Re: <nettime> Ece Temelkuran: Can the term ‘cloud fascism’ help us understand – and resist – the hard right? (TG)

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

I just finished the Varoufakis book. It was much, much better than what I
had gleaned from reviews and from discussions of it on nettime. What was
always left out of the commentaries - it's left out of this article too -
is the distinctive power of the cloud capitalists, which is the power to
directly change the behavior of their users (or their serfs, as Varoufakis
would say). Cloud capital is not about the production of goods. Instead it
produces specific kinds of social subjects, according to the needs and
desires of the cloudalists.  Of course we have known this about
surveillance capitalism for a long time, almost since inception. Yet it is
no longer about just nudging your taste toward certain products. Varoufakis
takes Elon Musk as his chief example. Musk, he says, was a major industrial
capitalist, producing a lot of data exhaust from his otherwise smokeless
automobiles, but without any digital service to which he could feed that
data, and then use it to shape the behavior of millions. Therefore,
according to Varoufakis, he needed to acquire such a service.

Now we see what Musk has done with Twitter. He has used it to fuel a
reactionary wave of historic proportions, by deliberately polarizing the US
population and exerting similar effects across the world. He may now
succeed in creating or paving the way toward a government-backed
crypto-currency serving the needs of the new capitalist ruling class.
Varoufakis's description of cloud capitalism does not include this fascist
outcome, yet it confirms his central thesis in an extremely chilling way.

Yes for sure, as Cade says, a proper legal decision with police enforcement
action could put a stop to that, and whatever one may have said or done in
the past, it's right to call for the decision and support the action.
However, here in America we are not seeing any such legal action, not yet
in any case. As Weimar Germany showed, the law crumbles in the face of
successful right-wing populism. We have not yet had the decisive test - the
much-discussed "constitutional crisis" has not yet reached the Supreme
Court - but my sense is that only a national movement expressed at all
levels and in all ambits of society can stop Trump. If such a movement
emerges, the courts and the police actions will follow. Until it does,
those who place their hopes in the law are just kidding themselves, as they
have been doing for a decade now, since the 2015 presidential campaign.

I hope the situation is better in Europe. But I doubt it.

bon courage, Brian

On Sun, May 11, 2025 at 11:41 AM Patrice Riemens via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

>
>
> Original to:
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/10/cloud-fascism-understand-resist-hard-right
>
>
> Can the term ‘cloud fascism’ help us understand – and resist – the hard
> right?
>
> Like clouds, far-right ideology moves here then there with absolute
> randomness. The danger is that those who can, shrink under their umbrellas
>
> Ece Temelkuran, The Guardian, Sat 10 May 2025
>
>
> Last month, a few weeks into the random detentions and denied entries at
> the US border, I was supposed to go to Princeton University as a guest
> lecturer to discuss global fascism. I asked the professors who invited me
> whether they thought it was safe to come. When I was in Turkey, European
> journalist friends once similarly asked me whether they’d be detained. And
> just as I did then, the American professors hesitated with half sentences:
> “Well, you know … ” It was decided that a law firm should be involved.
> After some back and forth, the final assessment remained unsettlingly
> ambiguous: “A detention is unlikely, but we cannot be sure.” Eventually, to
> be on the safe side, we choose the online option.
>
> In the end all was fine on the surface, but I know from being on the other
> side of this story that the silk thread-like connection between us humans
> had been cut. They felt their land a shade darker, and I felt like giving
> up on the unfortunate in dire times. After all, I should know: this is how
> a country drifts into darkness – not by a dictator’s orders but rather by
> the outside world abandoning its people to their own means, by cutting
> millions of the threads that hold us as humanity together.
>
> Meanwhile, what began as a shocking absurdity – academics, intellectuals
> and ordinary people with ideas being denied entry or sent to prison for
> weeks based on the search of their phone – quickly became ordinary. The
> unacceptable was normalised at such speed that, only a few weeks into the
> border crisis, the EU began issuing burner phones to its staff bound for
> the US. Some European countries warned their LGBTQ+ citizens to be cautious
> visiting the US in a tone akin to Tripadvisor travel tips. The charade
> began without warning and continues with absolute randomness. Trouble finds
> people as described in the assessment of my likely difficulties: “unlikely
> but not for sure”. And in that unsettling ambiguity lies the unique feature
> of today’s fascism.
>
> Many of us – writers, thinkers and politicians – try to come up with a
> catchy term for today’s fascism. At the heart of it, I have come to think,
> lies not only the desire to analyse but also the urge to attract people’s
> attention so they are adequately alarmed. It may be an all too human urge
> to think: “If only we could find the right word, people would stop and
> listen. Perhaps then they’ll do something.” In fact, it is good old
> fascism, only with many new spectacles and glamorous gadgets, like an
> updated app with new features. One of these new features of 21st-century
> fascism is being cloud-like. After all, it is the political child of cloud
> capitalism.
>
> The term was coined by the Greek economist and politician Yanis
> Varoufakis. He says there is a new economic system where big tech
> companies, particularly those operating in the cloud, have replaced
> traditional capitalist pillars like markets and profit with platforms and
> rents. This system is characterised by the creation of digital fiefdoms in
> which individuals, or fiefs, labour for these platforms. It is like in
> medieval times, but a techno version. Nobody, of course, throws themselves
> into this new form of slavery, yet things seemingly happen as if ordained
> by the natural order.
>
> The term “cloud” reveals a lot about the world’s current reality. The
> cloudlike vagueness, fluidity and slipperiness of the system – its
> everywhereness but at the same time nowhereness – are quite like moving
> storm clouds. Right now it is in Turkey, operating through the imprisonment
> of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s political rivals; now it is in Israel, starving
> Palestinian children. After appearing on the Italian shores to push back
> refugees to the sea, it suddenly shows up in the US, raining on a new land
> through the border police. Cloud fascism has infinite hands committing
> unpredictable crimes with the randomness that we all try to catch up with
> and adapt to. Like the cloud fiefs, we get on with it. And after a short
> while we lose our ability to be shocked, unwillingly normalising the cloud,
> as if now it is a natural phenomenon we must live with. As if the cloud
> simply is. Just don’t take your phone with you to the US. Buy a burner. No
> big deal. If there is a cloud, get an umbrella and walk faster past those
> who do not have one.
>
> The late Pope Francis called this umbrella attitude “global indifference”.
> He often referred to human dignity as the last defence line of human
> morality against the indignities of our present political and economic
> reality. As I perceive it, he didn’t mean only the dignity of the poor
> being broken by inequality. Dignity, as a central human value that unifies
> all of us, can be damaged in several other ways. Those who can afford the
> umbrellas to protect themselves from cloud fascism, who without any protest
> buy the burner phone, have their dignity broken too, even if they numb
> their heart not to feel it. The late pope didn’t stop at pointing out the
> wounded dignity of humanity; he alluded to civil resistance when he said
> that when the laws are not good enough, one can go against them to be on
> the side of the greater good.
>
> Finally, in Wim Wenders’s documentary about him, he said: “Revolution.
> Don’t be afraid of the word.” A word that for a while has been accompanied
> by a smirk or a sarcastic air-quote hand gesture even in progressive
> intellectual circles. That smirk is the sign of our loss of faith in
> humanity and the beginning of our submission to the darkest cloud. Whereas
> the pope smiled when uttering the word – big difference.
>
> This cloud of ours, this cloud fascism, is travelling the planet,
> showering us with acid rain. Yet each time it appears in a country, the
> citizens of the land behave as if it is the first time and only happening
> to them. The repeating astonishment marks the beginning of our retreat –
> and believing that a big enough umbrella, made solely for our nation, can
> save us is the dawn of our defeat. The question is whether we will blow
> away the cloud before the ultimate surrender. What stands between us,
> humanity and the dark cloud is the question of faith. Not in God, perhaps,
> but in the divinely joyous entity that materialises when people come
> together to defend their dignity. A cloud of resistance that is as random,
> fluid and unpredictable as cloud fascism. What can stop this acid rain is
> the everywhereness of the cloud resistance of human dignity. I am not
> saying revolution – well, after all, I am not the pope. May he rest in joy
> of dignity.
>
> Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish journalist and political commentator, and
> author of How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship
>
>
>
>
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