Racing Forward into the Past

The year 2021 marked the 400th anniversary of the Banda massacres in Indonesia, when the army of the Dutch East India Company massacred the Bandanese in a brutal campaign designed to secure a monopoly over the global nutmeg trade. If the histories of colonialism teach us anything, it is that the excesses of capitalism and economic exploitation have spawned crises that ‘affected communities’ wrestle with – not merely as social memory, but as a living ordeal, of persisting marginalities and vulnerabilities. Which is why Southern scholarship is somewhat skeptical about more recent, Eurocentric analyses of the polycrisis.

From the nutmeg monopoly to the ingredients of today’s digital economy, there are many continuities in the ideas of coloniality and crisis. Fast forward from the 16th century to the epoch of the tech barons, and we are really looking at layers of complexity in which inequality and exploitation are the normalized order of things. The core relations of power have remained in force, and if anything, they now seem once more to appear in their older forms.

Yanis Varoufakis, Greek politician and economist, refers to this paradigm of a contemporary, tech-dominated market society as ‘technofeudalism’. The idea being that, far from transitioning from capitalism to something better, we are slipping into a system where tech companies function like modern feudal lords.

Yanis Varoufakis, Greek politician and economist, refers to this paradigm of a contemporary, tech-dominated market society as ‘technofeudalism‘. The idea being that, far from transitioning from capitalism to something better, we are slipping into a system where tech companies function like modern feudal lords. Varoufakis argues that since the 2008 financial crisis, our economic system has fundamentally changed. Cloud, big data, and digital platforms have become the “land” of this new era, controlled by tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta. These companies, Varoufakis contends, influence our behaviors and choices in ways that are not as voluntary as we might believe. Just as medieval lords controlled land and labor, tech companies wield immense power over data and access to digital spaces. This consolidation of power, sustained by central banks and governments, mirrors the feudal structure of old, where a few elites control the resources that everyone else depends on.

This is why structural justice today is really about dealing with infrastructural power.

The Dark Side of ‘Openness’ 

This seemingly odd coincidence of the most advanced frontiers of technology and the most archaic of social relations is not limited to economic behavior either. Rather, in the rather short arc of change into the digital epoch, we seem to be confronted with a tragicomedy – a bewildering typology of neo-illberalism. Silicon Valley’s tech bros (you will recall one of them put out a call early this year for the tech industry to be more “masculine”) want to control global politics in directions that take us back to the barbaric ages of unabashed greed and utter lawlessness.

Zuckerberg captured the deliberate absurdity of profiteering from hate very well when he shut down fact-checking units and said that it is old-fashioned to regulate free speech.

The ideology of right-wing illiberalism and a specific variety in Trumpism–nativistic jingoism without any regard for economic reality–fits snugly into the contradictions of technofeudal capitalism. Zuckerberg captured the deliberate absurdity of profiteering from hate very well when he shut down fact-checking units and said that it is old-fashioned to regulate free speech.

Juan Manfredi, a Spanish scholar, notes that the key tenets of the new Trumpism operate under a triple D: deregulation, deglobalization, and disorder. Here, deregulation is the promise Trump made to Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Bill Ackman, and other major donors. It is a discourse against the green transition and privacy, advocating for a digital world without regulations. Artificial intelligence and cloud computing embody this vision of an open market that cannot be constrained by outdated mechanisms of liberal democracy. This ideology of technological solutionism is predicated on cheap energy—oil and gas production—and cold environments for data storage, whether in Argentina’s Patagonia or Greenland. The paradox lies in a deregulated digital world, but with tariffs and duties for industrial economies; factory production with regulations, quotas, and restrictions, especially against China.

What seems like political mayhem is actually what translates into unprecedented impunity of corporations in this much-celebrated frame of open innovation. Our battles so far against the liberal international order were about insisting that rules must apply fairly for the realization of structural justice. The difference today is that there are no rules in the digital space; there is only the discourse of openness. Decoupled from political vision, it translates into the daylight robbery of data and wages, the brazen enclosures in the name of trade secrets and abuse of IP, and absolute and raw imposition of power against local governance in the countries of the South.

The tenet is simple: What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is mine, and what’s ours is mine.

The intelligent corporation, Big Tech or Big Pharma, or Big Agri, that feeds on open data does not pay taxes, keeps what it finds, and will fight to the finish to maintain the myth of ungovernability. The tenet is simple: What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is mine, and what’s ours is mine.

The Vestiges of the Commons

Today, in the midst of this feudal procession, this tyranny of openness, how do we protect the collective and public interest?

How do we, for instance, deal with the extraction of genetic information from the South in the name of open science? Sam Altman of OpenAI will do anything to defend the massive appropriation of open knowledge in the public domain. In India, where several news organizations have taken Open AI to court, the company claims that facts are not covered by copyright and that charges cannot be pressed in India.

Meanwhile, internet freedom advocates are urging the U.S. Trade Representative to promote digital trade, innovation, and free expression. Specifically, the groups advocate for a framework with four “core principles”: free flow of information across borders, data security without strict data localization policies, no required source code disclosure, and prevention of discrimination against “foreign digital products or services.” The subtext? Governments in the South must ignore the opacity, non-accountability, and impunity of Big Tech.

This is why we need to study, rather closely, how the law has been manipulated to carve out the zone of ‘privacy’ in the most reductionist way, including in the much-vaunted European GDPR, and how this works to allow the market to operate freely for data aggrandizement.

What all of this means is that international economic law/public international law is under siege. And to the extent that the ideology of open innovation upstages public innovation, the public commons cannot exist. It will be degraded beyond repair. This is why we need to study, rather closely, how the law has been manipulated to carve out the zone of ‘privacy’ in the most reductionist way, including in the much-vaunted European GDPR, and how this works to allow the market to operate freely for data aggrandizement. The reasoning here is that an AI model is okay, so long as we deal with its so-called ‘negative externality’ – never mind that there was no prior public consultation or an in-depth exploration of ethical issues involving multiple civic constituencies.

Big Tech and Big Pharma would like to define data and AI harms as an inconvenience that could come in the way of monopoly capital. In February 2025, the European Commission withdrew the AI Liability Directive from consideration based on pressure from industry lobbyists who view any liability rules as a threat to their business models. Big Tech firms are terrified of a legal landscape where they could be held accountable for the harms their AI systems cause.

The digital innovation system, as it stands, is sacrosanct; its architecture in an international order of profound inequalities cannot be interrogated. The dismantling of the international trade and the aid order is, in fact, a symptom of this ascendance of techno-feudalism in all its neocolonial splendor.

The finance capital behind tech innovation deserves deep study. For instance, research shows that the minute Big Tech moves in, support for local innovation gets crowded out, meaning venture capital funding simply moves from promising local startups to powerful predators in the market. As SOMO’s research reveals, Big Tech acquires smaller firms with the intention to kill. In this, we see axioms of market regulation turned on their head, not explained by the economics of conventional competition and market power. SOMO’s research also shows that in many cases, tech giants do not follow rules and laws, and brazenly avoid notifying the merger authority.

The long and short of it is that inequality today, in part at least, if not entirely, is a result of the systematic erosion of public value, and a cannibalization of the commons.

The Fight Ahead

In conclusion, I would like to put forward the following.

Today, more and more economic activity is organized around creating enclosures and being able to extract rent (digital platforms are the exemplary case) as opposed to profiting from new, productivity-enhancing innovations.

Secondly, the dynamics involved in these firms/sectors don’t resemble ‘markets’ in the conventional sense. Instead, we see feudal hierarchies occupy the space of the market, and all other players, including governments, are entirely dependent on these companies to be able to do business. The sheer size and power of today’s tech-overlords are unparalleled in history. Supply chains and infrastructures are held hostage by powerful corporations and risk being weaponized to extract concessions from the South.

What is at stake is public value creation and distribution: how we claim public value, how we compute its creation and flows, and how we prevent its private capture.

What is at stake is public value creation and distribution: how we claim public value, how we compute its creation and flows, and how we prevent its private capture. The volatile geopolitics of today can also be read through this lens. We need to center the idea of public innovation, even before we speak of open data, open knowledge, and open innovation.

Underpinning this truism is the question of governance and of public law, both domestic and international. We need new vocabulary to shape the discourse of the law and of rights, adequate to our current conjuncture.

A last note: The idea that liberal democracies have a collective responsibility to achieve full employment, to care for all their citizens, to ensure relations of equality and civic rights seems to have been slowly supplanted by ideas of individual entrepreneurialism. This neo-liberal ideology always had overtones of some kind of social Darwinism, and in today’s moment, this seems to be exploding into the open.

This means that older ideas related to genetics, race, and human nature are coming back. Victories that have long been cherished, such as anti-biological essentialism, acknowledgement of diverse sexualities, care for the disabled, and respect for women’s autonomy over their bodies, face a conservative backlash. Our institutions need to be reinvented so that digitality and its constitutive technologies are put to the service of public value.

Note: This is an edited transcript of an address delivered at a Global Health Symposium, hosted by the United Nations University – International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH), and Third World Network (TWN), in April 2025.