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Camden Philosophical Society at its gathering on Tuesday, May 20, will discuss chapters from contemporary global public intellectual Yanis Varoufakis’s latest work, Techno Feudalism. These chapters pull together threads from several topics discussed by the society over this past winter, including alternatives to capitalism, promises and dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and human relationships to each other and to the Earth.
The May 20 session will, as usual, be a hybrid gathering from 3:30-5:30 pm EDT on the third Tuesday of the month. All are welcome to participate, in-person at the Picker Room of the Camden Public Library or by Zoom. That goes for visitors, as well as year-rounders in Maine, and friends of the society wherever you may be.
If you wish to participate via Zoom, please email sarahmiller@usa.net. You will receive a Zoom invitation on the morning of the meeting. Click on the “Join Zoom Meeting” link in that invitation at the time of the event.
Varoufakis is a socialist politician, an economics professor, former finance minister of Greece, and currently secretary-general of the pan-European Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25). In Techno Feudalism, What Killed Capitalism, heargues that capitalism has effectively collapsed and has been replaced not by Marxist socialism but by a new and powerful form of feudalism, which he calls techno feudalism.
He asserts that cloud rent has overtaken profit as the driving economic force, and humans have become “cloud serfs,” providing unpaid labor to self-reproducing algorithms, labor in the form of our online writings, photos, videos, and movements recorded by cell phones. ”The true revolution cloud capital has inflicted on humanity is the conversion of billions of us into willing cloud serfs volunteering to labour for nothing to reproduce cloud capital for the benefit of its owners,” Varoufakis writes.
Our discussion of Techno Feudalism will focus upon Chapter 3, “Cloud Capital,” which is addressed to Varoufakis’s father; and Chapter 5, “What’s in a Word.” A PDF can be downloaded here: https://dn721607.ca.archive.org/0/items/technofeudalism-what-killed-capitalism-2023-yanis-varoufakis/Varoufakis%2C%20Yanis%20-%20Technofeudalism%20-%20What%20Killed%20Capitalism%20%282023%29%20Yanis%20Varoufakis.pdf