Last year the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis wrote a book on what he called ‘technofeudalism’. Varoufakis, one of Europe’s more creative leftist thinkers, now believes that capitalism fuelled by profit-seeking is being replaced by the importance of rents. Big tech has become our new feudal overlord with its power to rent out a plethora of digital platforms that are designed to suck us in and harvest our data. If this is true, one of the world’s leading ‘cloud capitalists’ and intellectuals of this new order is Peter Thiel.
The tech oligarch’s current net worth is estimated at $16.7 billion, a fortune he’s accumulated through co-founding various venture capital firms and tech start-ups including Paypal. His early investments in Facebook and Palantir – an insidious spy tech firm which Thiel launched in 2004 with the help of start-up money from the CIA – have also paid off. Palantir’s data collection services, contracted by militaries and states worldwide, can be bent to a plethora of goals including deporting migrants and sweeping digital surveillance. The firm also supplies Israel’s apartheid regime with AI-based systems used to track Palestinians’ every move.
