Cédric Durand

Thank you, Susan, and good evening, everyone. I’m very happy to be here to discuss these important topics with you.

I would characterize the current conjuncture by borrowing a concept from Ernest Mandel — “too late capitalism.” Why “too late?” I think the most obvious reason is the ecological crisis. This is really at the heart of the debate we should be having; it’s absolutely crucial. But if you want to focus more on the capitalist dynamics, if you want to characterize the situation now, I think it has five key elements.

The first element is what I would call the rise of the rest, or the de-Westernization of the global economy. The hegemony of the United States and Europe is clearly fading thanks to the rise of China and, to a lesser extent, other countries like India. Just to give you a number: China accounted for about 2 percent of global GDP in the 1980s; it’s more than 17 percent now, adjusted for purchasing power parity. It’s a tremendous change, and it’s reshaping global dynamics. France and Germany, which together accounted for over 10 percent of global GDP, now account for only 5 percent. Together, they are now smaller than India. This gives you an idea of the scale of the change, and I think it’s relevant for understanding what’s going on right now.

The second key element is what I might call the end of financial hegemony — though that might be a bit premature. For five decades, we experienced a financial supercycle. This period was somewhat functional up until 2008, but after that, it has been entirely subsidized. There were huge bailouts, massive interventions by central banks. These interventions themselves have created problems. The COVID-19 crisis and the inflationary burst afterward showed that managing this economy has become increasingly difficult.

The economy is not very dynamic, but the financial sector is booming. The weight of fictitious capital is enormous, and we’re in a constant crisis. Every few months, we hear about another financial crisis in some corner of the world, another intervention somewhere else. Discussions about the price of the dollar, the rise of crypto, and stablecoins — all of these are part of the crisis of financial hegemony.

The third element is the hegemony of tech. We’ll discuss that more tonight, but I want to emphasize something: it’s not just that the tech sector is leading capital accumulation — it’s the extreme concentration of capital. A few corporations now represent about 20 percent of market capitalization in the United States and 35 percent of stock market capitalization, compared to about 20 percent in 2010. So, we’re seeing rapid growth not only in the sector, but also in the concentration of capital in a few corporations. That’s something very special and significant.

The fourth element is globalization. The effects of globalization can be felt in many aspects of our lives, from being able to travel to consuming goods produced all over the world. But it seems that, for the past ten to fifteen years, globalization has stopped expanding. The share of trade in the global economy isn’t growing anymore. Now, we have a lot of discussions about tariffs, decoupling, sanctions. There’s a process of fragmentation happening in the global economy, which is very different from the classical neoliberal era we lived through.

Finally, and this is important for our discussion tonight, too-late capitalism is also a capitalism that has lost its dynamism. It’s not a dynamic capitalism anymore; it’s a slowing one. Since the postwar boom, we’ve been in a slowdown. But now, even with technological development, there’s been no rejuvenation. High-income economies are seeing a decline in rates of investment, and this slowdown is not limited to those economies — it’s also happening in China, where we’ve seen a decade of slowing growth. It’s not just a general slowdown, it’s also that, despite all the innovation, productivity remains low and sluggish. We’re not producing more use value, and many people feel this form of impoverishment is connected to the slowing down of the rate of growth within capitalist states.

These five elements — the rise of China and other countries, the end of financial hegemony, the concentration of tech capital, the slowdown in globalization, and the overall slowdown in capitalist dynamics — are key to understanding what’s going on today. And these elements are the backdrop for the reactionary turn we’re seeing in many Western countries, especially in the United States, where there’s a shift toward authoritarianism, or even a neofascist turn. This is linked to increased international competition, a lack of social mobility, growing concentrations of economic power, and a general crisis that shapes the current conjuncture.

Susan Watkins

Thank you. Evgeny, what would you say to that or add to it?

Evgeny Morozov

I’ll try to address some of the points Cédric raised, while also offering some of my own thoughts. Much of both Susan’s framing and Cédric’s response revolves around 2008, viewing the crisis and its aftermath as a turning point. As a lens for periodizing how we think about the current shape of capitalism, I think it is largely correct, especially in the context of how the digital economy operates and how it has evolved. If we look at companies like Uber, Airbnb, and many other similar firms, they managed to position themselves in the aftermath of the crisis as tools to help the middle classes cope by becoming entrepreneurs. They presented themselves as offering people a chance to become entrepreneurs or to make sure that their assets — cars or homes — could have a second lease on life.

But I also think there’s a tendency latent in this periodization that obscures processes that began earlier and prevents us from looking at different issues and dimensions of capitalism. Since Cédric framed his intervention as a contribution to articulating what “too-late capitalism” might be, I want to say that over the years, I’ve become extremely critical and skeptical of the periodization that starts with “late capitalism.” With all due respect to Ernst Mandel, this framework has imposed analytical constraints on the Left’s ability to understand structural changes in capitalism since the 1970s.

This periodization assumes that after the liberal state of capitalism and the monopoly state of capitalism, we arrived at late capitalism in the 1970s, which then marked the beginning of globalization and the subsequent changes. But I think we need a different way to talk about these changes, a new conceptual framework. So, instead of using terms like neoliberalism, financialization, or globalization to describe capitalism’s evolving morphology, I’ve been trying to come up with a different periodization.

For the last decade, I’ve been working on a concept that moves from the old idea of “organized capitalism” articulated by Rudolf Hilferding and others a century ago, through a transition to “disorganized capitalism” in the 1970s, marked by the rise of deregulation, privatization, and the establishment of competition as the main form of global governance. This disorganized phase ultimately exhausted itself in the early 2000s, leading to what I’ve been calling “organic capitalism” — a very different beast. The term organic capitalism acknowledges that the efforts to discipline states and companies by subjecting them to more competition, privatization, and marketization from the 1970s to the late 1990s not only failed but generated a host of problems, such as climate change and inequality. But organic capitalism has also mobilized more capital to deal with those issues.

From the early 2000s onward, you can see a different rationale emerging, especially in sectors like finance, where people like Al Gore and others have begun to advocate for new ways of tackling these problems. This view accepts that capitalism hasn’t been as effective as Friedrich Hayek and others claimed, and that it has produced a lot of externalities. But by mobilizing more capital and introducing market-driven political interventions, we can fix those problems.

This thinking is evident in how asset managers approach climate change, viewing it as an issue that can be solved through market discipline. Silicon Valley enters this paradigm through what I call “solutionism.” Silicon Valley has positioned itself as the provider of solutions to every problem capitalism has created. From the 2010s onward, it proliferated solutions in areas like health care, education, transportation — virtually every sphere of life. For a long time, the public accepted these solutions without contest, not realizing that they were simply another form of privatization and marketization, now dressed up as “digitization” or “innovation.”

In this new phase of capitalism, which I call organic capitalism, politics is done through the market. The idea is to subject everything — platforms and other market-based institutions — to the logic of profitability and accumulation, using them to resolve many of the problems capitalism has produced. That’s why, over the past decade or so, the World Economic Forum in Davos has acknowledged the reality of climate change and other global issues. But their solution is to mobilize private capital to solve those problems, sidelining nonmarket institutions and treating the capitalist economy as the ultimate problem-solver.

This structural shift is easy to miss if we start from a more conventional periodization. I’ve been working to articulate how this new period has emerged, but I think there’s something important I need to mention here: this has not led to the exhaustion of finance or the finance industry. In fact, I would argue that it has led to an interesting entanglement between Wall Street and Silicon Valley. In different ways, both represent sides of this “organic capitalist,” solutionist coin.

Silicon Valley pitches itself as the provider of solutions, but those solutions, especially those relying on artificial intelligence, require massive capital investments. We’re talking about sums in the range of $250 billion this year alone for Research and Development (R&D) and capital expenditures from the top tech firms. Some of this money comes from their sizable cash reserves, but a significant portion comes from striking deals with idle capital in the Gulf states — Qatar, the Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Some of it even comes from private credit markets, which is an increasingly important but understudied segment of the global economy. These markets bypass the traditional financial system and involve new players who don’t resemble private equity or venture capital.

Take Facebook, for example. It has plenty of cash, but it’s still tapping into private credit markets — borrowing $22–$28 billion to build new data centers, as it recently announced. This marks a significant shift, and it leads to new vulnerabilities. We need to understand that finance and tech are not separate; they are mutually reinforcing, and the rise of tech hegemony is deeply intertwined with the ongoing relevance of Wall Street, particularly the new players in private credit.

One of the structural features of this new landscape is the decline of publicly traded companies and the stock market as means for disciplining capitalists. These are being replaced by private decision-making happening in institutions run by asset managers, but also by new players operating in private credit. This creates a new set of vulnerabilities that we need to think about.

Finally, there is a massive ideological component to all of this. Silicon Valley, along with figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, has captured the imagination of what the future and progress should look like. They are forcing, or at least hoping to force, left-wing movements and political parties to come up with an alternative vision of the future. I haven’t seen that happen yet, but it would be a mistake not to think about these new players not just as providers of solutions, but also as sources of powerful imagery about the future of politics and public life.

If you follow debates in the United States in recent months, you’ll notice that this vision of the future does not include democracy as we understand it. There will still be some public life, and some forms of association, but it will be hyper-technologized — mediated by reputation systems, tracking devices, facial recognition, drones, and whatever else is being built by these firms. It will not resemble traditional democratic forms of association. That ideological undercurrent is something we need to contend with as we think about how this new system legitimates itself.

Maybe I’ll stop here and we can return to some of these points later.

Susan Watkins

Thanks. Could I just ask you to follow up on a couple of points? Are you suggesting that these new forces will be able to keep pace with the vulnerabilities and the new crises they’re creating? Will they stay ahead of the curve, or do you see a catastrophe looming?

Evgeny Morozov

Well, I mean, we’ve been living through a catastrophe for the last five or six decades, right? And probably in a much more intense form over the past two or three decades. But I don’t see capitalists losing control or losing the plot, if that’s what you’re asking. So, it will be a very turbulent time, but I don’t really see any contending force on the horizon that will be able to wrest control away from them. In that sense, I also think that the entire turn towards AI in the past few years, particularly in the last twelve months, has managed to revitalize the capitalist imagination in ways we haven’t seen for a long time.

It has also managed to mobilize a lot of idle capital that was previously going into real estate or pure financial speculation. Even companies that have been somewhat dormant, like Apple, have been massive buyers of their own stock. They’ve spent about $110 billion on stock buybacks, but they only spent around $30 billion on R&D. You can actually see how this is hurting them because their spending was far less than companies such as Google and Amazon, both of which doing much better in the AI race.

So, in that sense, the wave of productive capital investment driven by AI’s promise to cut costs and open up new profit lines is real. It’s not fictitious capital. This investment will buy these firms — and this alliance between Wall Street and Silicon Valley — another five or seven years, if not more, of being able to burn a lot of cash. OpenAI, for example, does not expect to be profitable until 2029 or 2030. They will be burning tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions. Not just burning money — they’re already burning that much, and they’ll continue to lose tens of billions a year for a while. But their ability to convince both governments, who are heavily subsidizing them by letting them build data centers, and private capital, through sovereign wealth funds, is substantial. They’ve built a coherent narrative around it, despite the fact that the whole endeavor is highly irrational and wasteful. All these companies are essentially building the same kind of functionality.

In that sense, it’s a rational system within the current capitalist framework, and it will probably last for five to seven years. However, things could get much worse politically in the meantime. Elites may choose to manage the discontent that might emerge about data centers and their wasteful energy consumption through sheer force rather than through promises of a better future.

Susan Watkins

Cédric, do you want to reply to that, and then maybe talk about your ideas on technofeudalism as well?

Cédric Durand

Yes, but I’ll first make one point about the relationship between Wall Street and the tech sector. I agree with Morozov that there is a strong connection, and that the tech sector is mobilizing financial capital — public capital, bank capital, private capital, as you mentioned — and that there are significant mutations within the financial sector. That’s absolutely true. My point, though, is that the financial sector has lost some autonomy in the sense that it’s increasingly dependent on interventions by central banks. Even these interventions by central banks are creating more tension, particularly around inflation. Right now, in the United States, there’s an uptick in inflation while the central bank is lowering interest rates. This means it’s becoming increasingly difficult to preserve the value of money while maintaining the position of finance. I think this creates a big contradiction.

On the other hand, the tech sector is proposing — and what you’ve described is absolutely correct — that AI, more broadly, and the practices tied to it, are really driving societal change, especially in terms of investment and economic behavior. The shift I’m describing is from finance being the dominant sector to tech taking the lead. Of course, there’s no absolute disjunction between them. Everything is organic, but the leadership is now on the tech side. And it’s in that context that I developed the hypothesis of technofeudalism.

I’ve been surprised by how well the concept has resonated. I think one important moment to reflect on is January, when we saw those tech bosses at Trump’s inauguration. That was a striking image: all the tech CEOs were sitting in the front row, and Trump was just around. And on his very first day in office, what did he do? He decided to scrap any kind of regulation regarding AI at the federal level. This was a very important decision because it effectively undermined any form of state supervision over the area where these companies were making their most ambitious bets. It’s moments like that which capture the essence of what I’m describing and, at a more analytical level, I’d like to clarify a few points.

First, technofeudalism does not mean that the digital economy is taking us back to feudal times, of course. That’s not the point. One huge difference, and it’s a very important one, is that in medieval times, production was highly individualized. The peasants worked for the lord, but they worked mostly on their own. Today, we live in a highly socialized production system. All corporations depend on each other. Think about how many people are involved in the products we’re using right now — it’s completely unimaginable. It’s a completely different world.

However, there are similarities in terms of the quality of social relations. I would argue that dependency is one of the first analogies to feudal times. We are dependent on tech services in our everyday lives — each of us. I often joke that my mom probably could live without Google, but a month ago, she had a problem with her phone and had to ask a neighbor and then call me. It was an emergency. She needed a smartphone. Even at eighty-four, she absolutely needs Google now. We are all dependent on it. But it’s not just individuals. Corporations, entire sectors, and even states rely on Big Tech services.

For example, recently, the German Ministry of the Interior made an agreement with Amazon for its cloud services. Many of Europe’s major banks depend on US cloud services. The French national railway company used to have its own proprietary cloud, but it outsourced that service to Amazon. The CEO of Total, the energy firm, even explained that he was embarrassed to have to send geological data to the United States to extract oil. He didn’t trust that his data would be protected. So there is a general dependency, not just among individuals, but across the entire productive structure. And this dependency is centered around very few corporations. It’s a highly asymmetrical relationship that mirrors colonial dynamics. There is a center and a periphery, and it’s something that will shape Europe and many other countries in the future.

The second analogy I’d like to draw is that in feudal times, there was always some articulation between the political realm and the economic realm. Capitalist firms have always relied on state decisions. They’ve lobbied the state for favorable policies, but now, the Big Tech companies are taking key state capabilities into their hands. One example: during COVID-19, Google made public mobility data available, showing how people were moving around cities. But by 2023, they closed that access, and it became private again. The key data that used to be public is now controlled by Google, and this is happening with many other types of data.

Another example is how tech platforms now curate public debate. Facebook’s and Twitter’s algorithms are organizing political life in a way that is not neutral at all. It used to be mostly regulated by the state, but now, the state has ceded control over this area. There’s also a debate around the status of money. With the loss of trust in the dollar, companies like Amazon, X (formerly Twitter), and Walmart are beginning to issue their own money. When this happens, it will reduce the ability of the state to manage the economy and implement macroeconomic policies.

These examples show how key aspects of state power are shifting to the private sector and, in that sense, these companies are becoming political actors. Not just in abstract terms, but in how they shape social life. Finally, I’d argue that what they are doing is creating predatory positions to extract rent. This produces a zero-sum game, reminiscent of feudal times. In feudalism, lords expanded their territory in a zero-sum way — what one gained, the other lost. Big Tech companies are now in the same kind of competition, expanding their control over the social sphere.

It’s worth noting that, as Evgeny pointed out, these companies are investing massive amounts of cash, which is extraordinary. But this is a sectoral dynamic where investment is flowing into tech at the expense of other sectors. There is no broader investment rush. There’s less investment in public services, less in manufacturing capabilities, infrastructure, housing — things that are necessary for everyday life. In that sense, this dynamic is predatory. That’s why I think technofeudalism isn’t just an abstract concept; it’s a trend that’s materializing day by day.

Just a final note: I’m not saying that technofeudalism is inevitable. It’s a possibility, one that’s materializing in the West. But in China, we’re seeing something different. The state is not allowing firms to take control of the political process and dominate society. So, this is not a necessity; it’s the result of political choices that have been made today. But there are other possibilities for technology, other paths that could emerge.

Susan Watkins

Evgeny, do you want to respond to that, and to the possibility of China having a different model?

Evgeny Morozov

Well, first of all, we have to realize that there are many partly overlapping and partly competing theories and accounts of technofeudalism and neofeudalism, which is a related but distinct concept. Cédric’s version is probably the most nuanced and does not present it as an exhaustive or exclusive account of what drives change under capitalism. In his framing, it’s one of the explanatory frameworks that complements dynamics like financialization and globalization, which can also explain what’s going on.

Of course, there are more populist ways to think about it, and the most well-known one is Yanis Varoufakis’s approach. The claims he makes are much more absolute and definitive. For him, capitalism died in 2008 and a new system emerged in its place, replacing profit with rent. That’s a more populist reading of technofeudalism.

I take a position that occupies a middle ground between these more extreme populist and more nuanced accounts. My immediate response to Cédric is that I get the feeling that he seems to imply that a theory of capitalism in Marx and Marxism is, by extension, also a theory of the state, a theory of the form the state should take and the functions it should perform. Perhaps this would have been the content of the missing volume that Marx had hoped to write about the state, but that volume never reached us.

As far as I understand Capital, a theory of capitalism is agnostic about the form of the state and the exact distribution of labor between the market and the state. In my view, the idea that now some of these firms are taking on functions previously occupied by the welfare state — or earlier, by charities, or even earlier still by beneficiaries like the Medicis — is interesting. But it doesn’t really tell us whether we’re living in capitalism or feudalism. It just shows us that there is a plasticity of sorts in how various needs, for example those related to reproduction, can be fulfilled within the framework of the capitalist state.

In my own theory and periodization, there’s nothing abnormal about a growing number of governments delegating responsibility. Governments are willingly delegating more responsibility for health care, education, and the issuance of money to the private sector, particularly in Silicon Valley. Ultimately, I see this as a way for governments to achieve several goals at once. One of these goals is to create and maintain conditions for capitalist accumulation, so that despite all the systemic problems capitalism faces, firms can continue to accumulate. And partly, it’s a way of fulfilling needs they have when it comes to policing, health care, and so on.

So, when a company enters the defense industry or the policing sector, it’s not an impingement on the prerogatives of the state. It’s a way, to some extent, of deepening the reach of the state and doing it slightly differently but still keeping the state and its institutions in the picture.

Now, my problem with the theory of technofeudalism is that it indirectly sidelines or makes less relevant other existing frameworks, including those within Marxism. Specifically, it tends to overlook questions related to imperialism and the dynamics between the hegemon and the global economy. For almost a century, the United States has been the hegemon, and this framework has been key to explaining the global system. By substituting that lens with one that focuses on how power is distributed between states and companies, technofeudalism misses an important aspect of the global system.

I think we’ve heard some of that from Cédric, where the analysis is based on understanding how the balance of power shifts between states and governments, and states and companies. This approach is fine, but it fundamentally misses the fact that not all states are alike in the current global system. The American state in particular deserves to be analyzed with a very different set of tools because it’s the hegemon. It plays the tune to which the rest of the world — maybe with a slight exception of China — has to dance.

So yes, we can talk about the effects of the privatization of money, the rise of stablecoins, and so on. But ultimately, if you look at the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, which they just passed this year, it’s clear what the Trump administration wanted with stablecoins. The aim is to entrench and prevent any contestation of the hegemony of the dollar. While there’s more trade done in other currencies, and BRICS has done a lot to challenge the US dollar, the Trump administration’s intervention in the crypto space is designed to ensure that everything in the crypto world, including stablecoins, is backed by US Treasuries or the US dollar. This is a clever way of preserving US financial hegemony, and it’s ultimately a state-driven project.

In that sense, it’s hard for me to look at what’s happening now and invoke technofeudalism, which doesn’t even presuppose the existence of the modern state with all its dynamics and competing interests. If we think about traditional feudalism, it didn’t involve the kind of state we have today.

Another issue I have with technofeudalism is that, because of the populist imperative built into it by figures like Varoufakis, it highly personalizes issues that should be understood through a systemic lens. To some extent, I think we hear this in Cédric’s remarks, where he talks about his mother being dependent on Google, comparing it to the dependency peasants had on feudal lords. I would argue that this is a very different kind of dependency.

The dependency on tech is systemic. It’s not that people are dependent on Google personally. It’s that the entire modern society expects people to be present online. You need an online profile to apply for a job, to participate in modern life. This is not because Eric Schmidt or Steve Jobs made you do it; it’s because of systemic pressure from an invisible force.

In that sense, the dependency that has emerged is very much like the dependency workers have on selling their labor power. It’s driven by capitalist competition and capital, not by the personal dependence on a feudal lord, where you were literally forced to do what you were doing by someone with a rifle or an arrow in their hand.

So, I don’t see why discussing dependency should necessarily lead us to conceptualize it as feudalism. The pressure is systemic, not personal. This is one of the many nuances that lead me to think that situating the discussion within the dynamics of capitalism would help us better understand what’s going on.

Lastly, I’d like to touch on the bulk of Cédric’s argument, which he didn’t have time to elaborate on, about how intellectual property and systemic factors like supply chain control allow tech companies like Amazon and Google to wield political power in a way that shields them from the pressures that normally affect capitalist firms. It’s no longer about the pressures of capital as such. It’s about their ability to exploit loopholes in intellectual property (IP) law or leverage structural power that doesn’t derive from market-based competition, which allows them to deepen their accumulation.

I think I’ve summarized this point correctly. Where I diverge from Cédric is that I believe that, ultimately, what prevents these firms from being contested is the sheer amount of capital needed to challenge them. If someone is prepared to mobilize that capital and survive all the political battles that come with it, they will succeed. And we’ve seen this happen in the last few years with Elon Musk. Musk decided he wanted to be a major player in AI, and he formed a company called xAI, mobilized $20 billion, and burned through that capital, hiring the best talent and building the most elaborate supercomputer in three months, instead of the two years that experts said it would take.

Now, xAI is a contender to OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini. Whatever we may say about Musk, this is a classic example of a capitalist mobilizing capital, spending it wisely, and circumventing bottlenecks like IP law, supply chains, and everything else that was thought to make companies like Google or Amazon indestructible. Musk’s company is forcing OpenAI and others to cut their prices because now Grok offers AI at a much cheaper price.

To me, this is a classic example of how a capitalist enters an industry by mobilizing enough capital to do so. Yes, you can build barriers with IP, and yes, you can use political power, but ultimately, capital is still the yardstick and criterion by which you measure success. In that sense, I don’t think we’ve departed from the logic of capital that has driven the capitalist economy for the last century or two.

Susan Watkins

Cédric, if I could ask you to address a couple of points — there’s a lot to unpack here. First, the absence of the state under feudalism is obviously a problem for the technofeudal analogy. Sovereignty was vested in the lord under pure feudalism, but once the absolutist state started to arise, feudalism began to decline. Towns grew, and so forth. So, how would you justify your analogy given the lack of a state under feudalism? Secondly, do we actually need feudalism here? We already have different forms of capitalist dependency. If feudalism is being invoked essentially as a rhetorical tool — perhaps being used more rhetorically by someone like Mélenchon or Yolanda Díaz than by you — do you think it’s successful as rhetoric? Don’t we need to meet these new tech capitalists on the terrain of the future, rather than evoking the moral horrors of the past?

Cédric Durand

There’s a lot to unpack in your question, so I’ll just address these two points.

First, concerning the state, I think this is, of course, a very important issue. And I’m always careful to say that I’m talking about a trend toward technofeudalism. I’m not claiming that we were in capitalism until 2008 and suddenly transitioned into feudalism. For that matter, we weren’t in feudalism until, say, the nineteenth century, and then in two years we were in capitalism. These are long processes. The changes in the mode of production don’t happen overnight; they are gradual.

My point is that state capacities have been drastically altered in recent years in a way that’s quite surprising. This change is calling into question the position of the state. An argument I’d make alongside this one is that, despite the trend toward technofeudalism, I don’t think it will be successful. We see that these tech giants are unable to manage their own internal competition.

The role of the state in capitalism, and its necessity, is to regulate competition between capitalists. If there is no mediation by the state, there is no way to regulate that competition. What we’re seeing now is a weakening of the state’s ability to mediate this competition. These capitalists are changing the rules themselves, taking on forms of sovereignty. Evgeny is correct in emphasizing the international dimension of this. The US state is definitely involved in this dynamic, but I’m not sure that by using the tech sector to try to expand or maintain US hegemony, it’s not also losing its own capacities to act as an autonomous state.

The question of currency is key here. The intention of the US government, with all its efforts to maintain the dollar’s hegemony, is clear. Despite contradictions, they’re trying to preserve their control by introducing things like stablecoins. But we know stablecoins will generate financial instability. They won’t be as reliable as traditional currencies, and as more stablecoins emerge, some big firms like Amazon will have more than others and currencies held by these companies will be preferred over the others. At that point, we will see the rise of a kind of autonomous monetary power — an economic power outside the control of the state. That’s the kind of mediation I see in the current system.

On the second point, about the rhetorical effect: The way I entered into the technofeudal hypothesis was to try to understand the problems created by globalization, financialization, stagnation, and so on. I wanted to make sense of that. I went back to the structuralist reasoning about the combination of social relations, which was very helpful for imagining the way we’re experiencing a reconfiguration of relations. So, that was purely analytical.

But of course, I was aware of the rhetorical power of the term “technofeudalism.” I weighed both the advantages and disadvantages of using it. And I think the advantages are significant. There are four main advantages that I would emphasize.

The first advantage is simply to stress the fact that capitalism is not eternal. Capitalism has a history and its form changes. We’re heading toward a form of the end of capitalism. The socialization process that Marx analyzed — this law of capital accumulation — means the more capital accumulates, the more interdependent we become, and the larger the means of controlling or organizing the labor process. We are in that process now. Big Tech, intellectual monopolization, and centralization of knowledge represent an extreme level of centralization. I think it’s crucial to stress this because it helps us recognize the limits of capitalist logic and where we’re headed.

The second advantage, and this has a Benjaminian flavor to it, is to highlight that this historical movement is not necessarily progress. In the 1990s, there was so much optimism about tech. But the term ‘technofeudalism’ also helps to remind us that this evolution of tech could be regressive. It could increase inequalities, weaken democracy, and erode personal freedoms.

The third point is more related to the structuring of the world economy. What’s not often discussed is that the development of the tech sector and the growing dependency of our economies on these services is leading to the colonization of Europe. It’s not just Latin America and Africa that are peripheries — Europe is now a periphery. The bills we pay to these tech companies are increasing rapidly each year, with cloud investments and other services costing companies and societies more. There’s a form of uneven exchange taking place and calling these relationships “technofeudal” helps to frame the need for an anti-technofeudal front. I think this concept also helps to enliven debates around digital sovereignty.

Finally, thinking about technofeudalism also stresses the diminishing capacity of states. The fact that these Big Tech companies are taking control of functions once held by the state is crucial. If states are no longer able to control infrastructure, the generation of statistics, or their own administrative processes, it raises serious questions about how we can imagine socialist policies driven by democratic governance at the state level.

So, in stressing this, I want to highlight the existential threat posed to the possibility of administering socialist policies through the apparatus of the state. Without state capacity to control these things, it’s hard to imagine any kind of socialist project that could use state power.

Susan Watkins

Do you see that as irrecuperable, the state as a socialist tool?

Cédric Durand

No, I don’t think that state capacity is irrecoverable. I’m very optimistic on this point. I would say that the state is a battlefield. We’ve lost many positions, but in the past, we won some. So, I think it’s still a field of struggle. There’s no such thing as eternal defeat.

Susan Watkins

Evgeny, do you want to respond to that? I mean, most of the time this evening, we’ve been discussing capital in its various forms, but Cédric has raised the question of labor and socialism. Do you want to respond to that?

Evgeny Morozov

Sure. Let me make a couple of points because I have some immediate responses to what Cédric was saying. I find it very hard to look at the evolution of Big Tech from, say, late 2016 to 2025, and think that somehow they’ve become more autonomous from the state or that they’ve accumulated more power to act independently.

Let me remind you, when the newly elected Trump administration passed its ban on Muslim countries, preventing people from those countries from coming to the United States, Sergey Brin, the cofounder of Google, went to San Francisco airport to protest those measures. That’s a major tech billionaire, someone from Silicon Valley. This is something completely unthinkable in 2025. Today, Sergey Brin would probably be providing services to drive those people to the airport to be deported.

In that sense, I see this industry, including Mark Zuckerberg — who, by the way, was also extremely antagonistic to Trump in the first administration — completely bending to the needs and imperatives of the second Trump administration. While I understand the hypothetical potential of Jeff Bezos creating stablecoins that might take power away from the Federal Reserve, the reality is that a few months ago, Bezos — who owns the Washington Post — said, “Look, we are going to fire all of our liberal, left-leaning columnists and just focus on discussing free markets and freedom.” That’s Jeff Bezos.

And why did he do that? Because the climate in Washington has changed. In actual — not hypothetical — terms, Silicon Valley has been tamed. This is thanks partly to the fact that the distribution of power within it has changed. People like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and many others — including Trump’s sons — have gained much more influence within the industry than they had in the first administration. They’ve managed to bring the rest of Silicon Valley with them.

But right now, I would still describe Silicon Valley as mostly subservient to the Trump project and not as representing any kind of autonomous departure from it.

Beyond that, there’s another point I want to make, and it’s more abstract. Listening to Cédric, again, I get the sense that there’s a bit of an idealization of the collective rationality of capitalists in the past, and that they somehow wanted to create stable, rational state institutions that would solve their own collective action problems.

So it’s as if they decided that they needed an independent statistics agency that wouldn’t be corrupted by private powers. And when that agency came into existence, it was great, but now it’s being threatened because something else has taken its place. I’m just not sure I buy that idyllic view of capitalists being so farsighted and insisting on ideal state institutions to solve their problems. Everything that Marx tells us about capitalists is that they are shortsighted and don’t think rationally about maintaining capitalism as a system. Instead, they follow their own profit-making logic. Sometimes they manage to find figures and institutions that solve some of their collective action problems. But that’s rare. More usually they require drastic interventions or crises to force them to change direction.

In that sense, I don’t see why capitalists would object to a private agency solving the coordination problems they have when it comes to statistical knowledge. That’s what they’ve been doing with Standard & Poor’s, Bloomberg, and many others, who’ve been providing commodified private information for decades — and not a single capitalist has complained. Of course, you could argue that data on roads is different from financial market data, but I don’t think capitalists care whether they get their data from Google Maps or from some kind of state-run cartographic agency.

My problem with theories of technofeudalism is that they project certain features and qualities onto both capitalists and the state that I think are either nonexistent, transitory, or not core features of either capitalism or the capitalist state. To me, this introduces nostalgia for productive capitalism that advocates of the neofeudalism thesis imagine as now becoming unproductive — and I don’t entirely buy this line of argument.

Maybe I missed what Cédric was saying about labor, so I’m happy to answer that question, but what was the entry point into the labor discussion?

Cédric Durand

I was stressing the fact that diminishing state capacities are structurally problematic for the realization of socialism.

Evgeny Morozov

I completely agree. If we are engaging in this hypothetical speculation, of course, it would be much better to be building socialism from a position where the state is democratically controlled and partly co-opted by capitalists, than if we’re talking about a mix of highly private fiefdoms — like the tech billionaires want to build on islands or in sea-states where everything is privatized, including the provision of basic services. They’ve even tried to implement this with private cities in Honduras and elsewhere. There are existing templates, if you will, for how some of this private governance could happen in the ideas of people like Curtis Yarvin and others who would like to take this model to the national and global state, making sure it’s not just private cities, but private nation-states. Yes, I agree that if these visions were to be realized than the task of building socialism would only become harder.

So, on that point, I agree. And that’s why the current moment matters. It’s important to understand which parts of the state can still be defended. But I just think that raising rhetorical points about the need to stop privatization or digitization or reverse the ecological cost of data centers, and so on, doesn’t get us to articulating an alternative vision that could be more appealing than the vision Silicon Valley has put forward — one of hyper-efficiency and a government able to issue certificates in a minute, rather than the hours or days it takes now.

These are the kinds of things that Musk and Thiel have been promoting in the United States in the last few months. In that sense, I think the problem on the Left isn’t so much the lack of effort or desire to reclaim these state functions, but the inability to articulate a coherent political project that matches the utopian zeal of Silicon Valley, with a completely different emancipatory dimension.

Having such a project would not only force the Left to be realistic, it would stop socialists from being so defensive, and I would even say, in some cases, reactionary. The Left can’t simply be a force that exists to defend a status quo achieved thirty, forty, or fifty years ago.

Susan Watkins

Cédric, what do you think?

Cédric Durand

Yes, I think that’s very true. We really need to rise to the task of imagining, or at least proposing, some way of thinking about alternative ways of organizing things that are not just defensive. In my view, the renewal of the debate is a good direction to go in. You can frame it in terms of democracy — democratizing choices related to the way we live, our lifestyle and how we live together. Building scenarios and deliberating about those scenarios is a way to decide what kind of society we want to build, to give us the power to choose how we live.

For me, planning consists of three main components. The first is deliberation — gathering to deliberate about various options and building scenarios. The second is collecting data and organizing the curation of those scenarios. Ecological accounting will be crucial in this process, but of course, it’s not the only element. The formulation of needs, for example, is also a part of it. And the third element, which I think is the key, is the socialization of investment. Right now, investment is completely driven by private choices, and that’s the way our lives are shaped. We need to have a say in the socialization of investment. This is what planning is about.

How do you socialize investment? There are many historical examples, but three immediate ways come to mind. One is to build public services. We know how to do that at the national level. The second is for the state to control the strategic heights of the economy, as China does, which shapes the kind of society you want. The third is to control the credit process by socializing credit. This will allow us to decide which sectors to build and which ones not to build, without needing to engage in predictive decisions about innovation, which can’t be effectively controlled from the center.

In these three dimensions — deliberation, data-gathering, and distributing investment based on those scenarios — society’s technological capabilities are transforming the planning debate. In the twentieth century, the planning debate was largely about knowledge: information gathering, articulation, and structuring. Many of those problems can now be solved using current technologies. However, and this is very important, we need to be aware that we don’t want to become just the automaton of technology in this planning process. We need to think about the limits of that process itself — limits in relation to nature and to our own lives.

Ecological accounting is essential here. The idea is to create a permanent inventory of nature, which will never be perfect, but its purpose is to set limits that we don’t want to cross in order to preserve nature’s autonomous movement. The second element is our own lives. We don’t want our lives to be completely automated. We may be happy to have them curated by algorithms, to have better satisfaction of our needs through coordination. But if we want to preserve some forms of autonomy, we need to work out the limits of the planning process.

Susan Watkins

And finally, does technology actually offer any processes for democratic investment and capital-raising?

Evgeny Morozov

Your question, I think, is a political one: how should we be framing the response to the legitimacy of the capitalist project? I do think that despite all of the systemic problems and holes in the capitalist system, the average person on the street, both in Europe and the United States, is still a believer in capitalism. I don’t think that offering them an option of a system that plans better and more democratically would necessarily make them question their faith in the capitalist dogma. Part of the reason is that capitalism today legitimizes itself slightly differently than it did in the 1930s or 1967.

I’m not going to take you through the entirety of the socialist calculation debate, which Cédric partly alluded to in his answer, but you surely know there’s been a long-running argument between socialist economists and capitalist economists about how to best organize the economy. Socialists have argued that we can plan or use some kind of market-planning process, but ultimately it will be about allocating goods in a way that doesn’t depend on market competition. They argue that the reliance on planning will result in a more rational, efficient, and socially just allocation of resources — solving an allocation problem.

Capitalists, and people like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who were very big participants in this debate, later joined by James M. Buchanan, insisted that the market was superior to any rationally directed system. They argued that socialism leads to gulags and that it couldn’t allocate resources efficiently. They believed that central planning would lead to waste and inefficiency, and that the knowledge circulating in the market — implicitly and explicitly — couldn’t be fully captured by central planners, leading to subpar outcomes.

I would argue that until maybe the early 1970s, the legitimacy of the capitalist project hinged on the ability of the capitalist market to allocate goods better. It was about markets utilizing knowledge and allocating goods in ways that didn’t lead to gulags but also didn’t result in inferior technologies or goods.

But from the early 1970s onward, there’s been a shift in the legitimation strategy of the capitalist system versus prospective socialist alternatives. It has to do with rethinking the role of the marketplace in democratic capitalism. The market has been reconceptualized not just as a more effective system for allocating goods, but as a system for satisfying the deepest aspirations of both consumers and entrepreneurs. It’s become a political system for allowing us to turn into more complex subjects by constantly experimenting with new techniques of production, new methods of consumption, articulating new tastes, experimenting with different identities, and exercising some moderate degree of sovereignty as both consumers and entrepreneurs.

For the period between the late 1970s and maybe the 2010s, this became one of the core legitimizing strategies of capitalism. If you read people like Buchanan, who got the Nobel Prize and is one of the founding fathers of neoliberalism, he’d tell you that the problem wasn’t simply logistical. Toward the end of his life he insisted that even if socialists managed to build computers and AI systems that would allow them to allocate goods more efficiently than markets, they still wouldn’t be able to deliver on capitalist promises of continuous self-invention and the chance to experience complexity that the market offers both consumers and entrepreneurs.

Basically, by the late 1990s, the shape of that legitimation strategy shifted to allow for very different functions that markets performed. These were functions that would be difficult to satisfy under planning because they’re not strictly economic or logistical functions. By 2010, there was an even greater innovation in that space, with Silicon Valley delivering a more profound way for capitalism to legitimize itself by promising that all of us can become hackers and creative workers. We could all build things in our little garages, tinker with stuff on our 3D printers, and express our creativity in new and better ways.

If you follow the rhetoric coming from, say, Relax or Anthropos, or Gemini, what they’re basically promising with LLMs, generative AI, and everything else is that they’ve lowered the costs for all of us to become experts in any field. These companies lead us to believe that everyone can now become the kind of craftsmen that people like Richard Sennett have been celebrating for the last two decades. So, how do you become a craftsman under modern conditions or contemporary capitalism? Well, you pay $20 or $200 a month to OpenAI and experiment with AI. Your creativity is mediated by a bunch of capitalist firms raising money from places like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are some way away from being oases of creativity.

From this perspective, I don’t think we’ll be able to wrest control over the narrative from a socialist standpoint by simply saying, “Look, you can be the equivalent of Steve Jobs if you just spend more time on ChatGPT.” We also won’t win people over by offering them the capacity to deliberate with others and plan better how garbage will be collected in their neighborhood.

To me, planning can satisfy a lot of other needs, but it doesn’t address the core of how the modern capitalist project legitimizes itself. And in that sense, I think it’s a problem for the Left. Continuing to double down on the idea that we can build a more just, rational, ecological, and allocative system, when capitalists do not see the market primarily as an allocative device, is misguided. They’re selling the market as a device for satisfying the needs that we’ve developed — needs that we want to express through politics, to build cultural and political institutions to deliver on the promise of liberating ourselves from the legacy of modernism.

In that sense, I think the task facing the Left is much deeper. The crisis of ideas on the Left is much more profound. I wish we could solve it by making planning more participatory, democratic, and ecological, but I don’t think that will solve the problem facing the Left.