For the technofeudal lords, losing money from Trump’s tariff extravaganza in the short run is a tiny price to pay for a massive long term ‘investment’ in their empire

After 1971, neoliberalism was an ideology essential in legitimising the emancipation of financial capital from the regulatory shackles of the New Deal and the post-war Bretton Woods system.

Today, a new form of capital is on the ascendancy and needs its own ideology to be fully liberated: cloud capital. Cloud capital has created a new system that is no longer predicated on markets or profit. I have called it Technofeudalism – a new mode of production and distribution that, powered by cloud capital, has replaced (a) markets with cloud fiefs (like Amazon) and (b) capitalist profits with cloud rents.

Fully to realise the power of their cloud capital, the technofeudal lords (Bezos, Thiel, Musk etc.) needed a new ideology, just like the financiers needed (after the end of Bretton Woods) neoliberalism. So, what did they replace neoliberalism with? They replaced it with the ideology of techlordism.

• Techlordism replaces neoliberalism’s liberal individual with an amorphous HumAIn (a human-AI continuum).
• Techlordism also replaces neoliberalism’s fundamentalist belief in the divine mechanism of the market with another divinity: the algorithm that bypassed the signal processing functions of the decentralised market mechanism, yielding a perfectly centralised mechanism for matching buyers and sellers.

In this light, Trump is to the technofeudal lords, the cloudalists, nothing more than a useful tool. He is useful to them in that his policies (full deregulation of their AI-driven ‘services’, along with massive tax cuts for the cloudalists) supercharge the capacity of their cloud capital to extract more cloud rent from the rest of the economy.

So, in this context, losing money from Trump’s tariff extravaganza in the short run is a tiny price to pay for a massive long term ‘investment’ in their technofeudal empire.