Pepe Escobar - Raging Twenties: Great Power Politics Meets Techno-Feudalism

1. Introduction

All things are a flowing

Sage Heracleitus says;

But a tawdry cheapness

shall reign throughout our days.

Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

It seems, as one becomes older,

That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence

Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy

Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,

Which becomes, in popular mind, a means of disowning the past.

The moments of happinessnot the sense of well being,

Fruition, fulfillment, security or affection,

Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination

We had the experience but missed the meaning,

And approach to the meaning restores the experience

In a different form, beyond any meaning

We can assign to happiness. I have said before

That the past experience revived in the meaning

Is not the experience of one life only

But of many generationsnot forgetting

Something that is probably quite ineffable:

The backward look behind the assurance

Of recorded history, the backward half-look

Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages, II, no. 3 of Four Quartets

The Raging Twenties started with a murder.

That lethality was amplified when a virus cannibalized virtually the whole planet, devouring time.

As time has been standing stillor implodedever since, we cannot even begin to imagine the consequences of the anthropological rupture caused by SARS-CoV-2.

A new world starts when languageeither a living entity, or a virus from outer space (William Burroughs)starts metastasizing new words.

A basket of concepts already stand out. Circuit breaker. Biosecurity. Negative feedback loops. State of exception. Necropolitics. New Brutalism. Hybrid Neofascism. And, as we shall see, New Viral Paradigm.

The proliferation of new wordsand conceptsparadoxically developed in parallel with the slow fade out of The Word.

Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe summed it all up: This end of the word, this definitive triumph of the gesture and artificial organs over the word, the fact that the history of the word ends under our eyes, that for me is the historical development par excellence.

We all now live in Google town. Suddenly, we were forced to identify the lineaments of a new regime. A new mode of production: a turbo-capitalist survival engineered as Rentier Capitalism 2.0, where Silicon Valley behemoths take the place of estates, and also the State. That is the techno-feudal option, as defined by economist Cedric Durand.

Squeezed and intoxicated by information performing the role of a dominatrix, we were presented with a new map of Dystopia, packaged as a new normal, featuring cognitive dissonance, a biosecurity paradigm, the inevitability of virtual work, social distancing as a political program, info-surveillance, and triumphant Trans-humanism.

A sanitary shock was superimposed over the economic shockfinancialization always taking precedence over the real economy. But then the glimpse of a rosy future was offered towards more inclusive capitalism. A Great Reset. All thought out by a tiny plutocratic oligarchy, duly self-appointed as Saviors.

Baudrillard has shown us how sign value subsumes every other categoryvalue, exchange-value, use-value. Our post-postmodern condition has gone way beyond the rule of signs. No more citizens: everyone now is collateral damage.

No wonder informed citizens started questioning whether they have been reduced to no more than victims of a full spectrum psy ops.

All of these themes evolve along the 25 small chapters of this book. And they also interact with the larger geopolitical chessboard. SARS-CoV-2 accelerated what was already a swing of the power center of the world towards Asia. The Empire we have been taught to accept as a fact of life is irretrievably losing its leadership positionand will have to deal with much pain implicit in the acceptance of an increasingly multipolar world.