social relations, techno-feudalism, and psychopolitics together form a correct conceptual framework? Can these two frameworks generate a chemistry between them?

İ.B.K: There is a real chemistry, and it is worth stating with precision before I qualify it. Varoufakis and Durand supply the objective structure, cloud capital, intellectual monopoly, the rentier economy; Han supplies the subjective form, the achievement subject who exploits itself in the name of freedom, the society of positivity that expels all negativity, the transparency that becomes domination. These are two faces of one process, and read together they describe both the cell and the prisoner who has learned to love it. Varoufakis even reaches Han’s terrain in his own idiom when he writes, in the chapter on the death of the liberal individual, that techno-feudalism has produced persons who are possessed and not possessive, persons whose focus has been stolen; that sentence could sit unaltered within psychopolitics.

This chemistry holds true only under one condition—a condition that forms the central claim of my Constellations paper (see “Toward a Critique of Critique: Paradoxes of ByungChul Han and the Dialectic of Despair and Possibility”). Han’s psychopolitics, for all its diagnostic acuity, carries limited empirical scope; his achievement subject tends to reflect the pathologies of an elite Western academic milieu more faithfully than it captures the lived conditions of globally precarious populations, and his sweeping declarations (“the Other is completely expelled,” “society is completely transparent”) trade nuance for emphasis. So the synthesis becomes a correct framework only if Han’s subject is re-grounded twice over: re-grounded in political economy, so that the self-exploiting subject is understood as the correlate of the rentier structure and not a free-floating mood, and re-grounded empirically, in the actual infrastructures, the Recalls and Journals, through which psychopolitics is materially enacted. Absent that double grounding, the marriage of techno-feudalism and psychopolitics produces a beautiful elegy and very little analysis.

Elif Başlantı: How does psychopolitics find its place within this transformation? Could it be a structural result of the techno-feudals, whether precariats or cloud proliferating developing since the 2008 crisis? What is the relationship between the self-exploiting person and both technofeudalism and the rentier economy?

İ.B.K: You have named the chronological hinge correctly, and it lets me make my central theoretical move. Han insists on a sharp distinction between prohibition and compulsion, and he refuses to call self-exploitation a form of internalization, reserving that word narrowly for the absorption of negative constraints. I argue the reverse. If we shift attention from the source of compulsion to its function, neoliberal subjectivation reveals itself as a positive internalization, an affective self-binding, together drawing on the adjacent frameworks of Lauren Berlant and Nikolas Rose, in which subjection is lived as autonomy and domination is sustained through the very desire to optimize oneself. The subject internalizes not a “no,” but an affirmative injunction to thrive, and that is what makes the regime so resistant to the older grammar of resistance. Now place this against 2008, exactly as you suggest.

Varoufakis’s account of the post-crisis settlement, socialism for the financiers, austerity for everyone else, an investment strike, permanent stagnation, asset inflation, produced two things at once: the rentier structure of cloud capital, funded by the central banks’ money, and the precarious subject who must curate the self as a brand to survive a world that offers no fenced-off refuge from the market.

Psychopolitics is therefore the structural correlate of the rentier economy and not a parallel cultural symptom. The cloud serf who self-optimizes is producing the behavioural surplus, in Shoshana Zuboff’s term, most fully developed in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, that the cloudalist captures as rent. The self-exploiting person and the rentier are the two ends of a single relation: one labors without a wage and experiences it as self-realization, the other collects the rent and calls it a platform.

“As David Harvey argues in The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, the bailout transmuted catastrophe into upward redistribution, and the platform now transmutes the user’s every lapse, every search, every idle scroll, into rent.”

B.Ç: The new rentier economy has turned economic failures directly into instruments of power. Where does the obligation to pay rent on platforms, without owning any means of production, position itself within Byung-Chul Han’s established relationship of power and divinity?

İ.B.K: Han’s theory of power is most acute where it observes that power, at its most effective, does not coerce against a will but acts through it, smoothing and not breaking, operating through permission and seduction; the “free” power he describes governs by saying yes, by enabling, by occupying the place of the unconditioned. The platform rent you describe is the exact realization of this.

The user pays in attention and data, owns none of the means of production, and experiences the arrangement as gift and as freedom, never as extortion; one is granted access, and the granting feels like grace. This is why the theological register you invoke is apt and not merely ornamental. The platform sits in the position of the divine in a precise structural sense: it is the unconditioned condition of participation, it cannot be petitioned or appealed to, and when it casts you out, as Varoufakis observes of the worker fired by an algorithm, you fall into a Kafkaesque spiral in which there is no human face behind the verdict.

I feel Jodi Dean’s communicative capitalism provides us with a political reading: circulation itself becomes the trap, since our contributions are captured as so much undifferentiated flow whose very abundance forecloses political efficacy. And the conversion of failure into power that you name is, for me, the most damning continuity with 2008: As David Harvey argues in The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, the bailout transmuted catastrophe into upward redistribution, and the platform now transmutes the user’s every lapse, every search, every idle scroll, into rent. Han gives us the phenomenology of why this feels like devotion; Varoufakis and Dean give us the structure of why it functions as extraction. Both are needed, and neither suffices alone.

S.G: According to Han, we are in a transformation where we voluntarily share data and collaborate with algorithms out of a desire for exposure. In this environment of voluntary disclosure, how are platforms transforming individual self-presentation; can we truly say our participation in daily and social life is “free”? Where does the society of positivity stand in this situation?

İ.B.K: Self-presentation is now governed by a double bind that Varoufakis describes with great economy: the young person is taught to treat the self as a brand and, at the same time, to be judged on the perceived authenticity of that brand, so that every post becomes a calculation about which of one’s possible “true selves” the average online opinion will reward. The word “free” fails in both of its senses, and the failure is instructive. Our participation is free of charge, and yet it is paid for in the free labor that Terranova theorized, the unwaged production of the very content that constitutes the platform’s most valuable stock. And our participation feels free as in autonomous, and yet it is compelled, through the positive internalization I described, so that the compulsion arrives wearing the mask of self-expression.

The society of positivity is the affective regime that makes this unfreedom feel like liberation. Han’s smooth surface, the like, the expulsion of the negative, the dating-app reduction of the Other to a narcissistic mirror, is the cultural form in which the rentier capture of the self is rendered pleasurable. My own work supplies the micro-mechanics: Apple Journal’s gratitude prompts are positivity at the level of the inscription itself, steering the diary toward the sunset and the workout and away from the argument with the boss or the protest one attended. What I add to Han, and what I think a critical reading has to add, is that positivity is not merely a Stimmung; it is a productivity strategy, since the platform’s algorithms optimize for the rents that flow more copiously from contentment and engagement, and, as Varoufakis grimly notes, sometimes from hatred too.

B.Ç: At the breaking point where the individual fully internalizes the system’s failure, can Han’s “voluntary servitude” be organically connected to techno-feudalism’s “digital serfdom”?

İ.B.K: Yes, and the connection is organic and not merely analogical, though I want to mark its knot carefully. The hinge is the old motif of voluntary servitude, La Boétie’s question of why people fight for their subjection as if for their salvation, refracted now through Han and Varoufakis. The cloud serf’s unpaid labor and the achievement subject’s self-exploitation turn out to be the same act under two descriptions: the subject reproduces, for free and with enthusiasm, the cloud capital that dominates it. Han explains the libidinal economy of this, the desire that binds us to the chain; Varoufakis explains the property relation, the brute fact that we do not own the means through which we produce and communicate.

I insist on holding both, because each guards against the characteristic failure of the other. Han alone risks a subjectivism in which everything becomes a matter of affect and the question of ownership evaporates; the chain dissolves into a mood. Varoufakis alone, in his stronger moments, risks an economism in which the subject is merely a function of the rent mechanism. The organic connection is therefore real on one condition: that the libidinal account never be permitted to dissolve the objective property question, and that the property account never be permitted to forget that domination today operates through desire and not against it. Voluntary servitude and digital serfdom are simply the inside and outside of the same wall.

S.G: How should we interpret the relationship between Fast Theory and “story-selling” that you directed at Byung-Chul Han, from the perspective of algorithmic hegemony? Does the algorithmic attention regime not only subjugate the masses but also bend the very critical theory that opposes it to its own logic of circulation?

İ.B.K: This is the reflexive turn of my Constellations paper, and your second question states its thesis more sharply than I did. By Fast Theory, I mean the condition under which critical thought is obliged to conform to the imperatives of immediacy, circulation, and commodification, a condition Hartmut Rosa theorizes as social acceleration and Pierre Bourdieu anticipated in his portrait of the “fast-thinker” who produces marketable concepts on demand. Story-selling is Han’s own term, from The Crisis of Narration, for the packaging of thought into consumable insight, and I turn it back on him with what I hope is fair respect. The paradox is this: Han’s near-annual, swiftly translated output, the more than twenty slim volumes each built around a single evocative concept, enacts the very acceleration he denounces; he risks becoming, in Knepper and Wyllie’s phrase, a “publishing zombie,” and his signature notions, the burnout society, the achievement subject, risk hardening into critical commonplaces drained of analytic precision by sheer repetition.

My translation-velocity data was meant to make this visible, the high-tempo transnational dissemination of a critique of cognitive saturation that becomes entangled in the circuits it indicts. So my answer to your decisive question is yes. The algorithmic attention regime does not only subjugate the masses; it bends the critique that opposes it toward its own circulation logic, and there is no clean outside from which one might escape this. Even radical critique, in order to be seen or heard, must accommodate the tempo it aims to resist; this is the structural dilemma, and I name it, after Heidegger, a kind of Verfallenheit of theory itself. The conclusion I draw is not despair but a task: we need a critical theory of accelerated critique, one that can hold the diagnostic force of a thinker like Han together with a lucid awareness of the conditions of its own production. To refuse that reflexivity is to let the attention economy write our theory for us.

E.B: In your study “Three Modalities of Algorithmic Forgetting,” how does the loading of mental functions onto applications such as Microsoft Recall, Apple Journal, or Google Ask Photos, the delegation of thinking and execution to artificial intelligence, and the complete entrusting of personal data to cloud capital, affect social relations and the fundamental functions of humans at their core? Where does the human-freedom relationship stand in this transformation?

İ.B.K: Three modalities, one political drift, and the drift is depoliticization. Let me state the mechanism in each case, since the differences matter. Over-capture, embodied by Recall, records indiscriminately and thereby saturates and flattens; its forgetting comes from overwhelming volume, and it converts the collective, structural question of surveillance into an individualized technical chore, recasting the subject from a political actor into a personal risk-manager of their own traces, a self-responsibilization in Nikolas Rose’s sense. Curated retrieval, embodied by Ask Photos, naturalizes absence through opaque selection; the trace persists in storage, yet what the system does not surface drops out of practical reach, and because the omission is invisible, it cannot be contested. Preemptive guidance, embodied by Journal, steers inscription toward normative positivity before the record exists, which is Brian Massumi’s logic of preemption applied to memory and Paul Connerton’s prescriptive forgetting enacted in advance. The effect on the fundamental functions you ask about is a narrowing of the mnemonic horizon. We move from narrative memory, which invites interpretation and lets unexpected and antagonistic elements surface, toward query memory, which is instrumental and incurious; memory ceases to be a field of struggle and becomes private mood management, and the political self capable of recalling injustice gives way to a privatized self oriented to wellness and efficiency. This is, at the level of memory, precisely the death of the liberal individual that Varoufakis describes; our focus is not weakened by some failure of will, it is stolen, co-opted by infrastructures that profit from our distraction. As for freedom, I want to end this answer against the grain of my own pessimism, because the empirical record forbids fatalism. These systems fail and are contested: Recall provoked an uproar over its plaintext screenshots and was pulled and re-engineered; Ask Photos was quietly paused because its curation could not reliably surface what users wanted; users revert to classic search, refuse the prompts, name the overreach. Following Giorgio Agamben’s notion of profanation, the return of system-bound objects to common use, I read these refusals as small but genuine cracks in the edifice. Freedom here is not a possession we have lost; it is a practice of contestation that remains open.

S.G: Does this psychopolitical passivity in everyday life completely eliminate the possibility of a structural social transformation? Is politics nowadays only reproducing itself in a way that feeds the attention economy? How do you see Byung-Chul Han’s critique here? Could the end of political solutions and promises of democratization be imminent?

İ.B.K: Here I must stage my clearest disagreement with Han, in the spirit of immanent critique and not dismissal. Han’s strong thesis is that burnout and revolution are mutually exclusive, that revolution has become impossible, that no proletarian messiah waits in the wings because the subject is already enmeshed in the systems it might oppose. I read this stance through Enzo Traverso’s diagnosis of left-wing melancholia and Wendy Brown’s “Resisting Left Melancholy: a critique” so lucid that it paralyzes, that comes to reify the very loss it laments, enclosing itself in a hermetically sealed negativity. I refuse the closure on three grounds, each of which I have argued in print. First, the diagnosis has limited empirical scope, modelling the world on a particular elite experience of exhaustion. Second, it ignores the fugitive moments of refusal that the historical record keeps producing, from the Arab Spring to the global climate strikes to encrypted solidarity networks and the ironic subversions of meme cultures, which complicate any purely pessimistic picture of digital life. Third, and most fundamentally, it confuses a genuine difficulty with an ontological impossibility. Is politics today largely captured by the attention economy, reproducing itself as circulation that forecloses action? Yes, and Jodi Dean’s communicative capitalism is the indispensable name for this: the endless contribution of messages that feels like participation and functions as foreclosure. But capture is not abolition, and a relocation of the political is not its end. I do not believe the end of democratization is imminent; I believe its form is being displaced from the institutions we inherited toward arenas we have not yet learned to occupy, and the urgent task is the rebuilding of collective subjects capable of acting at the scale of cloud capital. Han sees the depth of the impasse with rare clarity, and that clarity is a gift; the danger is only that he aestheticizes the impasse into a destiny.

M.B.A: Given that these rent mechanisms and the transformation of social relations lead criticism to become paralyzing, what you have described as a “left-wing melancholia,” where is the way out? What should we focus on to find a solution to the structural crisis caused by this shift?

İ.B.K: Let me answer constructively, because the whole point of my critique of melancholy is to earn the right to a way out. Against the melancholic attachment to a lost world, I would marshal the warmer current of the tradition: Ernst Bloch’s concrete utopia and his “not-yet,” the anticipatory consciousness that finds the seeds of the future in the tendencies of the present; Erik Olin Wright’s real utopias, emancipatory designs tethered to institutional imaginaries of transformation, since, as Wright warns, a critique without such imaginaries becomes a diagnosis without remedy; and Terry Eagleton’s distinction between hope and optimism, his insistence that authentic hope is militant and underpinned by reasons, acknowledging structural intransigence even as it insists on enacting alternatives. I would even read Han’s own late turn generously here: The Spirit of Hope reframes hope as a “waiting without guarantee,” and read against the grain of his fatalism, that posture can be salvaged as a muted form of Bloch’s anticipatory consciousness, an attentiveness to what remains unexhausted.

The focus, concretely, follows from the diagnosis. If the structure is rent and cloud capital, the answer is the socialization and democratic governance of that capital, and here Varoufakis’s constructive program, for all my disagreement with his periodization, deserves to be taken seriously: the reconfiguration of property rights toward one-employee-one-share, the central bank reimagined as a monetary commons with a basic dividend, and above all the termination of the attention model through a Bill of Digital Rights and a micropayment platform that would let us refuse the bargain of free services paid for in unfree labor. To this I would add the living movements that already prefigure it: Trebor Scholz’s platform cooperativism, the construction of data commons against the data colonialism that Couldry and Mejias urge us to resist in Data Grab, and the patient organizing of the cloud serfs and cloud proles who, contrary to Han, have not vanished as political subjects. The one path I would foreclose is Varoufakis’s occasional drift, shared with Han’s later work, toward a fatalistic hope that excess will undo the system from within, a waiting for collapse that is not the same as organizing liberation. The task, I believe, is to carry his incisive negativity together with a renewed and militant imagination, so that critique becomes the negative ground from which a reasoned hope can grow, and not the elegy that mourns the future before it has been fought for.

S.G: Thank you very much for your time. We are extremely grateful for your contributions to our new issue.

İ.B.K: The pleasure was mine. As I take leave, I would like to tell your readers that diagnosis is the easy part. The real task is to refuse the melancholy it invites and turn the cloud into a commons through reasoned praxis.

Critiquing the Critics of Techno-Feudalism: Calling off Capitalism’s Funeral yazısı ilk önce Context Dergi üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

“Capitalism is inherently rooted in human nature,” forming the basis of the classical school of economics. This view posits that capitalism is distinguished by its focus on rational profit maximization, based on the belief that humans are intelligent beings who consider potential gains in all actions.

Recently, questions such as “Where is humanity headed?” and “Is capitalism ending?” are being addressed through a new framework called Techno-Feudalism or Neo-Feudalism. As technological progress, including AI, robotics, and internet infrastructure, becomes deeply integrated into daily life, discussions of universal basic income are often paired with dystopian visions from Big Tech. Even critical studies supporting this framework suggest capitalism’s demise. Nonetheless, many other works focus on capitalism’s emergence, growth, and crises. Certainly, before dismantling capitalism, it is essential to ask, “How did capitalism originate?” This question offers crucial insight into the story of capitalism’s demise. Nevertheless, answering it is challenging. Even after centuries, there is no consensus in social and economic sciences, and it remains a focus of significant research.

While various answers exist, two main perspectives are often introduced. The first argues that “Capitalism is inherently rooted in human nature” forming the basis of the classical school of economics. This view posits that capitalism is distinguished by its focus on rational profit maximization (RCT Theory), based on the belief that humans are intelligent beings who consider potential gains in all actions. It also suggests that capitalism, by seeking to enhance labor productivity through technological means, assumes that humans will naturally choose the most efficient methods, which it regards as an instinct. These ideas are grounded in Enlightenment notions of progress, which view humanity’s ongoing enlightenment as culminating in humans’ realization of their true nature. Until then, humans have faced significant challenges, with the development of capitalism seen as a process of overcoming these obstacles. Evidence for this perspective includes technological advances since Homo sapiens first used tools and historical exchange of material commodities.

This perspective suggests that capitalism has no point of origin. While human nature continues to exist, it must transcend its constraints -such as those from Feudalism- to mature. These constraints are often political: feudal lords, parasitic powers, culture, and religion. Regulations that hinder human nature constrain the growth of “economic” agents. So, even after humanity’s goal of globalization and the transformation of economic agents into regulators, why do traces of feudalism re-emerge under the guise of Techno-Feudalism?

A second perspective emerges from a critical view on capitalism, rooted in Marx’s foundational work, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859). Marx’s critique highlighted that wealth is not inherently capital; rather, capital represents a specific social relation. This suggests that wealth accumulation alone did not directly lead to capitalism’s rise, as capital is more than just wealth or profit; it is a form of social relationship. Consequently, capitalism’s origins are not solely tied to accumulation. In contrast to other theories, this view implies that humans are not inherently driven by profit maximization or productivity.

Capitalism and its social relations drove humans to seek maximum profit. It was not human nature that turned wealth into capital, but social property transformations that created the laws of capitalist movement unprecedented in history. In a changing world, competition, profit maximization, and the re-creation of surplus value necessitated constant workforce growth and development. This law of movement was unique to this era. Hence, capitalism was both a historical beginning and a finite process, neither inevitable nor the end of history. Techno-feudalism might have risen from capitalism’s ashes, altering social property relations and redefining humans as social beings. Ultimately, capitalism, like feudalism, could lose its specific laws. So, how did feudalism dissolve? Ellen Meiksins Wood, an American political theorist and historian, explains that feudalism was a specific mode of production where the economy and political authority were closely linked. Unlike capitalism, this system relied on non-economic coercive methods to extract surplus value. Peasants, often near castles for safety and market access, had direct access to land, allowing them to acquire surplus agricultural and craft products through military force. As states expanded, cities grew, and transportation improved, societal control increased. Over time, political pressure on serfdom decreased, with military power centralizing in absolutist states or large kingdoms and empires. For instance, English landowners moved from forcibly extracting surplus to renting land within competitive markets. Enclosures displaced peasants, ending subsistence farming and forcing them into a working-class role where they had to sell their labor to survive.

Illustration depicting the Enclosure Movement and the displacement of peasants from common lands, marking the transition to capitalism.

Now, exploitation shifted from the lord’s sword to the cold, invisible mechanisms of the market. The division between the economic and political spheres brought about changes in social relations. Dispossessed peasants developed a rational market-based economy to survive. Capitalism, emerging within its unique historical context, quickly expanded into a global economy.

“For instance, English landowners moved from forcibly extracting surplus to renting land within competitive markets. Enclosures displaced peasants, ending subsistence farming and forcing them into a workingclass role where they had to sell their labor to survive.”

Immanuel Wallerstein, an American sociologist renowned for his work in historical sociology and developing world-systems theory, argued that feudalism would end just as it had arisen. He theorized that every system is born, runs its natural cycle, and eventually, because of structural contradictions, enters a permanent crisis phase. The modern world-system, which emerged from the crisis of feudalism, is based on a vast network characterized by unequal exchange between the core and peripheral nations. While earlier capitalism overcame stagnation through territorial expansion, it can no longer do so in today’s highly developed global economy, having reached its mathematical limits. Factors such as rising labor costs from declining rural populations, ecological costs from exhausted natural resources, and growing tax burdens on education and healthcare contributed to this stagnation. The crisis became evident as overall profit rates shrank, pushing capitalism toward a breaking point, as Wallerstein noted in The End of the Known World.

The initial response of capital to the prolonged decline in the system’s profit rates was the rise of Neo-liberalism. However, as the bottleneck in production continued, capital shifted toward financial speculation. Instead of expanding through production, capital began to grow through finance. This unsustainable system collapsed during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. To rescue the system, central banks printed trillions of dollars of fiat money. Since there were no profit expectations in finance, this influx directly inflated technology companies’ share prices, enabling significant investment in digital infrastructure.

Economist Yanis Varoufakis describes this phenomenon as the emergence of Techno-Feudalism, which diverges from traditional market mechanisms. He argues that companies funded mainly by unbacked central bank money, which dominate internet platforms, undermine capitalism’s core principles, markets, and profit mechanisms. A new feudal-like parasitic structure has emerged over production, with productive capital now dependent on these platforms.

Historic view of Wall Street illustrating the rise of financial capitalism in 19th-century New York.

Financial capital clusters around them to compete and seek profit or growth. Fiber-optic cables, data centers, and A.I. systems connect the world, making productive capital reliant on these infrastructures.

“Economist Yanis Varoufakis describes this phenomenon as the emergence of Techno-Feudalism, which diverges from traditional market mechanisms. He argues that companies funded mainly by unbacked central bank money, which dominate internet platforms, undermine capitalism’s core principles, markets, and profit mechanisms. A new feudal-like parasitic structure has emerged over production, with productive capital now dependent on these platforms.”

Major corporations like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Apple now control this landscape. Platforms and algorithms dominate consumer markets, dictating choices and prices with near-absolute authority. Consequently, productive investments are reduced to rent-seeking activities, such as feudalism, in which peasants paid a share of their harvest to landowners. Today, producers and programmers often pay 30-40% of their sales as rent to platform owners. Billions of people work as digital serfs to grow cloud capital entirely voluntarily, thinking they are just having fun or socializing without any charge. Every search, share, and like trains these algorithms and provides data about consumer habits. Moreover, this cloud capital uses this data to hold our attention hostage, exploit dopamine cycles, and directly implant desires into minds, trapping them in an algorithmic hegemony. Jodi Dean, an American political scientist, notes that the once-dissolving divide between the economic and political realms of capitalism is now reversing, with the economy gaining political influence.

“Digital network owners are controlling trade, influencing free expression, and even affecting daily life, much like sovereign states. As this shift towards a Great Tech Authoritarianism unfolds, all intelligence and health data are increasingly managed by cloud capital.”

Originally seen as a democratic space, the internet now has the power to heavily influence preferences through algorithms that shape the content which users interact. Digital network owners are controlling trade, influencing free expression, and even affecting daily life, much like sovereign states. As this shift towards a Great Tech Authoritarianism unfolds, all intelligence and health data are increasingly managed by cloud capital. Today, as Wallerstein suggests, the end of the world as we know it is near. Tech-Feudalism hasn’t yet broken the fundamental laws of capitalism. It’s possible that social relations are already changing in ways we’re not noticing.

Big Tech Authoritarianism

“The initial response of capital to the prolonged decline in the system’s profit rates was the rise of Neo-liberalism. However, as the production bottleneck persisted, capital shifted toward financial speculation. Instead of expanding through production, capital began to grow through finance.”

Some studies claim that Neo-Feudalism is a natural phase of capitalism, and a significant number of people are thinking about the end of capitalism. Perhaps solutions to capitalism’s crises lie with major tech companies. Y. Varoufakis, notable for his work in this area, advocates for cyber boycotts and global strikes by mobilizing the cloud, calling on all humanity to join. He believes resistance efforts should be initiated, and the last chance to act should not be missed. We will see how it unfolds.

Before the Fall: What History of Capitalism Reveals About Techno-Feudalism? yazısı ilk önce Context Dergi üzerinde ortaya çıktı.