How Amazon turned our capitalist era of free markets into the age of technofeudalism | Yanis Varoufakis

For the past six years, every Black Friday – that made-up carnival of consumption – Amazon workers and their allies have mobilised across the world in coordinated strikes and protests. At first glance, these disputes look like the standard struggle between a giant capitalist employer and the people who keep it running. But Amazon is no ordinary corporation. It is the clearest expression of what I call technofeudalism: a new economic order in which platforms behave like lords owning the fiefs that have replaced markets.

To appreciate Amazon’s extraordinary power, we must recall the system it is helping to bury. Capitalism relied on markets and profit. Firms invested in productive capital, hired workers, produced commodities and lived or died by profit and loss. But the emerging order is one in which the most powerful capitalist firms have exited that market altogether. They own the digital infrastructure that everyone else must use to trade, work, communicate and live.

Amazon sits at the apex of this new order because it owns the cloud computing platform – Amazon Web Services (AWS) – upon which other technological firms, such as Uber, rely, but also large parts of banking, healthcare, logistics, public administration, media and education sectors. Once these businesses are embedded in AWS, switching costs become prohibitive. Firms thus become vassals on Amazon’s vast cloud fief and surrender their customers’ data. In 2020, the European commission charged Amazon with using the sales data of other sellers to illegally gain an advantage in the European marketplace.

Amazon fuses logistics, cloud infrastructure, data extraction and algorithmic command into one vertically integrated system. Inside Amazon’s warehouses, technofeudal domination takes a more visceral form. Workers are subjected to minute-by-minute surveillance: handheld scanners and other devices track their movements; algorithms measure their pace, track productivity and monitor behaviour. Amazon, however, has said that claims of excessive surveillance are “factually incorrect” and any recording was necessary for ensuring safety and efficiency in its operations.

Consumers, too, are drawn into the system. Each click, scroll, search and purchase on Amazon trains its algorithms to predict our needs and manipulate our desires. We, effectively, labour so that Amazon’s cloud capital accumulates. Each time we buy, Amazon can take as much as 40% of the sale price from the sellers in what I call cloud rents.

Governments have a job, ostensibly, to regulate behemoths such as Amazon, but they are also becoming its serfs as public institutions run their data and communications on Amazon servers. According to the Guardian, key ministerial departments that have contracts with AWS include the Home Office, Department for Work and Pensions, HMRC, the Ministry of Justice, the Cabinet Office and Defra.

Unsurprisingly, cloud capital has invaded battlefields and the shadowy world of surveillance. Amazon Rekognition, launched in 2016, was aimed at law-enforcement bodies including ICE in the US. Palantir – the surveillance firm that produces software used in everything from counter-terrorism to predictive policing to ICE’s deportation machine – has a partnership with AWS. Amazon is also directly involved in Project Nimbus, the 2021 cloud contract through which Amazon and Google provide the Israeli state with advanced cloud computing, AI and secure data storage.

Amazon is a technofeudal rentier owning the digital infrastructure on which privateers, states and societies depend. Thankfully, there are signs of a pushback. The campaign that brings workers and citizens together every Black Friday – Make Amazon Pay – recognises this transformation. What began as a fight for workers’ rights has grown into a coalition of unions, climate campaigners, tax justice groups, digital rights advocates and migrant and Palestine solidarity networks. They understand that Amazon’s reach extends across logistics, finance, governance, ecological destruction, surveillance and war.

Its demands – decent wages, safe workplaces, collective bargaining, climate action, tax justice, curbs on Amazon’s vast water consumption, an end to its entanglement with surveillance agencies and military operations – are integrated. Together, they map the much needed unified resistance to technofeudal domination.

In the early decades of industrial capitalism, cross-border worker solidarity was hard. Today, the resistance to cloud capital can use its own tools to coordinate at planetary scale. Campaigns such as Make Amazon Pay offer a glimpse of the alliances required to confront our new cloudalist overlords. It may be only a beginning – but it is a hopeful one.

• Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25 and the author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism