Juan Villoro
In 1946, true to his craft, automotive engineer Louis Réard invented a way to stop traffic: the bikini. The name of the garment came from the atoll where atomic bombs were tested. In a world dominated by men, an explosive condition was attributed to the female body.
Advertising took full advantage of the bikini to attract male consumers, demonstrating that people stop thinking and blinking for primitive reasons. Women, understood as “housewives,” received other “offers of interest”: household appliances. Cinema, radio, the record industry, and television had such a distracting effect that advertising explored new ways to attract attention.
Eighty years later, the digital revolution has created people whose normality consists of being distracted. If someone visits a web page for two minutes, it is a success for programmers. Content has become effervescent.
The latest book by Yanis Varoufakis, former Minister of Economy of Greece, addresses a unique topic: the wealth generated by attention. Technofeudalism: The Stealthy Successor to Capitalism posits that we have transitioned to another mode of production, one that no longer relies on the control of goods, but rather on the rents paid for access to the cloud.
In a splendid interview with Venezuelan journalist Boris Muñoz, Varoufakis states: “All tyrannies begin with a promise of liberation.” The internet emerged as a means of democratizing information, but it gradually turned users into commodities.
Companies such as General Electric and ExxonMobil used to allocate 80 percent of their resources to salaries; today, Big Tech companies allocate only one percent for the simple reason that we do most of the work, contributing content and increasing the statistical value of the platforms.
No government can do without Google or YouTube. This gives digital consortia excessive power: “Capital has always made governments dance to its tune,” says Varoufakis, adding that the cloud “can directly control our minds on behalf of its owners.”
Adam Smith referred to the “invisible hand” that regulates the market. That divinity of liberalism has been replaced by another: the algorithm. Machines know what we want. The new economy is based on controlling the behavior of others.
According to the former Greek minister, the expansion of Big Tech was made possible by two phenomena: they took over users’ identities and benefited from the 2008 financial collapse (with the economy at a standstill, much of the $700 billion that the U.S. government created as a bailout fund went to technological development). In this way, public resources boosted a sector that is now more powerful than the government.
The pandemic emphasized technological dependence. According to Medscape, screen time increased by 52 percent among the most active users: those under 18.
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” famously said Fredric Jameson, literary critic and Marxist theorist. Varoufakis seeks to imagine that end: free enterprise is already dominated by a handful of techno-feudal lords. However, he also predicts the end of this new era: “Capital in the cloud does not produce any tangible product”; it operates parasitically, feeding on collective behavior, and will cease to exist when it has no more customers to exploit. It will die “for the same reason that a lethal virus dies when it kills all its hosts.”
In the meantime, what can the unsuspecting citizen who has already entrusted their dreams to their operating system do? In line with Condorcet, Varoufakis comments that the secret of power lies not in the minds of the oppressors but in those of the oppressed. The digital age has generated a peculiar, happy submission, where slavery is experienced as entertainment. Breaking out of the vicious circle means thinking for oneself.
The great planetary booty is human attention. The species that in the atomic age was captivated by the bikini and the automatic washing machine lives in a state of permanent alienation, watching kittens on TikTok.
In this environment, anyone who still manages to concentrate qualifies as a dissident.
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