2: Neofeudalism Is Melancholy

Neofeudalism is about the politics of defeat. This is the issue, the core of this book. Not that being defeated or feeling defeated is simple. Nevertheless, neofeudalism is about this: a very neoromantic project about aspiring to and living defeat – a place where melancholy reigns. Unfortunately, technology, by virtue of being entangled in the idea of some alleged radical change in the mode of production, is cast as part of what causes such doom. Neofeudalism is a call to fantasise about the collective subject already not revolting – a conversation in which dialectics are absent and fake temporalities have been produced – a call for a regression to a place with no proletariat, all in the name of Big Tech. The scholarly eagerness to command the future by focusing on the urgency of addressing the G.A.F.A.M. combination (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) and its associated capitalisms is questioned in this book. The call is not a progressive move but a call to return to the past because it encloses temporality. This is why, at its core, neofeudalism is a conservative project. The framing of the future as inevitably bleak and filled with doom reflects neoromantic calls to imagined, mystical places – habitats of collective loss and melancholy that are cherished as refuges from the harsh realities of modernity. Neofeudalism transforms the desire to imagine a radical future into a melancholic longing for a past where the future itself is recast as a deficiency, a void that must be filled by returning to a time when economics reigned supreme, wealth was ostensibly abundant and money was being printed. Technology has no place in that future; on the contrary, it is only addressed with regard to capitalism.