What could be more delightful than a trip to Greece to meet Yanis Varoufakis, the charismatic leftwing firebrand who tried to stick it to the man, AKA the IMF, EU and entire global financial order? The mental imagery I have before the visit is roughly two parts Zorba the Greek to one part an episode of BBC series Holiday from the Jill Dando era: blue skies, blue sea, maybe some plate breaking in a jolly taverna. What I’m not expecting is a wall of flames rippling across a hillside next to the highway from the airport and a plume of black smoke billowing across the carriageway.Because even a modernist villa on a hillside on the island of Aegina – a fast ferry ride from the port of Piraeus and the summer bolthole of chic Athenians – is not the sanctuary from the modern world that it might once have been.

The house is where Varoufakis and his wife, landscape artist Danae Stratou, live, year round since the pandemic, but in August 2023 at the end of a summer of heatwaves and extreme weather conditions across the world, it feels more than a little apocalyptic. The sun is a dim orange orb struggling to shine through a haze of smoke while a shower of fine ash falls invisibly from the sky. A month later, two years’ worth of rain will fall in a single day in northern Greece, causing a biblical deluge and never-before-seen levels of flooding.

That the end of the world feels just a little bit nearer here than it does in some places may not be coincidental to Varoufakis’s having written a new book called Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Nor that the book comes to the conclusion that capitalism has been replaced with something even worse. Not the glorious socialist revolution that his hero Marx foresaw. Nor some new mutation of capitalism such as the one detailed by Shoshana Zuboff in her surprise 2019 bestseller, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. We’re now in servitude, Varoufakis argues, to the fiefdoms of our new global masters, Lord Zuckerberg of Facelandia and Sir Musk of the rotten borough of X.

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.

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I saw this guy on Q&A recently and found his ideas interesting, he was also on the press club yesterday if anyone wants to pull that up on Iview and watch him.

One thing that struck me was he said that Social Democracy died and no one has noticed, it was planned that way.