Reading the Signs of the Times
Something is shifting beneath our feet. Many of us feel it—a kind of spiritual and social exhaustion that defies easy naming. We sense that the old maps no longer match the terrain, that the language we inherited for understanding how the world works has grown inadequate to describe what we’re actually experiencing. We talk about “capitalism” as if it were still the system our grandparents critiqued, but something has changed. The exhaustion we feel isn’t just personal burnout; it’s the disorientation of people who realize they’ve crossed into unfamiliar territory without noticing.
Into this confusion comes a voice worth hearing—not from the pulpit, but from the world of economics. Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister and economist, has written a book that reads less like a policy paper and more like a prophetic diagnosis of our predicament. In Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, he offers a framework that may help us understand why so many of us feel like something fundamental has gone wrong—not just in our politics, but in the very fabric of how we live, work, and relate to one another.
Varoufakis begins his book with a memory from childhood. His father, a metallurgist, introduced him to the magic of iron—how heating and quenching metal could transform its very nature, hardening it into something new. From this, his father taught him that technological revolutions don’t just change what we make; they change who we are. The Iron Age didn’t merely give us better plows; it reshaped civilization itself. Varoufakis carries this lesson forward to our own moment: we are living through a technological transformation as profound as any in history, and it is reshaping us in ways we have barely begun to comprehend.
His central claim is striking: the capitalism we thought we were living under has already died. It has been replaced by something he calls “technofeudalism”—a new economic order where markets are supplanted by digital fiefdoms, where profit is eclipsed by rent, and where billions of us have become unwitting serfs laboring on digital estates we do not own. If this sounds dramatic, well, that’s the point. The drama has already happened. We’re simply catching up to the reality.
The New Principalities and Powers: Cloud Capital
For those of us shaped by the biblical imagination, the language of “powers and principalities” carries a certain resonance. Paul used this language to describe the spiritual forces that shape empires, institutions, and systems—forces that transcend individual bad actors and take on a life of their own. Varoufakis gives us a secular name for our era’s reigning principality: “cloud capital.”
Cloud capital is not the factory machinery of the industrial age. It is not the assembly line or the blast furnace. It is something new—a kind of capital that doesn’t merely produce goods but modifies behavior. Varoufakis calls it a “produced means of behavioural modification.” When you interact with Alexa or scroll through Amazon, you are not simply shopping; you are being trained, studied, and shaped. The algorithm learns your preferences, then curates your reality to manufacture your desires. And here’s the eerie part: as you train the algorithm, it trains you back. Before long, you are locked in an infinite loop where you can no longer distinguish your authentic wants from those the system has cultivated in you.
This is not the invisible hand of the market. It is, Varoufakis argues, something more like an invisible puppeteer. The old industrial capitalist wanted to exploit your labor. Cloud capital wants something more intimate: it wants to curate your soul.
Consider what this means for the marketplace itself. Varoufakis insists that when you enter Amazon.com, you have not entered a market. You have entered a fiefdom—a private estate where one algorithm acts as judge, jury, and landlord. In a genuine market, buyers and sellers interact with some degree of freedom; they can share information, form associations, even organize boycotts. But on a platform like Amazon, everyone is “wandering in algorithmically constructed isolation.” The algorithm decides what you see, what prices you pay, which vendors succeed and which fail. This is not commerce; this is digital feudalism, and we are all paying rent to the new lords simply to exist and trade within their domains.
Recent events confirm that even our legal systems struggle to address this new reality. In 2024 and 2025, Google was ruled a monopolist in no fewer than three separate federal cases—for illegally dominating search, advertising, and the Android ecosystem. Yet the remedies have been startlingly modest. As one Stanford Law analysis observed, despite years of litigation and clear findings of illegal conduct, “little is likely to change.” A judge ruled that Google need not be broken up, in part because he believed artificial intelligence would eventually create new competition. The house always wins. Meanwhile, in November 2025, a federal judge dismissed the FTC’s antitrust case against Meta entirely, ruling that Facebook is not a monopolist—despite the company’s ownership of Instagram, WhatsApp, and its documented history of acquiring nascent competitors. Legal experts at Northeastern University concluded that “there’s something problematic about relying on antitrust litigation for trying to correct big accumulations of power in the tech space.” The lesson of 2025, according to analysts at ProMarket, is blunt: “antitrust law will not be able to stop” the consolidation of technofeudal power. Our nineteenth-century legal tools were built for railroads and oil trusts. They cannot comprehend, let alone dismantle, the digital fiefdoms of the twenty-first century.
The Loss of the Sovereign Soul: From Citizen to Cloud Serf
Varoufakis introduces two haunting figures: the “cloud prole” and the “cloud serf.”
The cloud prole is the warehouse worker, the delivery driver, the gig worker whose every movement is monitored and dictated by an algorithm. These workers, Varoufakis writes, would recognize themselves in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times—forced to keep pace with a machine that has no capacity for empathy or mercy. The difference is that now the machine is invisible. It lives in the cloud. There is no foreman to plead with, no human face to appeal to. When the algorithm fires you, you spiral into a Kafkaesque nightmare, unable to speak to anyone capable of explaining why. This is a profound violation of the dignity of labor—a sanctity that our faith traditions have long insisted upon.
A March 2025 academic study of Amazon’s warehouse operations confirmed Varoufakis’s analysis in chilling detail. Researchers documented what they called the “electronic whip”—a system of scanners, badges, and tracking devices that generate real-time data on worker productivity, publicly rank employees, and algorithmically monitor compliance with quotas. One researcher told The Register that “the physical movements of Amazon workers, which are directed through these algorithmically generated quotas and enforced through automatic termination or discipline, are just destroying these people’s bodies.” The same study found that Amazon weaponized these surveillance tools during union campaigns—temporarily loosening the “electronic whip” to win worker favor, then tightening it again once the threat had passed. As the lead researcher put it, these algorithmic tools “aren’t just whips, they’re also bazookas” in the company’s anti-union arsenal.
But here is the more unsettling revelation: most of us are not cloud proles. We are cloud serfs. When we scroll, post, click, review, and share, we are performing unpaid labor that enriches the owners of cloud capital. The content that makes Facebook valuable, the reviews that make Amazon trustworthy, the data that makes Google powerful—we create all of it, for free. Varoufakis notes that Big Tech’s paid workers collect less than one percent of these companies’ revenues. The rest comes from us—from billions of people contributing their time, attention, and creativity to platforms they do not own and cannot control.
The gig economy represents a hybrid of both conditions—workers who are technically “independent contractors” but whose every task is dictated by opaque algorithms. A May 2025 Human Rights Watch report titled “The Gig Trap” documented that six of seven major gig platforms use algorithms with hidden rules to assign jobs and determine wages, meaning workers often don’t know how much they’ll earn until after completing a task. The report found that many gig workers make an average of just $5.12 per hour after expenses—while Uber recorded $9.8 billion in net income for 2024.
A June 2025 Oxford University study of 1.5 million Uber trips revealed the mechanics of this extraction in granular detail. After Uber introduced “dynamic pricing,” driver pay decreased, Uber’s cut increased (reaching 50% or more on some trips, up from a previously advertised 25%), job allocation became less predictable, and inequality between drivers widened. Drivers now spend over an hour more per week on unpaid “standby”—logged into the app, waiting for work, uncompensated. Legal scholar Veena Dubal calls this the “algorithmic gamblification of work,” where “algorithmic decision-making systems are undermining the possibility of economic stability.” As one driver told researchers: “They are robbing us and the customer.” The house, it turns out, always wins.
Under feudalism, serfs worked ancestral lands and surrendered the lion’s share of their harvest to the landlord. Today, we toil on digital estates, and the sheriff who collects the lord’s share is an algorithm we cannot see. We may even enjoy the work—just as medieval serfs found meaning in their traditions and communities. But the structural reality remains: we are laboring to enrich a tiny band of what Varoufakis calls “cloudalists,” and we are not compensated for it.
This poses a profound spiritual question. If our attention is being stolen, our desires manufactured, our very sense of self curated by systems we cannot perceive, how do we cultivate an inner life? How do we practice the ancient disciplines of silence, solitude, and discernment? How do we listen for the still, small voice when a thousand algorithmic voices are vying for our attention? The liberal individual—the autonomous self who freely chooses their own path—may already be dead, replaced by a fragmented identity optimized for engagement. This is not merely an economic crisis; it is a crisis of the soul.
The Economics of Idolatry: Profit vs. Rent
One of Varoufakis’s most illuminating distinctions is between profit and rent. Under capitalism, profit was earned by creating something new—building a factory, inventing a product, taking a genuine risk. Rent, by contrast, is extracted simply by owning access. The feudal lord did not earn his income by farming; he collected it from those who needed his land to survive. Technofeudalism marks a return to this older arrangement: the cloudalists do not create value so much as they position themselves as unavoidable gatekeepers who extract tolls from everyone who passes through.
And how was this new order funded? Here is where the story becomes genuinely enraging. Following the 2008 financial crisis, central banks responded by printing unprecedented amounts of money and channeling it to the financial sector. Politicians called it a rescue; Varoufakis calls it “socialism for the bankers.” Ordinary people faced austerity—cuts to public services, stagnant wages, evaporating opportunities—while the financiers received rivers of free cash.
But austerity killed investment. With consumers too poor to buy, businesses saw no point in building new factories or creating new products. So where did all that printed money go? Into assets: real estate, art, stocks—and, crucially, into cloud capital. The pandemic accelerated this process. As economies shed millions of jobs, Amazon hired 100,000 workers and positioned itself as a hybrid of the Red Cross and the New Deal. Meanwhile, even struggling tech companies used the flood of central bank money to build their cloud empires.
The result is what Varoufakis calls “gilded stagnation”: fabulous wealth for the cloudalists, precarity for everyone else. This is the economic equivalent of the biblical indictment against those who “reap where they did not sow.” Figures like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have detached from the real economy, their fortunes swelling even as the productive capacity of society stagnates. The new feudal lords have found a way to grow rich without creating social value—a form of extraction that previous generations would have recognized as plunder.
In the United States, the Institute for Policy Studies found that the share of national wealth held by the top 0.1 percent has grown nearly 60 percent since 1989, while the share held by the bottom 50 percent has declined by more than a quarter. The 905 American billionaires now hold a combined $7.8 trillion—more than the total wealth of 66 million households in the bottom half of the population. Oxfam’s research reveals that billionaires are now 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens, and they own more than half the world’s largest media companies and all the major social media platforms. The cloudalists have not merely accumulated wealth; they have accumulated the power to shape the narratives by which we understand our world.
A Vision for the Common Good: Escaping the Fiefdom
Before sketching an alternative, Varoufakis dispenses with a popular false hope: cryptocurrency. Bitcoin and its descendants promised to liberate us from the parasitic financial system, to create a decentralized utopia beyond the reach of banks and governments. Instead, Varoufakis argues, crypto became a pyramid scheme that enriched early adopters while serving the very institutions it claimed to oppose. JPMorgan and Microsoft now run consortium blockchains. Crypto has been co-opted, another tool for accumulating cloud capital. For those seeking liberation, this is not the way.
So what is? In his companion novel Another Now, Varoufakis sketches a blueprint that reads, to my ears, like a secular echo of the Kingdom of God—a vision of shared dignity, distributed power, and restored human agency.
Imagine democratized companies, where every employee receives a single share upon being hired—not a financial asset to be traded, but a vote. One employee, one share, one voice. Major decisions would be made collectively, dissolving the feudal hierarchy of owner and worker. This is not Soviet central planning; it is workplace democracy, the application of the principles we claim to cherish in our political life to the places where we spend most of our waking hours.
Imagine a restored digital commons, where our data and our digital identities belong to us, not to the feudal lords. The original internet was built as a commons—a shared space of open protocols, free access, and horizontal communication. It was enclosed by Big Tech, privatized and monetized. But what was enclosed can be reclaimed. The tools exist; what is lacking is the political will.
And imagine what Varoufakis calls “cloud mobilization”: using the tools of the cloud to rebel against its masters. A coordinated consumer strike against Amazon for a single day. A targeted boycott that crashes a company’s share price. A coalition of cloud serfs and cloud proles recognizing their common interest and acting together. The beauty of such mobilization, Varoufakis notes, is that it inverts the usual calculus of collective action: instead of maximal personal sacrifice for minimal gain, we would have minimal sacrifice delivering significant collective results. The inconvenience of staying off Amazon for a day is trivial; the cumulative effect of millions doing so simultaneously could be profound.
A Call to a New Humanism
Near the end of his book, Varoufakis frames our choice with two images from science fiction. One is Star Trek: a future where technology liberates humanity, where machines handle drudgery so that people can explore, create, and flourish. The other is The Matrix: a dystopia where humans are merely the fuel that powers an empire of machines, their minds imprisoned in illusions while their bodies are harvested. We are, he suggests, fast approaching a fork in the road. The path we take is not predetermined; it depends on choices we make now.
For those of us who follow in the way of Jesus, this should sound familiar. We have always been called to discern the spirits of our age, to resist the principalities and powers that would commodify the sacred, to work toward a world where human dignity is honored and creation is healed. Varoufakis is not a theologian, but his diagnosis aligns with ancient wisdom: systems that extract without giving, that accumulate without sharing, that treat persons as means rather than ends—these are systems that contradict the grain of the universe. They may flourish for a season, but they contain the seeds of their own destruction.
The question is not whether technofeudalism will eventually collapse under its own contradictions; the question is what will replace it, and how much suffering will occur in the transition. Here is where prophetic hope differs from mere optimism. We do not know that things will turn out well. We have no guarantees. What we have is a calling: to act faithfully, to resist complicity, to build alternatives, to tend the commons, to remember that our minds and our souls are not for sale.
Varoufakis ends his book with a rallying cry that deliberately echoes Marx: “Cloud serfs, cloud proles and cloud vassals of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our mind-chains!” The language is secular, but the sentiment resonates with the deepest convictions of our faith. We are called to freedom. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves—which is impossible if we allow our neighbors to be reduced to data points harvested for profit. We are called to steward creation—which is impossible if we allow a handful of cloudalists to own the digital infrastructure on which all of us depend.
I commend this book to you not because I agree with every sentence—there is much to debate, much to question, much to think through together. But Varoufakis has given us something precious: a new vocabulary for naming what many of us have felt but could not articulate. If we are going to work for the common good in this strange new world, we need to understand the terrain. Techno-Feudalism is a map worth studying.
May we have the courage to see clearly, the wisdom to act justly, and the faith to believe that another now is possible.
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What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?
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