Are The Irish People Rising up to Techno-Feudalism?
100 years after ridding British landlords Ireland has sold its people to corporate landlords
Future Perspectives Newsletter is a round-up of my essays from the frontier of digital money, governance and organization. For more info on my REST API technical writing for Fintech companies please visit www.andrewgillick.com
This is how capitalism ends: not with a revolutionary bang, but with an evolutionary whimper. Just as it displaced feudalism gradually, surreptitiously, until one day the bulk of human relations were market-based and feudalism was swept away, so capitalism today is being toppled by a new economic mode: techno-feudalism.
- YANIS VAROUFAKIS, Former Greek Minister of Finance
What’s Happening in Ireland Now
Two weeks ago thousands of people joined the Raise the Roof protest in Dublin city to highlight Ireland’s housing crisis. Like California, Ireland’s cities have been annexed by Big Tech, REITs and investment funds who are now the largest owners of private housing.
The average rent in Ireland jumped 15% in the past year alone.
At this rate many people will not be able to pay the rent let alone save to buy a house unless one is on a big salary usually at Big Tech/Pharma. I write this as one who feels some guilt around becoming a landlord in Ireland this year (accidentally by default of my mother’s sudden death) and anger having grown up in Dublin with friends there.
Meanwhile, the number of Irish homeless is at a record high of 11,000.
Despite the historical image of the “rebel Irish”, the current generations are perhaps the most deferential to authority and IT TAKES A LOT for anyone to stick their neck out in protest these days. There has been barely a whimper during two decades of continuous socio-economic crises in the country.
Anger around housing has been fomenting for years but their demands of ‘affordable housing for all’ may be pissing into the wind.
How Ireland Got Here
In a nutshell, a little over 100 years after ridding the British landlords who put Paddy to work as a peasant on his forefathers’ land the Irish now find themselves once again digital serfs but to corporate landlords.
Literally.
Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), so-called cuckoo funds, private equity and Big Tech are now among the biggest owners and landlords of private property in the country. Seeking yield in the decades of low interest rates they bulk buying entire estates and apartment blocks and outbidding families in the process.
Many of these offshore funds are also building thousands of new apartments and dwellings in Dublin solely to rent them out primarily to students who for decades have been in a rent squeeze and can only aspire to eventually graduate and work for the landlords.
The Irish economic miracle, one of the most productive counties in the world on a GDP per capita basis, has been built on attracting multinational corporations with the world’s lowest corporate tax rates. The 2022 corporate tax take was a record 21 billion Euros.
For decades Ireland has been the EU HQ to the majority of US Big Tech and Big Pharma companies and attracts thousands of highly-qualified highly paid foreign workers every year which has, among other factors, has pushed house prices up. Over the years these multinationals have also bought literally streets of housing in Dublin city for their employees.
But also private equity, vulture funds, and REITs swooped into the country after the 2007–2009 property collapse where prices fell 60% peak to trough and there was a surplus of stock and thousands of unfinished houses and apartments.
In some cases they finished the projects, in others they sat on them and waited for price to go back up. Many dwellings were kept off the market and 15 years on from the crash housing prices are back to their bubble peak and the country is suffering a double-whammy supply shortage and affordability crisis.
How do we describe this situation that is repeating in the world’s major cities: Is it globalisation, central bank policy, rentier capitalism, or are we entering a new phase of capitalism, such as Techno-feudalism?
What is Techno-Feudalism?
The Leftist concept of Techno-feudalism describes the process of capitalism coming full circle back to the top-down economic rentier system it replaced.
The concept has been trending since Shoshana Zuboff’s widely-acclaimed Surveillance Capitalism which outlined the next phase of digital/financial capitalism whereby Big Tech are the data overlords extracting data as rent from anyone who produces anything digital and microtargeting them with ads to buy more stuff, so the theory goes.
In the age of Techno-Capitalist-Feudalism, neo-serfs work endless fields of digital code, rather than endless fields of corn & potatoes, cultivating digital footprints as profit for the new feudal-overlords perched high upon a pedestal made of the people’s own blood, sweat, & tears!
Michell Luc Bellem
If this is the start of techno-feudalism then crypto-feudalism is the end-game in the barriers to rent-seeking are removed (i.e. influencers creating their own ‘token/money’ for multi-level marketing) and allows everyone can monetise and speculate from selling their data (‘Self sovereign ID’ and social credit scores).
In medieval feudalism the main economic activity was the collection of rent and tributes in the same way that the aspiration of everyone today is to build passive income by owning property, shares or someone else’s debts.
The situation we have now is that multinational corporations (MNCs), REITs control more money, thus more powerful, than most countries.
The tail is now wagging the dog as corporations hold the upper hand on governments, they can make or break an economy, political careers, and have all the technology knowhow in an age in which governments simply cannot keep up.
“At Alibaba, we treat it more like governing an economy, as we have to manage so many companies’ dependent upon us as partners… By 2036 we will have built an economy that can support 100 million businesses for billions of users. We won’t own that economy. We will just govern it.”
— Jack Ma, Alibaba CEO
I believe the situation is better described as neo-feudalism as, ultimately, physical things are still the most essential, even in the digital economy: the data warehouses that store Amazon servers and cables, the office blocks for employees, the real estate that houses people etc.
If so, it’s the global Real Estate Investment Trusts, private equity and vulture funds that are on top the new economic system.
The fiefdom of Ireland
Ireland is Techno/Neo-feudalism taken to its extreme and looks more like a fiefdom for MNCs and funds than a sovereign republic, totally reliant on foreign-direct investment to maintain its “prosperity” and prevent a revolt.
The government swears fealty in the form of serving up well-educated obedient employees in return for investment. In feudal lingo, this is like an Earl swearing his daughter’s marriage to a lord in return to be a vassal of his land.
Corporations and funds are notorious for playing accounting tricks in Ireland, such as the “Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich”, where they play closer to 1% rather than headline 12.5%.
In the infamous case of Apple it was ordered by the EU High Courts to repay the government (i.e. Irish taxpayers) 12 billion Euros over illegal tax exemptions, but the government refused to take it!
Conclusion
Although it sounds dramatic the Techno/Neo-Feudalism concept closely describes what’s happening in Ireland: Big Tech and REITs bulk buying property that only their employees can afford.
It will take a bit longer to lift the Irish out of their decades-long languor and rekindle the rebellious spirit.
But the Irish housing crisis is bigger than Big Tech/REITs presence in its cities. We have reached the nexus of finance, information and technology are amorphous and the socio-economic structure particularly in the West is in flux.
What comes out the other side I don’t know but I bet it will will be far more complex than most of us are prepared for.
ABOUT ANDREW GILLICK
I create industry-leading technical and API documentation for Fintechs that frees up developers, attracts investors and captures customers.
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This is not unique to Ireland of course - we see it everywhere. Of course, the extent and modus-operandi may differ.