A dramatic meditation on six dark auguries
“The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”
— Hegel
The dusk is thickening over the Western democracies. Their parliaments still convene, ballots are still cast, and constitutions yet adorn museum-lit vitrines; but somewhere in the glow of liquid-crystal screens the old promises of liberty are being quietly rewritten. Six contemporary thinkers—Varoufakis, Postman, Mbembe, Chomsky, Forrester, and Wolin—have each raised a different lamp to the gathering night. When their beams are allowed to overlap, they project an unsettling silhouette of the future. Let us follow those lights one by one, and watch how the figure of “freedom” changes shape.
1. Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism: The New Lords of the Cloud
Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism has molted. No longer a system of competitive markets exchanging commodities, it has become technofeudal: a realm where cloud capital—the softwares, platforms, and data vaults—replaces land, and cloud rents replace profits.
- Ownership is concentrated in “fiefdoms” (Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta) that levy tolls on every digital crossing.
- Labourers do not sell labour so much as they perform obligations inside gated architectures: gig workers, app developers, even casual scrollers whose clicks mint behavioural surplus.
- Law, tax codes, and infrastructure bend around the needs of these barons, just as medieval kings prorogued roads and rivers for dukes.
Implication for liberty: freedom of enterprise and speech migrates from public law to private terms of service. One may roam the global village, but only so far as a moderator’s algorithmic gaze allows. Habeas corpus is replaced by habeas data: the right of the platform to detain your metadata in perpetuity.
2. Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death”: The Carnival That Swallows the Polis
Neil Postman, writing before smartphones were dreamt, warned that television’s logic would drown politics in entertainment. The prophecy is now all-encompassing:
- Images arrive in floods, “breaking news” every quarter-hour, flattening tragedy and trivia into the same spectacle.
- The citizen is refashioned as a dopamine seeker; sustained attention—democracy’s oxygen—is asphyxiated by the scroll.
- Because the electorate’s appetite is measured in micro-seconds, policy is drafted as pageant, not programme.
Implication for liberty: A public that cannot remember yesterday cannot defend tomorrow. Constitutional guarantees survive on paper, yet the capacity to desire them withers. Where Tocqueville feared gentle despotism, Postman discerns the softer doom of jocular anesthesia.
3. Mbembe’s Necropolitics: Zones of Perishable Life
Achille Mbembe extends Foucault’s biopolitics into the domain where sovereignty chooses not how to cultivate life, but whom it may abandon to death. In the West this is often exported:
- Refugees drown at fortified maritime borders;
- Supply-chain labourers inhale toxic dust beyond the visible perimeter;
- “Essential workers” in pandemics clock in beneath banners praising their heroism while lacking basic protections.
Implication for liberty: Freedom becomes geographically and racially partitioned. Aerial liberties over Silicon Valley coexist with aerostat surveillance over Gaza; each presupposes the other. The right to life—the bedrock upon which the right to liberty stands—turns conditional, and so liberty erodes from below like foundations gnawed by tides.
4. Chomsky’s Necessary Illusions: The Alchemy of Consent
Noam Chomsky’s media critique reminds us that propaganda in democracies is not shouted; it is manufactured through selection, framing, and repetition.
- Ownership of media clusters with ownership of lobbyists and think tanks;
- Debate is bounded by the “thinkable,” while genuine alternatives are dismissed as naïve or extremist;
- Citizens are presented a menu choice after the entrée has already been cooked.
Implication for liberty: The ballot box offers choice without voice. The form of freedom remains—campaigns, editorials, opinion polls—but substance is continuously skimmed away like cream from milk, leaving a watery liberalism that can be drunk without risk by the powerful.
5. Forrester’s Economic Horror: The Market without Jobs
Viviane Forrester saw the globalisation of the 1990s birthing a paradox: soaring productivity coupled with evaporating employment.
- Automation, off-shoring, and just-in-time logistics produce surpluses with ever fewer workers;
- Welfare states, designed for cyclical unemployment, crack under structural redundancy;
- A new caste of surplus people emerges—formally free, materially shackled.
Implication for liberty: Classical liberalism equated freedom with the right to sell one’s labour. When labour is no longer wanted, liberty mutates into the right to hustle eternally—Uber by day, Etsy by night—under permanent precarity. Debt, not prison bars, becomes the new fetter.
6. Wolin’s Inverted Totalitarianism: Governance by Managed Democracy
Sheldon Wolin’s chilling coinage describes a system where corporate power usurps political life without the theatrical violence of 20th-century dictatorships.
- Security agencies partner with tech firms, blurring public and private sovereignty;
- Elections are ritual confirmations of elite consensus, not engines of change;
- Citizens are spectators, politics a branded spectacle, dissent a demographic niche.
Implication for liberty: The tyrant is no longer a moustached figure on a balcony but a placid circuitry ensuring that disruptive wills are absorbed or silenced long before they reach quorum. Totalitarianism is inverted: people are not coerced to idolise the state; they are coaxed to ignore it.
Constellations: How the Six Lenses Interlock
- Varoufakis supplies the economic infrastructure (platform serfdom).
- Postman supplies the cultural superstructure (spectacular distraction).
- Mbembe exposes the sacrificial underside (zones of expendable life).
- Chomsky shows the linguistic machinery (manufactured consent).
- Forrester reveals the social fallout (precariat and redundant multitudes).
- Wolin maps the constitutional outcome (hollowed republic, corporate sovereignty).
Together they describe a self-reinforcing circuit:
Technofeudal platforms harvest data → Entertainment media lulls critique → Necropolitical frontiers externalise violence → Illusions manage consent at home → Jobless growth multiplies desperation → Inverted totalitarian governance stabilises the arrangement … which further empowers the platforms that began the cycle.
Can the Circle Be Broken?
- Digital commons legislation could dissolve platform fiefdoms, but lobbyists writing “necessary” tech policy are the very vassals of those lords.
- Public-interest media could counter Postman’s spectacle, but attention itself is colonised by algorithms optimised for outrage and mirth.
- Transnational human-rights regimes could confront necropolitics, yet those regimes depend on the very powers deploying lethal peripheries.
- Education in critical media literacy could puncture necessary illusions, but curricula are increasingly outsourced to corporate ed-tech.
- Universal basic income could answer economic horror, but fiscal imagination is bounded by deficit phobias fanned by rentier classes.
- Constitutional reform could curb inverted totalitarianism, but such reforms require the mass mobilisation that the preceding forces relentlessly disperse.
Hope, then, must recruit new energies: unions that span borders and sectors, whistle-blowers inside the algorithmic fortresses, artists capable of holding attention long enough for truth to ferment, and jurists who dare draft rights for the twenty-first-century subject—rights to data self-determination, to dignified redundancy, to the slowness indispensable for thought.
Epilogue: The Flame and the Screen
Liberty in the West was once pictured as a torch raised high. To keep that fire, citizens gathered in forums, argued, voted, sometimes bled. Today the torchlight competes with a trillion tiny LEDs, each promising easier warmth. The danger is not that the flame will be snuffed out in a single gust of tyranny, but that we will cease to notice its dimming, amused and scrolling beneath the neon canopy of our own captivity.
Yet dusk is not night. The owl that sees in darkness has already taken flight, carrying these six grim insights on its wings. If we dare to look up, to read the shapes it traces across the fading sky, we may still decide that liberty is worth the costlier light of day.
Balductum Musings 
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