6: Melancholy Is European

The politics of regulating ‘Big Tech’ reveals the contradictions at the heart of neofeudalism. While neofeudalism discourse fixates on how neoliberalism has already transformed, it ignores the ongoing struggles over production, ownership and control of the regulatory overhaul that is actually needed to create a so-called digital economy. In other words, it is not only that neofeudalism is oblivious to the politics of epistemology but also that, at large, it discounts that Big Tech did not develop in some political void in which the issues and melancholy evident in the neofeudalism milieu were simply absent.

In the neofeudalist imagination, the state and regulatory bodies – whether national or supranational, such as the EU – are conspicuously absent, erased in the name of economic inevitability. Yet, this erasure is not accidental; it is symptomatic of a deeper ideological commitment to the primacy of economics, the myth of the free market and the rise of digital policy – a set of policies that juxtapose the real and the digital in order to ensure that digital imposes on the actual. The foundations of digital policy – technoliberalist regulation – were engineered, not as a natural evolution of capitalism, but as a deliberate project to dismantle public oversight and consolidate private power. This project, far from emerging in a ceteris paribus void, was enabled by the advent of the Internet, which served as capitalism’s ideological Trojan horse, smuggling in a new regime of accumulation under the guise of technological progress – hence the title of Cameron and Barbrook’s famous 1996 article, ‘The Californian Ideology’.