I recently posted that I was reading Yanis Varoufakis’ (2023) Technofeudalism and have discussed Günther Anders too. Below Anders and Varoufakis seem to be saying something very similar, though one is referring to TV/Radio as opposed to algorithms. Through each, we commodify ourselves and effectively work ‘for free’ as we engage with (and serve) those media. There are subtle differences and subsequent transformations, of course, but the process of commodifying human behaviour, as Anders shows, began decades ago. Varoufakis suggests that ‘cloud capitalism’ is doing something new and unprecedented, but (as much I am enjoying Varoufakis’ book and very much appreciate his ability to acknowledge difficult paradoxes), my tendency to stand back and look at what’s happening from a distance makes me suspicious that what he’s identifying is as he says unprecedented, even though I see there are, of course, intense developments.
Here are two passages, one from each, that describe how humans are unwittingly complicit in the commodification of their time, activities, their very selves.
“… capital can command us in unprecedented ways, the key to grasping cloud capital’s special nature, as we shall see, is the way it reproduces itself – and its power to command – a process that is very different to the one that reproduces hammers, steam engines and television networks. Here is a glimpse of what makes cloud capital so fundamentally new, different and scary: capital has hitherto been reproduced within some labour market – within the factory, the office, the warehouse. Aided by machines, it was waged workers who produced the stuff that was sold to generate profits, which in turn financed their wages and the production of more machines – that’s how capital accumulated and reproduced. Cloud capital, in contrast, can reproduce itself in ways that involve no waged labour. How? By commanding almost the whole of humanity to chip in to its reproduction – for free! (2003, Varoufakis: 79/80 (my italics)).
As I read Varoufakis’ suggestions that cloud capital can now reproduce itself without waged labour, I’m reminded of the enduring habit of dividing the world into mind and body, language and matter – a form of dualism that, unlike paradox, separates and isolates forces that might otherwise co-exist. Paradox allows conflicting forces to exist in the same space, to inform and transform one another through feedback loops. Dualism, by contrast, insists on distinction and hierarchy. This matters because the idea that cloud capital is fundamentally different from material capital risks reinforcing the very split I tend to argue against: the split between language (or code, or algorithm) and matter. Language has never existed apart from matter – not under any circumstances, unless one believes in a divine, immaterial origin (to think, one must be embodied, to speak one needs breath or fingers if signing, to read, one must have eyes or be able to feel and the text/signs must be on a paper, or a screen, or in the shape of a burning bush). It’s a difficult position to defend, not least because dualism is so deeply embedded in our thinking, in our syntax, in the metaphors we use to make sense of the world. We cannot speak – perhaps not even think – without invoking some version of it. But this is precisely why I remain suspicious of arguments that treat digital or “cloud” forms of capital as if they were somehow disembodied or post-material. For me, they are not ruptures from the past, but rather continuations – reconfigured, yes, but always sedimented in and through material life.
And so to Anders…
“Everyone knows that the industry has abandoned its postulate of centralization, which was the indisputable model some thirty years ago, most often for strategic reasons, in favor of the principle of “dispersion”. It is not contradictory that this principle of dispersion should be valid today for the production of the mass-man. And I say, for his production, despite the fact that we have so far spoken only of dispersed consumption. But this leap from consumption to production is justified here because both coincide in a certain way, since (in a non-materialistic sense) man “is what he eats”: mass-men are produced because they consume mass products; this implies at the same time that the consumer of mass-produced commodities, through his consumption, becomes a collaborator in the production of the mass-man (that is, he becomes a collaborator in the process of transforming himself into a mass-man). Thus, consumption and production coincide here. If consumption “is dispersed”, so too is the production of the mass-man. And this takes place wherever consumption takes place: in the presence of every radio and every television. In a certain way, each individual is employed and occupied as a domestic worker. It is true, of course, that he is a domestic worker of a very unusual type, because of the nature of his work: his self-transformation into a mass-man through his consumption of mass-produced commodities, that is, through his leisure. Whereas the classical domestic worker made products in order to assure himself of a minimum of consumer goods and leisure, today’s domestic worker consumes a maximum number of leisure products in order to collaborate in the production of the mass-man. The process is completely paradoxical insofar as the domestic worker, instead of being paid for this collaboration, must even pay for it himself; especially for the means of production (the radio or television and, in many countries, even for the broadcasts), by the use of which he allows himself to be transformed into the mass-man. He therefore pays to sell himself; even his lack of freedom—which lack he has helped to bring about—he must obtain by buying it, since it, too, has been transformed into a commodity. (Section 2, Anders, 1956 (my italics)).
The key phrase in Varoufakis is that capital is accumulated without waged labour. (Just as language cannot exist without matter, capital could not accumulate without humans at all – if/as machines take over many interactions, it will indeed continue to need human flesh and behaviours – as workers, consumers, data sources, or, in the most horrific of examples, as ‘stock’, as seen in the revolting prison/concentration camp business model perpetuated by the US which has just signed over $45 billion to ICE.) Although one might conclude that Anders says leisure is revealed to be work disguised and Varoufakis suggests that leisure and work are no longer distinguishable, both describe a collapse between the two and a system that feeds off any and all our activities (paid work, but also, love, sex, illness, watching TV, scrolling online, etc).
An LLM explains the subtle difference but which effectively amounts to the same:
Varoufakis emphasises the totality (there’s no escape – everything is value generation)
Anders emphasizes the deception (you think you’re relaxing but you’re actually working)
I asked an LLM to summarise core similarities and differences and to argue against me where necessary. Here is a summary of its conclusions:
While both Günther Anders and Yanis Varoufakis diagnose how individuals perform unpaid labour that reproduces capitalism—transforming consumption into a productive activity and commodifying themselves—they differ in their analyses. Anders focuses on the production of standardised subjectivity through ideological shaping, whereas Varoufakis emphasises the extraction of individualised data to enable predictive manipulation. Although Varoufakis claims that “cloud capitalism” is unprecedented, many of its dynamics—such as the collapse of leisure into labour and the domestic sphere as a site of exploitation—were already anticipated by Anders. Nonetheless, cloud capitalism represents a qualitative intensification, marked by data as capital’s primary substance, real-time behavioural modulation, and partial independence from waged labour. Thus, Varoufakis’ framework both extends and radicalises processes Anders first identified, while introducing new technical and economic configurations.
For me, what seems to matter is that we resist thinking in linear terms, as this tends to produce a parochial perspective — one that detaches technological developments from the historical conditions in which they emerged. Anders (as I’ve noted before) critiques this tendency explicitly in Section 7 of The Obsolescence of Man, where he argues that television and radio flatten and homogenise difference under the guise of egalitarianism:
“The method allegedly intended to bring the object close to us, actually serves to veil the object, to alienate it, or simply to do away with it altogether. Indeed, it does away with it, since the past, by being projected onto the single plane of the world of pals and chums, has actually ceased to exist qua history—and this is perhaps even more plausible than our general thesis, that when all the various and variously distant regions of the world are brought equally close to us, the world as such vanishes.”
We are atomised, distanced and separated from each other and from time. (Of course, we are time, but that’s another blog, perhaps!)
To view time more materially is to understand it – and the events from which it is constituted – in sedimentary rather than linear terms. The past, in this sense, does not disappear but persists as a layered, still-active presence, retaining its distance (or alterity), and contextualising the emergence of what often looks and feels like a seamless and Universal Now. Perhaps such a view has the potential to make us less vulnerable to the kind of hyperbolic shock that social media, especially, loves to generate. This may leave us with the cognitive resources needed to cope with, and respond to, the multiple interrelated challenges we face today rather than acting out in all directions.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that Varoufakis is guilty of not contextualising – quite the opposite. Indeed, he goes to great lengths to present us with the history. But the habit of linearity is so deeply ingrained (as Marshall McLuhan explains at length throughout his work). To think along a straight line seems ‘natural’, while my ongoing project seems to explore ways to resist this flattening of time, difference, and historical depth. And I suppose ultimately, this means, I really need to consider how that might be performed in the ‘artworks’ I produce.
Refs:
American Immigration Council. (2025) ‘Congress Approves Unprecedented Funding for Mass Detention and Deportation in 2025’, American Immigration Council. Available at: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/press-release/congress-approves-unprecedented-funding-mass-detention-deportation-2025/ (Accessed: 7July 2025
Anders, G. (1956) The obsolescence of man, vol I , part 2: The world as phantom and as matrix: philosophical considerations on radio and television – Günther Anders | libcom.org. Translated by J.M. Pérez. Available at: https://libcom.org/article/obsolescence-man-vol-i-part-2-world-phantom-and-matrix-philosophical-considerations-radio (Accessed: 25 June 2025).
McLuhan, M. (2010) Understanding media: the extensions of man. (Repr) London: Routledge.
Varoufakis, Y. (2023) Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. London: Penguin.
Edit (11/7/25): A couple of useful reviews of Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism: