Recently my spouse sourced Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis from my local book store for me. I attempted to read it recently and ended up decided to put it down unfinished. I'm hoping to get a sense of what other people who read the book thought so I can see if I struggled with the topic/writing or if the book is just bad.
I started struggling early on when Yanis seems to imply that the Trojan War was a real war that happened and not just mythology. It didn't really matter to his thesis, he was just using it in an analogy, but I got hung up on that. Made me feel like the author doesn't know what they're talking about.
After a break, I read on for a few chapters before I got frustrated enough with his writing that I started just skimming. He uses a lot of words to describe things that probably could have been written in a single sentence, but he'll take paragraphs. It just reminded me of all the tricks I would use in high school to pad my essays.
Anyways, I finally flipped to the conclusion to see if it would suck me back in, but alas he seems to finish as vague and useless as this entire book seems to be.
Please let me know your impressions!
by persononfire
3 Comments
yeah i had similar issues with this one. varoufakis has some interesting economic insights but his writing style is just so bloated and self indulgent. like dude we get it you went to fancy schools but can you just make your point without the unnecessary historical tangents
the technofeudalism concept itself has merit but he takes forever to actually explain what he means by it. i kept waiting for concrete examples or actionable analysis but instead got more flowery prose about digital serfs or whatever. felt like he was more interested in coining a catchy term than actually digging into the mechanics
honestly his other stuff like adults in the room was way more readable even if you disagree with his politics. this one just felt like academic masturbation
I don’t know about this book, but Troy was a very real place and the Trojan war very well may have happened in some capacity, if not exactly as described in the Illiad and the Odyssey.
From Wiki:
The historicity of the Trojan War remains an open question. Many scholars believe that there is a historical core to the tale, though this may simply mean that the Homeric stories are a fusion of various tales of sieges and expeditions by Mycenaean Greeks during the Bronze Age. Those who believe that the stories of the Trojan War are derived from a specific historical conflict usually date it to the twelfth or eleventh century BC, often preferring the dates given by Eratosthenes, 1194–1184 BC, which roughly correspond to archaeological evidence of a catastrophic burning of Troy VII,[4] and the Late Bronze Age collapse.