With talk of ‘techno-feudalism’ in the air, in our August issue Evgeny Morozov asks: is the digital revolution really taking us back to the Middle Ages? Picking through the work of Yanis Varoufakis and Shoshana Zuboff, Morozov writes that the ‘techno-feudal fairy tale obscures the actual horror story’: ‘Big Tech’s dominance is the culmination of a 70-year project whereby Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the Pentagon systematically crushed any nation that dared imagine technological independence.’ He notes that far from being somehow intangible, the services provided by tech oligarchs are built on material infrastructure — as Guillaume Pitron and Hervé Le Crosnier noted in 2021 and 2008 respectively.
Every month, we give ‘the longer view’ on the topics explored in the latest edition of the paper — from the cruise industry and Japanese communism to the role of emigration in building a far-right voter base. The entire archive is available, online, to subscribers.
