By CEDRIC DURAND*
While capital traditionally invests to reduce costs or meet demand, techno-feudal capital invests to bring different areas of social activity under its control.
in the novel The man without qualities, set in Vienna on the eve of World War I, General Stumm von Bordwehr asks, “How can those directly involved in what is happening know in advance whether it will be a great event?” His answer is that “all they can do is pretend to themselves that it will be! And if I may be allowed a paradox, I would say that the history of the world is written before it happens; it always begins as a kind of gossip.”
Last week, with Donald Trump’s return to power, gossip was rife as tech giants gathered for the inauguration. Front-row seats were reserved for Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Tesla’s Elon Musk, while Apple’s Tim Cook, Open AI’s Sam Altman and Tik Tok’s Shou Zi Chew sat a few rows back.
A few years ago, the vast majority of these billionaires were open supporters of Joe Biden and the Democrats. “They were all with him,” Donald Trump recalled, “every one of them, and now they’re all with me.” The crucial question concerns the nature of this realignment: is it simply an opportunistic shift, within the same systemic parameters? Or are we facing a moment of rupture worthy of being called a great historical event? Let us risk the second hypothesis.
Donald Trump, as we know, enjoys extravagant gestures and tributes. When courtiers gather at his Mar-a-Lago mansion, doesn’t it look like a miniature Versailles? But the former president is no Louis XIV aspirant. His project is not to centralize authority in the state, but rather to strengthen private interests at the expense of public institutions. He is already seeking to reverse the incipient attempts at interventionism by the Joe Biden administration, repealing its green subsidies, antitrust policies and tax measures, thus expanding the scope of action of corporate monopolies at home and abroad.
Two of his executive orders, signed on Inauguration Day, underscore this trend. The first repealed a Biden-era mandate that required “developers of AI systems that pose risks to the national security, economy, health, or public safety of the United States to share the results of their safety tests with the U.S. government.” While government officials had previously had some say in advances at the cutting edge of AI, that minimal oversight has now been eliminated.
The second decree announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk. Based on a reorganization of the US Digital Services – established under Barack Obama to integrate information systems across different branches of government – DOGE will have unrestricted access to unclassified data from all government agencies.
Its first mission is to “reform the federal hiring process and restore merit to public service” by ensuring that state employees have a “commitment to American ideals, values, and interests” and “loyally serve the Executive Branch.” DOGE will also “integrate modern technologies” into this process, so that Elon Musk and his machines will have responsibility for political oversight of federal civilian employees.
In the early hours of Donald Trump’s second term, therefore, tech entrepreneurs have managed to shield their most lucrative projects from public scrutiny and, at the same time, significantly expand their influence over the state bureaucracy. The new administration is not interested in using the federal state to unify the ruling classes as part of a hegemonic strategy. On the contrary, it seeks to emancipate the most aggressive fraction of capital from any significant federal constraints, while forcing the administrative apparatus to submit to Elon Musk’s algorithmic control.
The increasing concentration of power in the hands of techno-oligarchs is by no means inevitable. In China, the relationship between the tech sector and the state is volatile, but the former is often forced to accommodate the development goals of the latter. In the West, public bodies have also occasionally faced corporate monopolies – such as Congress, the Treasury Department and the Fed all joined forces to block Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency project in 2021.
For economist Benoît Cœuré, “the mother of all issues is the balance of power between government and Big Tech in shaping the future of payments and controlling related data.” But Donald Trump is now tilting that balance even further in Big Tech’s favor. In a series of executive orders, he has taken steps to instruct regulators to boost investment in cryptocurrencies while preventing central banks from developing their own digital currencies, which could act as a counterweight. We can expect more of these policies in the future: deregulation, tax breaks, government contracts, and legal protections.
This radical project, undertaken by the world’s greatest power, could have serious implications for redefining the relationship between capital and the state, classes and countries, for many years to come. It threatens to accelerate a process that I have elsewhere described as ‘techno-feudalization’. As large corporations monopolize knowledge and data, they centralize the algorithmic means of coordinating human activities – from working practices to social media use and consumer habits.
With public institutions increasingly incapable of organizing society, this task is passed on to Big Tech, which is acquiring an extraordinary capacity to influence individual and collective behavior. The public sphere is thus dissolved into online networks, monetary power is shifting to cryptocurrencies, and Artificial Intelligence is colonizing what Marx called the “general intellect,” heralding the progressive appropriation of political power by private interests.
The weakening of mediating institutions goes hand in hand with an antidemocratic impulse, or rather, a hatred of equality. Since the publication of the techno-optimistic manifesto “Cyberspace and the American Dream” in 1994, large parts of Silicon Valley have embraced the Randian principle that pioneering creators cannot be constrained by collective rules. The entrepreneur has the right to ride roughshod over weaker beings who threaten to constrain him: workers, women, racial minorities, and trans people.
Hence the rapid rapprochement between Californian liberals and the far right, with Musk and Zuckerberg now presenting themselves as cultural warriors fighting to turn back the tide of “wokeness.” Algorithmic governmentality enshrines the right to “innovate” without any accountability to the demos.
This emerging accumulation regime also replaces the logic of production and consumption with the logic of predation and dependence. Although the appetite for surplus remains as voracious as in previous periods of capitalism, Big Tech’s profit motive is unique. While capital traditionally invests to reduce costs or meet demand, techno-feudal capital invests to bring different areas of social activity under its control, creating a dynamic of dependency that entangles individuals, companies, and institutions.
This is partly because the services Big Tech offers are not commodities like other services. They are often critical infrastructure that society depends on. Microsoft’s massive outage in the summer of 2024 was a stark reminder that airports, hospitals, banks, government agencies and more now rely on these technologies — allowing monopolists to charge exorbitant rents and generate endless streams of monetizable data.
The end result of this process is widespread stagnation in the global economy. Profitable enterprises in other sectors are seeing their market position weaken as they become more dependent on the cloud and AI, while the population as a whole is subject to the predations of rentier capital. The techno-feudalists’ immense need for resources is also leading to increasing ecological destruction, with new high-carbon data centers springing up around the world. As growth slows, political polarization and economic inequality are deepening, with workers competing for an ever-shrinking share of wealth.
This raises several strategic questions for the left. How does the fight against Big Tech relate to other existing anti-capitalist struggles? How should we think about internationalism in an era in which techno-feudal power transcends national borders?
Here it might be worth keeping in mind Mao's main precepts in the classic about the contradiction (1937), skilfully summarized by Slavoj Žižek: “The main (universal) contradiction does not supersede the contradiction that must be treated as dominant in a particular situation – the universal dimension literally resides in this particular contradiction. In each concrete situation, a different ‘particular contradiction’ is the predominant one, in the precise sense that in order to win the struggle for the resolution of the main contradiction, one must treat a particular contradiction as the predominant one, to which all other struggles must be subordinated.”
Today, the universal contradiction remains that of capitalist exploitation, which pits capital against living labor. However, the techno-feudal offensive represented by Donald Trump and Elon Musk could change this situation, creating a new, fundamental contradiction between American Big Tech and those they exploit. If we reach that point, the task of the Left would change drastically.
Taking China’s colonial wars as an example, Mao explains that “when imperialism launches a war of aggression against such a country, the various classes within that country, with the exception of a small number of traitors to the nation, can temporarily unite in a national war against imperialism. The contradiction between imperialism and the country in question then becomes the principal contradiction, and all the contradictions between the various classes within the country (including the previously principal contradiction between the feudal system and the masses of the people) temporarily recede into the background and assume a subordinate position.”
In our context, this would mean forming an anti-techno-feudal front that goes beyond the left, including diverse democratic forces and fractions of capital in conflict with Big Tech. This hypothetical movement could adopt what we could call a 'non-aligned digital policy', with the aim of creating an economic space outside the domain of monopolies, where alternative technologies could be developed.
This, in turn, would entail a form of digital protectionism—denying access to U.S. tech companies and dismantling their infrastructure wherever possible—as well as a new digital internationalism, in which people would cooperatively share technological solutions.
Of course, such an alliance would need to confront several structural barriers. Given the complex interpenetration of capitalist interests, with investments linked to each other across different sectors and territories, it is difficult to determine which fractions of capital are most aligned with Big Tech and which could be pressured to participate in such a movement.
There is also the fact that national bourgeoisies are notoriously unreliable partners when it comes to development projects outside the imperial core; they are often more interested in increasing their own rentier wealth than in promoting the kind of structural change that would end dependency. And there is also the risk that, even if such a pooling of forces were possible, an anti-techno-feudal front would be vulnerable to bureaucratic capture – entrusting the development of digital alternatives to experts rather than actively involving the popular masses.
But the tech billionaires have their own obstacles to overcome. Their agenda—using an alliance with Donald Trump to break down the last remaining obstacles to algorithmic control—has an extremely narrow social base, and the speed at which it moves is sure to generate resistance from both the general population and elites.
It must also contend with China’s digital prowess, as rival companies such as DeepSeek seek to undermine Silicon Valley’s image of invincibility. Could American techno-feudalism then prove to be a fragile Leviathan? Will Donald Trump’s return to power be remembered as a “major event,” or will it be mere gossip?
*Cedric Durand is a professor at the University of Sorbonne Paris-North. Author, among other books, of Techno-Féodalisme: Critique de l'économie numérique (Discovery).
Translation: Julio Tude d'Avila.
Originally posted on the blog Sidecar of the magazine New Left Review.
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