How the West Bungled Its Way into Technofeudalism

History doesn’t repeat itself, but, my God, it certainly rhymes — badly, and in the case of America’s self-immolation vis-à-vis China, completely off-key.

Yanis Varoufakis’ brutal dissection in Technofeudalism reads like a coronial report on the West’s terminal idiocy:
We’re not watching the rise of a “new China threat” — we’re watching the dying spasms of a clownish empire losing to its own creation: cloud capital.

A Recap for the Attention-Deficit West:

Once upon a time (i.e., post-WWII), America ran a magnificent scam: sell the world things — aeroplanes, refrigerators, good old-fashioned stuff — in exchange for gold. When America became a deficit country (buying far more than it sold), it pivoted brilliantly:
“No more gold, peasants. Here, have an IOU instead.”
Thus was born the Dollar Empire: a global system where America got to run enormous deficits, foreigners got paper promises, and everyone smiled through gritted teeth.

Fast-forward: Japan, Korea, China — they got in line. They built things, exported things, grew rich — and recycled all their lovely profits straight into American property, debt, and Wall Street snake oil.
Win-win!
(Except for the workers on both sides, who were flogged like medieval peasants, but who’s counting?)

The Minotaur Has a Stroke

Then came 2008: America’s financial system committed hara-kiri on live television.
China stepped up to save global capitalism (yes, really), jacking up investment to absurd levels, buying up Western assets, and quietly building something far more dangerous than steelworks and solar panels: cloud finance.

While the West was still dry-humping neoliberal fantasies about “free markets,” China fused Big Tech and Big Brother into a seamless, sprawling surveillance-finance-entertainment-behavioural-modification apparatus.
Think Facebook, Amazon, Citibank, your GP, your car insurance, and your government — all rolled into one app.
Welcome to WeChat World™ — population: everyone.

The New Cold War: Idiots vs Strategists

Enter Trump. And Biden. And the bipartisan realisation, delivered with all the subtlety of a pub brawl, that China’s Big Tech wasn’t just mimicking Silicon Valley — it was obliterating it.
TikTok wasn’t just teenagers dancing. It was dollar extraction without the need for US trade deficits or dollar supremacy.

Cue blind panic. Ban Huawei! Ban TikTok! Ban chips! Ban thought!
Meanwhile, Beijing smiled, nodded, and built its own chips, its own cloud, its own digital currency.
When the US froze Russian central bank assets in 2022, it unwittingly told every finance minister from Delhi to Dakar:
“Your money isn’t safe with us.”
Oops.

The Chinese digital yuan — a once quaint science project — suddenly looked like the lifeboat on a burning ship.
Guess which way the rats are swimming?

Europe: Toasted, Buttered, and Eaten

As for Europe? Bless them. Still fantasising about “strategic autonomy” while chained to America’s collapsing empire like a loyal spaniel.
Europe lacks cloud capital, lacks industrial capacity, and now — post-Ukraine, post-energy crisis — lacks even the pretence of relevance.
Germany, France, the Netherlands: mere franchisees of American technofeudal overlords.

Brussels’ vision for the future?
“Please sir, may we remain a respectable vassal state?”

The Global South: Choose Your Feudal Lord

The so-called “developing world” faces an even grimmer menu:

• Pledge allegiance to Washington’s dying dollar-based cloud fief?
• Or become serfs under Beijing’s emerging digital rentier aristocracy?
  Either way, the crops are taxed, the wells are privatised, and the commons are torched.

Development? Don’t make me laugh. The South has been invited to another game of “Heads they win, tails you starve.”

Technofeudalism: A Lovable New Hell

Meanwhile, back in the heartlands of Empire, cloudalists — Google, Amazon, Tencent, Alibaba — are fencing off reality itself.
You will own nothing, subscribe to everything, and feed their algorithms while praying for a dopamine hit.
Democracy?
A charming relic, like powdered wigs and carrier pigeons.

In a final, cosmically ironic twist, it turns out that the only force keeping China’s cloudalists in check is… the Chinese Communist Party itself.
Yes, dear liberals: the last faint flicker of “people power” resides under authoritarian rule, while the “free world” rolls over like a half-seduced Victorian maiden.