<<Here at The Hinternet we have come to believe that no matter how eager many are today to acknowledge that the transformations currently underway are “a big deal”, just how big a deal they are is almost always understated. It seems to us, in fact, that not only is capitalism likely to survive the present changes, but that it is the only thing that will. It will survive mostly by cutting human beings out of the picture altogether as economic agents, transforming them instead into something much more like a natural resource. In this respect, pace Varoufakis, if in certain respects cloud capitalism reintroduces certain features of feudalism, we would do best to understand the great majority of human beings living today not as analogous to feudalism’s serfs, but to feudalism’s cabbage, turnips, and beets.

The problem is not that we are forced to farm the land —i.e., fill the cloud with our data as an activity akin to labor—, but that we are ourselves being farmed. In this respect, while we always hate to take recourse to trendy academic terminology, we cannot help but suspect that technofeudalism is in fact better described as posthuman capitalism. In industrial capitalism human beings created profit by working the machines. In posthuman capitalism the machines create profit by farming the human beings. We realize this sounds a bit too pithy —like one of those switch-a-roos Chairman Mao used to love to perform to get the peasants hooked on his wit and wisdom—, but we believe we can flesh it out in language that will make our contention broadly plausible.>>