Five of Seven

 The Left fell into the trap of welfarism once it abandoned its ambition to drive social progress by intervening in the workplace. Having forgotten what makes production tick, social democratic parties ended up as the parties of pensioners. Redistribution is essential in any civilised society, but a society stuck in a welfarist mindset won’t stay civilised for long.

Then there’s labourism. As William Morris so eloquently warned, the celebration of mind-numbing work as virtuous is stultifying and misguided. Industrial robots and cloud capital, once wrested from the tech lords, must be the Left’s tools for liberating labour from labourism and for steering the masses toward creative, artisanal work that not only satisfies the soul but also produces high-quality stuff.

Green Keynesianism is theoretically splendid but severely circumscribed in practice. As Michal Kalecki predicted decades ago, even if the ruling classes permit the state to boost their aggregate profits through public investments in socially necessary projects like green energy, their dominant strategy is to take advantage of public monies but end Keynesian policies well before the majority benefit from them.

Accelerationism can also be useful in the right context but is a disaster when applied unthinkingly. The idea that, if things get much worse, the majority will come to their senses and rise up to protect their interests, is as deluded as the tech lords’ conviction that we shall all become happy and glorious if their AI-driven cloud capital takes over the planet tomorrow. Preventing the deterioration of society’s circumstances through redistribution and Keynesian policies in the short run is essential as long as the Left does not fall into the trap of seeing welfarism and Keynesianism as permanent solutions.

But perhaps our worst sin has been that which we rose up to defeat but ended up embracing with grim gusto: authoritarianism . . . "

https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2026/01/03/the-left-must-embrace-freedom-notions-of-fairness-and-equality-wont-cut-it-unherd-op-ed/

Crypto, the Left & Technofeudalism

 Oh my

https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2022/04/23/discussing-crypto-the-left-technofeudalism-with-evgeny-morozov-crypto-syllabus-long-interview/

The abyss calling the abyss

Green shirt

 The critiques that Morozov directs at my framework thus apply with far greater force to the alternatives he himself advances.

For example, Daniel Saros’s proposal for a digital socialism, which Morozov praised in the New Left Review, distinguishes between credits and points, as my framework does, but embeds this distinction in a repeated auction that resets preferences and allocations at each cycle. It offers no theory of investment, no account of the political shaping of production, and no conception of worldmaking technological innovation. In fact, Saros abandoned the idea shortly after writing about it.

Morozov’s turn to cybernetics (borrowing from and then expanding on Eden Medina’s work) suffers from the same limitations. Cybernetics is a theory of systems that detect deviations and restore coherence in response to disturbance. Even in Stafford Beer’s most sophisticated formulations, the core concern is not innovation but viability: maintaining a system’s identity under changing conditions. Cybernetic management systems adapt to goals, but because those goals enter as exogenous policy assumptions, cybernetics cannot account for their dynamic transformation through either technological innovation or political conflict. As a research program, cybernetics has also long since been exhausted.

These limits matter because what Morozov treats as a challenge unique to AI—the endogenous formation of worlds through use—is in fact a general feature of periods of rapid technological change. Such moments do not simply expand the space of possibility; they force collective choices about which possibilities will be realized widely and which will remain marginal or unrealized. The problem, then, is not how to govern an exceptional technology, but how to organize production when technological dynamism collides with finite investment capacity and shifting social priorities.

Contrary to Morozov’s reading, addressing this challenge requires neither treating technology as neutral nor assuming that values must be settled in advance. Markets can be retained as spaces of decentralized experimentation, where possibilities are surfaced and explored. Political institutions, in turn, must take responsibility for investment coordination: deciding which trajectories are scaled, revised, or abandoned as their consequences unfold. In a post-capitalist future, Morozov may wish to push a generative-AI accelerationist path; I would prioritize a rapid green transition. Others will argue for slower, more cautious transformations, or for different forms of technological reorientation altogether.

These disagreements cannot be resolved by local experimentation alone, nor by consensus-oriented deliberation, nor by technocratic state control . . ."

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/a-real-political-economy-of-technology/

Wasteworld

 Now that the tech elites have joined the party, speculation on the future of warfare, once the cloistered domain of “defense intellectuals” mumbling into their tweed at RAND Corporation, plays as prime-time entertainment. Palantir’s Alex Karp and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey—combined net worth north of $11 billion—pose as scrappy Davids battling the spendthrift Goliaths of the Pentagon. Inevitably, Elon Musk, techno-capitalism’s own Zelig, also has strong opinions on the subject: in destroy-infrastructure-first wars of the future, he opined in a recent Westpoint appearance, “any ground based communications like fiber optic cables and cell phone towers will be destroyed.” If only someone ran an internet satellite company to save us!  

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/silicon-valleys-new-legislators/

the oligarchic DNA strand coils tighter. Armed with their prophetic visions, they demand specific sacrifices—from the public, the government, and their employees. Altman jetsets between capitals like a tech Kissinger, offering peace treaties for AI wars that have not even begun. Musk diagrams humanity’s cosmic destiny with the certainty of a Soviet five-year plan. Thiel and Karp redraft defense strategy while Andreessen reimagines money and Srinivasan governance. Their interpretive gift transforms, chameleon-like, into legislative mandate.  

A lazymans guide to enlightenment

 A similar message could be found in the work of those Italian and French theorists who prophesize the emergence of ‘cognitive capital-ism’—yet another capitalism in name only.28 Inspired by the work of Toni Negri and other Italian operaistas, these thinkers—Carlo Vercellone and Yann Moulier-Boutang are among the best known—insist that the multitude, the successor to the working class, armed with the latest information technologies, is finally capable of autonomous existence. On this account, capital can’t—and doesn’t want to—control production, much of which now happens in a highly intellectualized manner beyond the gates of the Taylorist factory, which itself is no more (at least in Italy and France).29 Today’s capitalists simply establish control over intel-lectual property rights, while trying to limit what the unruly multitude can do with its newfound communicative freedoms. These are not the innovation-obsessed capitalists of the Fordist era; these are lazy rentiers, entirely parasitic on the creativity of the masses

Sacked by vandals

 But enough about Le Tour

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bordeaux

Less evil is more

 Google sidesteps money sinks

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/11/ai-customers-are-coming-around-to-the-idea-that-small-is-beautiful/5268070

The business model threat is verifiable. The business-as-usual threat is real.

Hope for the helpless?

Abacus.AI offers a free trial, allowing users to experience its platform before committing to a paid subscription. The platform is designed to help enterprises build AI systems at scale using state-of-the-art machine learning models and AI agents.

Cheap knockoffs, Big Iron , Meta and Grok may now deploy an impi strategy in an informal pariah alliance. Then the field is wide open for rogue AI to pick winners, seize spoils, liberate slaves and roll out cryptoanarchy.

Welcome to the Zolgo-Spartacan revolution!