Algorithms and Egregores
By Carlos Perona Calvete, European Conservative.
It makes sense, then, that the ideological manifestation of Cloudism is the systematic deconstruction of identity (the evaporation of moisture from the terrestrial; as Marx said, “everything turns into steam”).
he 2000s shift from capitalism to ‘Cloudism,’ described in Yannis Varoufakis’s Techno-feudalism: What Killed Capitalism as a shift from terrestrial capital to so-called ‘Cloud capital,’ was already augured by manual labour’s representing less of the economy than digital labour and by the prominence of the virtual implying less of the actual. Of course, in a sense, ideas have always represented the bulk of value, so this is nothing new, nor is it problematic as such. The problem lies elsewhere.
A Cloud that never rains
Varoufakis’s claim is that Cloud-capital-owning Big Tech firms do not have to worry about making money because, under current conditions, central banks will not stop printing money. Moreover, the economy is today structured in such a way that capitalists (producers and sellers) have to use Big Tech platforms to be competitive, and so these platforms effectively extract rents and suck up the constant supply of money printed by governments.
This being the case, these firms can dedicate themselves to ensuring their ongoing dominance by finding ways to control people, a project in which governments are also largely interested. Their chief method of doing this is by using algorithms and big data to capture attention and predict behaviour.
It is here that the cloud turns out to be hostile to the ground, so to speak; the virtual becomes a sinister counterpart to the actual: The tendency here is not to generate value through ideas (which may be more or less worthy), but to generate control and market dominance through distraction, noise, and content. Consequently, a market for data—the value of which consists in predicting people’s behaviour—develops, the main aim of which is not so much to get people to buy this or that, but to keep them on the reservation of the Big Tech/central bank nexus.
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