Having finished Technofeudalism, I’ve moved on to Society of the Spectacle, which has me thinking.
They say no one escapes the Spectacle. Guy Debord made sure of that. His vision was airtight, his diagnosis terminal: we are all spectators now, alienated from our labour, our time, our own damn lives. It was a metaphysical mugging—existence held hostage by images, by commodities dressed in drag. The future was a feedback loop, and we were all doomed to applaud.
But what if the loop could be hacked?
What if the infinitely halved distances of motionless critique—Zeno’s Paradox by way of Marx—could finally be crossed?
Enter: Yanis Varoufakis.
Economist, ex-finance minister, techno-cassandra with a motorbike and a vendetta.
Where Debord filmed the catastrophe in black-and-white, Varoufakis showed up with the source code.
Debord’s Limbo
Debord saw it all coming. The substitution of reality with its photogenic simulacrum. The slow death of agency beneath the floodlights of consumption. But like Zeno’s paradox, he could only gesture toward the end without ever reaching it. Each critique halved the distance to liberation but never arrived. The Spectacle remained intact, omnipresent, and self-replicating—like an ontological screensaver.
He gave us no path forward, only a beautiful, ruinous analysis. A Parisian shrug of doom.
Varoufakis’ Shortcut
But then comes Varoufakis, breaking through the digital labyrinth not by philosophising the Spectacle, but by naming its successor: Technofeudalism.
See, Debord was chasing a moving target—a capitalism that morphed from industrial to financial to semiotic faster than his prose could crystallise. But Varoufakis caught it mid-mutation. He pinned it to the slab and sliced it open. What spilled out wasn’t capital anymore—it was rent. Platform rent. Algorithmic tolls. Behavioural taxes disguised as convenience. This isn’t the market gone mad—it’s the market dissolved, replaced by code-based fiefdoms.
The paradox is resolved not by reaching utopia, but by realising we’ve already crossed the line—we just weren’t told. The market isn’t dying; it’s already dead, and we’re still paying funeral costs in monthly subscriptions and attention metrics.
From Spectacle to Subjugation
Debord wanted to unmask the performance.
Varoufakis realised the theatre had been demolished and replaced with a server farm.
You don’t watch the Spectacle anymore. It watches you.
It optimises you.
It learns your keystrokes, your pulse rate, your browsing history.
Welcome to feudal recursion, where Amazon is your landlord, Google your priest, and Meta your confessor.
Solving Zeno the Varoufakis Way
So how does one cross the infinite regress of alienation?
Simple. You call it what it is. You reclassify the terrain.
“This is not capitalism,” Varoufakis says, in the tone of a man pulling a mask off a Scooby-Doo villain.
“It’s technofeudalism. Capital didn’t win. It went feudal. Again.”
By doing so, he bypasses the academic ballet that has critics forever inching closer to the truth without touching it. He calls the system new, not to sell books, but to make strategy possible. Because naming a beast is the first step in slaying it.
In Conclusion: Debord Dreamed, Varoufakis Drives
Debord haunts the museum.
Varoufakis raids the server room.
Both are essential. But only one gives us a new map.
The Spectacle hypnotised us.
Technofeudalism enslaves us.
And if there’s a way out, it won’t be through slogans spray-painted on Parisian walls. It will be built in code, deployed across decentralised networks, and carried forward by those who remember what it meant to be not watched.
Let Debord whisper. Let Varoufakis roar.
And let the rest of us sharpen our blades.
Philosophics 