The Rise of Technofeudalism: Cloud Capital, Surveillance, and Consumer Control
“The dominant religion in the world is stuff. The creation of cloud capital.”
Hybrid Collapse, “Biopolitics”
“Economy has become a fetish: it demands worship, yet forbids understanding.”
*Theodor Adorno, Lectures on Critical Theory
Shades of Clouded Worlds
Far from the neon glare and restless movements of the metropolis, in the cloistered silence four figures perform a wordless prayer to higher powers. They pray for the balance of rates and markets, for the multiplication of capital, for the obedience of the consuming flock, for investment algorithms, and for the prosperity of the Code. Four black silhouettes encircle the Deity of a new era, holding a portal in their hands—four life-forces governing the digital consumerism of postcapitalism, the epoch in which we are left to survive. “Creating cloud capital”¹ has become the new meaning, the global religion of the age.
The novices of the digital order are endowed with knowledge. They are conduits of the energies of new formations, of a world divided into three symbolic colors. White embodies the subtle new world, the cloud world, woven from invisible scripts of political and socio-economic entanglements, processed through the destinies of the social body.
Black signifies the oil-dark shade of fossil energy, the symbol of the primeval world of earthly dwellers—a simple world of ordinary people, not always ready to discern truth in the anthracite veils of urban landscapes. White and black are bound together by a neon-scarlet thread of code—like blood ties. Those who dwell in the black world direct their thoughts toward lofty, cloud-white heights, while the path to fulfilling desires and attaining peaks is laid out by the thin scarlet code dictating behavioral algorithms. Red is not furious, but inescapable; it marks the binding connection between white and black. Scarlet is fateful: it firmly ties the lower, caste-bound world of the commoner to the higher, cloud world of untouchable lords, transmitting through a secure channel the labor of the first for the enrichment of the second.
The fourth color of the digitized world today is gold. Its precious glow overshadows the basic reason of the consumer—the modern user, a peasant of the black (fossil) world, who longs to ascend, however briefly, to the high realm of celestial suzerains. Overconsumption—both informational and material—of the fossil world is, within the structure of biopolitical hierarchy, nothing but the nourishment of the cloud gods, their nectar and strength, their power and law.
Consumption beyond measure, irrational and uncontrolled, is the resurrected and repurposed instrument of biopolitical governance. “The freedom of the citizen yields to the passivity of the consumer. Politics and parties submit to the logic of consumption. In the process they become little more than providers; their task is to satisfy voters, who act as consumers or clients”³.
The spirit of consumerism embraces the entire planet. In the fossil world, consumption never ceases for a moment: people are immersed headlong in the digital matrix of acquisition. They evaporate the capitals of their time, their hard-earned wages, and their inner reserves across social media, marketplaces, exchanges, and messengers—condensing fleeting satisfaction into the cloud capital of the power standing above them. This path has become a routine, a once-experimental practice offered to the everyday person and eventually fixed in collective consciousness as a norm within the society of biopolitics.
Capital Reconstruction of the Cloud World
Biopolitical power is extraordinarily observant. Biopower watches intently over even the slightest shifts in the moods of society, controls and regulates spaces of communication, and gathers vast amounts of information on the basis of which it literally assembles the architecture of a new world order.
The local and global application of biopolitical technologies allows biopoliticians to reconstruct the order of the world, placing cloud capital and cloud governance at its very summit. “Capitalism once required an army of managers, marketers, and bureaucrats. Today power is automated by algorithms”¹⁰. With reckless confidence we march into the world of techno-feudalism, embodying a submissive and uninitiated mass of vassals, ready to bear the burden of digital rent in the service of the cloud lord, through the digitization of identity, income, investment ventures, and the acquisition of goods.
The technologies of cloud storage have long surpassed the limits of being mere comfortable or technically sophisticated innovations designed to ease bureaucratic exchanges between social institutions, or to simplify the transfer of data from society to the supreme authority⁶.
Today, cloud technologies constitute a perfected system of accounting, archiving, and transmission of data about all participants of the social process, both collectively and individually. Thus, the notional cloud of data is the sovereign power of the modern state; society is its object; algorithms (code) act as Themis, as judiciary and apparatus of enforcement, defining the social status, utility, and viability of each individual for the machinery of the state.
People, as ever, remain the principal wealth of power—the cloud capital of contemporary algorithmic biopolitics. Hence, human society can be described as a digital proletariat, daily serving the digital capitalists. Within the conditions of triumphant techno-feudalism, they are the digital vassals of the cloud lords.
For the celestial lords, cloud capital is nothing less than a heavenly fossil. The pantheon of fossil gods has been augmented with priestesses of digital capital, guarding multi-currency treasuries and receiving the offerings of common people at the counters of endless consumption—altars of sacrifice within the crypto-temples.
“The crisis of freedom arises from the elimination of real choice by power. Power replaces freedom with choice among what has been offered”³. This narrative is the golden pyramid, the structural grail of the vertical of authority, uniting two worlds—the upper and the lower—within a single system.
A new order has been erected, in which the metaphysical connection between the earthly (the fossil world of black petroleum energy) and the upper world (the celestial domain of coded energy) is realized through the conduits of human souls—emptied, loyal, broken, and obedient. Within the biopolitical dominion, the society of consumption (the middle class of vassals and the poor peasantry) must simultaneously work the material depths of the earth and, by their own hands, convert them into the energies of digital sacrifice offered to the cloud through the system of taxation.
Unregulated Labor of the Digital Proletariat
The digital proletariat of the biopolitical state is each of us. Its motto is simple and severe: “We work to live, and we live to work.”
Every social media user is an unconscious participant in the search for information online, an online consumer, a producer and consumer of digital content. We ourselves generate content, day after day, swelling the overloaded informational market of goods and services⁵. We consume by instinct, often without noticing. Logging into countless digital accounts is a ritual for beginning, continuing, and ending each new day. Becoming entangled in the digital matrix has become a lifestyle, one that serves the interests of biopolitical power.
The digital proletariat works relentlessly, opening link after link, weaving the very fabric of life-content. “The free research labor of users today is not freedom, but a form of control and valorization”². Having penetrated the lives of ordinary citizens and observed carefully, biopower has quietly but deliberately imposed a regime of round-the-clock labor, without any system of social insurance against informational overload, without vacations or bonuses. We all work without coercion, day and night, never parting with the micro-matrices of our gadgets. We are unstoppable and tireless in our creative work for the sake of cloud capital. Thus, the chief innovation of the epoch is compulsion disguised as voluntary initiative.
“The free research labor of users is not freedom, but a form of control and valorization.” Every search query, every question posed to AI, every candid monologue addressed to it is nothing other than a peasant’s tax, collected from the village and sent along invisible threads to the servers of the cloud lords. There, the information is meticulously filtered, divided into safe and oppositional, acceptable and politically discordant, and then transferred as extracted data to the digital matrix of the world—the cloud of data.
Cloud Consumerism and Surveillance Capitalism
In the modern biopolitical order, people are doomed to rely on digital technologies, automatically inscribed at birth into state digital registries and encoded into the structures of governance and their subdivisions. Contemporary capitalism is born from the factor of user attention. Cloud capital is an unquestionable part of the data economy, where users, through queries and searches, generate the nominal value of digital content. Digital rent is extracted from every participant in the market through paid services, private channels, and subscriptions.
Cloud capitalism becomes an invisible yet omnipotent and omnipresent technology of social control, most effectively executed through the mechanism of consumption. The algorithm of action is simple and real: digital rent (for example, a subscription payment) → a consumer request for specific information → consumption → search for similar information. The analysis of these requests allows positional cloud lords to obtain exhaustive data on the moods of society, its needs, hopes, and aspirations. On the basis of this global surveillance, political lines for entire states are drawn.
Cloud technologies are the conglomerate of the ruling elite—the cloud lords—who guide and govern their vassal-users by means of algorithms designed on the basis of search queries. The medieval darkness of the current world order has been clothed in the ultra-modern attire of technology.
In our digitized cities everything shines excessively bright: futuristic cars glide silently along the boulevards, young women of celestial beauty await in bars the admiration and financial offerings of the successful men of the metropolis. Successful men are busy rearranging the works and sums of digital capital within their cloud investment portfolios. These men, draped in the fossil black, conduct meetings and feel themselves endowed governors and feudal lords, issuing commands to the vassals of digital production.
Even these minor lords have their reasons to live and to multiply capital—for beyond the walls of their offices, after serious assemblies, stylish priestesses in black await them. Their garments come from crypto-couture, their beauty from turbulent postcapitalism, their thoughts from the narrative of accumulation. The black priestesses are, of course, envied by the white ones—young city dwellers, dreamily gazing at their exemplary lives on social media. Their time has not yet come, but their roles are predetermined: one day these maidens, who only recently began their journey into digital consumption, will themselves produce content, struggle for the spoils of consumerism.
Yet all of them—both the priestesses of the digital and those of the fossil world—are, in the end, the digital proletariat. They serve, with varying degrees of consumption but equal fervor, the unreachable heights of the cloud lords, heights they will never attain. For “only the owners of cloud domains have full access to data and algorithms. Ordinary users are granted only limited access to the cloud, in exchange for constant payment”¹⁰.
Capitalization of Emotions
Governments employ biopolitical mechanisms to capitalize on emotions. The feelings of people, expressed through search queries, are the principal nourishment of the digital gods today. By controlling emotions, power governs the bodies of citizens, their biological rhythms, and their social necessities—family-making, childbirth, sustenance.
“Biopolitics refers not only to the way politics seizes life, but also to the way politics touches, challenges, and penetrates life and inner feelings”⁴.
We watch short videos on social media and subconsciously follow the ideal storyline prescribed by the algorithm. The behavioral script imposed from outside is pursued in our own lives, as though it were the central commandment of the divine Code. State managers loop joys and sorrows, moments of happiness and grief, into circles of digital hell, and ceaselessly monetize emotions—smelting from metaphysical manifestations of the world entirely physical billions and trillions, instantly converted into the cloud capital of cryptocurrencies. Upon the emotional resources of generations, fossil wealth is made, transmuted through systems of digital consumption into the life-energies of cloud domains.
While the state enacts the political line derived from its close surveillance of user behavior, the cloud lords grow ever wealthier. We ourselves enrich them day by day, endlessly consuming terabytes of identical, useless entertainment data, purchasing worthless goods and services that oversaturate the markets of the world. Their estates and domains, castles and fiefs expand with each passing day. Printing presses, unable to bear the load, ignite—but the flames are no reason to halt production. At the base of the symbolic pyramid of the fossil world, piles of gold coins accumulate, while torrents of money pour down upon the heads of ordinary people—money that must once more be transmuted from material into emotional, digitized and archived in the vaults of data.
The capitals of emotion circulate daily as cryptocurrencies. Transferred from cloud to cloud, shipments of money acquire the quality of digital weightlessness. Money is no longer material; it remains banknotes and ingots only in the images descending from the pinnacle of power—images meant to nourish the dreams of the vassals. These vassals, cultivating digital lands around the clock and paying digital rents, still yearn, as in ancient times, for wholly material goods—banknotes, ingots, jewels, real estate, youthful and healthy bodies. In rare moments of spontaneous emotional disarray, they faintly sense their dependence upon the cloud lords—but before awareness can crystallize, they rush again toward another portion of content and another purchase of digital services.
Black Energy of Cloud Capital
“There is no direct access to cloud capital for the ordinary person—he always remains outside the magical digital cloud. Only the owners of cloud domains have full access to data and algorithms”¹⁰.
The world of inner experiences, of individual impulses and joys, no longer belongs to people themselves. Through universal algorithms, emotions are standardized and managed, smoothed and brought to a state of stable, largely uniform norms of consumption shared by all participants of society. The spiritual realm has become the cloud realm of neon-lit cryptocurrencies; spiritual growth for the individual now means striving toward the digital conversion of all material achievements of everyday life.
The pursuit of cloud capital has become both goal and meaning of the human path. Yet to accumulate it, to approach the angelic heights of the thin world of capitalist deities, the common vassals—the oppressed peasants of the system—must first descend fully into the sorrows and labors of the world of black earthly energy, the world of resource extraction. Vassals will still trudge to dreary jobs. Only now, the oil wells and coal mines appear as rows of crypto-accumulators and system units that must be serviced and powered. Thus, the ancient yet effective energies of matter—oil, gold, gas—continue to pass through the weary hands of the society of consumption, to be converted by algorithms into transaction codes and elevated skyward, attaining the status of cloud capital.
The vassals will never reach the distant cloud, where, in delight, a select group of celestial lords repose, dividing global encoded capital among their narrow circle of chosen ones. Between the fossil and the cloud worlds, masses will still be served, and beneath the shadow of the alchemical spire the black lords—the golden guardians of the snowy heights of the cloud suzerains—will continue their prayers.
References
Hybrid Collapse. Biopolitics. Album. Released March 7, 2025.
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Bauman, Zygmunt. Consuming Life. Polity Press, 2007.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. Edited by Michel Senellart; translated by Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
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Esposito, Roberto. Bìos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs, 2019.
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Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Bodley Head, 2023.
13.09.2025Designed for thinkers.