Technofeudalism, Medieval Law and the Brazilian General Data Protection Law
In the article published about Yanis Varoufakis' new book in The Guardian, journalist Carole Cadwalladr, you can read the following:
The Financial Times labelled Varoufakis “the most irritating man in the room” during the negotiations, so it’s not exactly a surprise to learn that Technofeudalism is a polemic, a controversialist’s take. And although in 2023 there’s nothing particularly novel or special about hating on tech – hating on Elon Musk is the only rational response to the situation in which we’ve found ourselves – nevertheless, Technofeudalism feels like an important new book.
It’s a big-picture hypothesis rooted in a historical account of how capitalism came into being that describes what is happening in terms of an epochal, once-in-a-millennium shift. In some ways, it’s a relief to have a politician – any politician – talking about this stuff. Because in Varoufakis’s telling, this isn’t just new technology. This is the world grappling with an entirely new economic system and therefore political power.
“Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook,” he writes. “You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”
It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism. And us? We’re the serfs. “Cloud serfs”, so lacking in class consciousness that we don’t even realise that the tweeting and posting that we’re doing is actually building value in these companies.
In addition to reading the article (partially translated above), I saw several videos in which Varoufakis talks about the new book. The topic obviously interests me, as I myself noticed similarities between the reality described by Shoshana Zuboff and feudalism in one of the texts I published about her book.
I bought the book "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism” on Amazon but I didn't receive it. This forced me to sue the company. The judge of the 1st Court of the JEC of Osasco, responsible for case no. 1038407-07.2023.8.26.0405 granted the requested injunction by my lawyer (Article 300 of the New [Brazilian] Code of Civil Procedure determines the granting of urgent protection when there are elements that demonstrate the probability of the right and the danger of damage or the risk to the useful outcome of the process. In the present case, I understand that they are present the legal requirements for granting the requested urgent relief, considering the probability of the requesting party's right and the danger of irreparable damage or difficult repair if the relief is granted only at the end of the dispute. In view of this, I GRANT the injunction request to determine that the defendant deliver the book acquired by the author, namely, "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism -Varoufakis," within 10 days, under penalty of a daily fine of R$ 50.00, limited to R$ 1,000 .00. It is already stated that the daily fine may be increased, reduced, excluded, or even converted into losses and damages depending on the specifics of the specific case.). However, to date, Amazon has not complied with the injunction.
The legal dispute between me and Jeff Bezos' company seems to illustrate well the phenomenon described by Varoufakis. After all, what characterized the Middle Ages was the coexistence of different legal orders. What we considered inevitable and desirable (submission of everyone to State law and respect for judicial decisions) was not a reality. Did Amazon not comply with the injunction granted to me because it believes it has the absolute power to rule the law within its techno-feudal domains? This is a thought-provoking question.
It is evident that Amazon is responding to several lawsuits in the Brazilian courts. In a case similar to mine, the company was ordered to deliver the book purchased and paid for by the consumer. The São Paulo Court of Justice website reports that there are 931 cases filed against the company Amazon Serviços de Varejo do Brasil Ltda. Therefore, the disregard for the consumer appears to be intentional, the result of a cost-benefit calculation. To this day, no study has been carried out on a national scale about legal disputes involving the company created by Jeff Bezos.
However, it is not possible to confirm or rule out Yanis Varoufakis' hypothesis just taking into account Amazon's ambition to have legal autonomy to decide how and when it will respect the rights of Brazilian consumers and whether or not it will comply with decisions originating from the Judiciary. The medieval appearance of the company is evident, but to validate or not the Greek economist's thesis it is necessary to study Medieval Law. And that's what I decided to do.
“The sources allude to mansus ingenuilis, mansus aldiaricius, mansus servilis, that is, mansus free, mansus semi-free, mansus servile, as a logical transposition that confuses and surprises the modern reader. For the medieval mentality, it was not about transposition, but about the irresistible force of the normative fact of land with all the heritage of customary rules solidly inscribed in its grooves, normative to the point of completely disregarding the status and will of the subjects who came into contact with it. It happened that, in a land cultivated by generations of free, semi-free or serf men, it became customary for this land to be worked under these conditions, and the circumstance of pure fact became usage, that is, a strictly normative rule. And this has a macroscopic consequence: in the future, in the mansus servilis an ingenuus worker, that is, totally free, may live and work, but the obligations that will fall on him will be essentially the same as those of the generations of servants who originally occupied the mansus and who, with their continuous maintenance, they contributed to giving the meek the lasting sign of custom that time seems reluctant to affect.
The real attraction, and above all the extremely relevant identification of custom as the voice of the real, will lead, over time, to semantic changes in usus and consuetudo, changes that are quite significant for the legal historian: usus and consuetudines will designate the amount of services or tax charges owed for a long time, customarily, by the inhabitants of a given land; usus and customudines will designate the freedoms hard won from the lords by the people of a given land, now customarily acquired – as uses – as limits to the lord's powers. But laughable exaggerations should be avoided in this regard: it is not about essential human rights, but rather, modestly, the recognition that, on a given land, a certain favorable use has matured – and the recognition effectively falls to the homines terrae - , in order to make it understood that what is important are the lasting events in a land, and that the homines residing there benefited from them in a completely indirect way.” (The Medieval Legal Order, Paolo Grossi, publisher Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 2014, p. 119/120)
A little further on, the author makes another observation that I think is important to reproduce here:
“Sometimes, pressing agronomic requirements – always faithfully interpreted by usage – shaped a specific causal figure from top to bottom; In this regard, an agrarian contract widespread throughout the Mediterranean region and known by the Latin term partionaria, contractual ad partionem, by the Spanish plantación-complantación or by the French complant, is exemplary. In it, the difficulty of countries with temperate and dry climates in establishing forms of shrub and arboreal vegetation comes to outline a quite unique legal figure: the farmer, who has assumed the obligation of specific improvement to transform a herbaceous crop into a tree or shrub, obtains, at the end of the generally long duration of the contract, ownership of a part of the land, which is divided between the old dominus grantor and a new dominus, the concessionaire. The use – the contract, obviously, is clearly customary – aims to encourage such forms of colonization, and it does so with the intention that the physical energy spent on such a valuable agronomic transformation is not frustrated. For reasons that are not absolutely social, but purely economic, work – energy-work – becomes a mode of acquiring property.” (The Medieval Legal Order, Paolo Grossi, publisher Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 2014, p. 133/134)
Keeping these observations about Medieval Law in mind, let’s return to current reality. Internet users in general and consumers who use virtual purchasing platforms produce data. The law assigns ownership of this data to users (art. 17, of the Brazilian General Personal Data Protection Law). But among the rights granted to the data owner is not the right to charge for their use. Profits arising from the processing and use of data produced by internet users and virtual purchasing platforms, duly anonymized, belong exclusively to the controllers and operators who collected and stored them. They are only liable for the individual and/or collective moral damages they eventually cause (art. 42 of the Brazilian General Personal Data Protection Law).
The data and metadata explored by internet controllers and operators have little or no value for each user, as to explore them algorithms are needed that filter and segment the information based on criteria previously defined by IT engineers. Internet users do not control these algorithms and the overwhelming majority of people have no idea how they work behind the screens they see when using their computers and smartphones.
Here there is an evident distinction between feudalism and technofeudalism. In the first case, anyone who worked the land to transform it over time under the regime of partionaria, contract ad partionem, plantation-complantación or complant could acquire ownership over a part of it. In the second, the context in which we live, people own the data they produce but this right does not (and cannot) transform into an economic value for those who created it.
In the medieval legal order, de facto relationships with land determined a person's specific situation and the way in which they would be treated. In the Middle Ages, men could be free, semi-free or serfs depending on the status of the given land on which they lived and worked. There are no more free and semi-free spaces on the internet, as the entire computer network has been colonized by Big Techs. The logic of surveillance capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff) has extended to all virtual domains, so Technofeudalism is not as similar to Feudalism as Varoufakis imagines. Even so, the hypothesis he formulated has the merit of making us think about the reality that has been imposed on us.
To regain some autonomy and dignity, internet users will have to fight both to obtain economic rights over their data and to be able to oppose the anonymization of it for profit. This obviously cannot be done in the context of the Brazilian General Personal Data Protection Law (or any similar Law in other countries) . This Law was not created to protect users but to guarantee the profits of Big Techs.