Find Patelis’ full video abstract below. For more video abstracts, visit our PeerTube page.

Transcript

Have I Got News for You: The Road to Neo-feudalism. That’s the title of my article. Have I Got News for You was a very famous show back in the ’90s in the U.K., a new show. The Road to Serfdom is Hayek’s most famous book. So Have I Got News for You: The Road to Neo-feudalism is soaked with melancholy. Have I got news for you: neo-feudalism is about the politics of defeat. You’ve heard the word. I’m sure you’ve—there’s so many authors from Varoufakis to Kotkin to Zuboff to, quite recently, Morozov actually summarizes them, trying to critique the debate. So have I got news for you: neo-feudalism is nothing of what it tries to be. To begin with, why do we need to call it a day? Like, who’s calling it a day? Why is it—right now—that we are actually told that it’s over? And that’s why it’s such a melancholy, conservative project because it actually tells you “regress to the times where there were just overlords. There was no collective subject, and those bad, bad, bad techies are all at fault.” Have I got news for you: the debate on neo-feudalism does not have epistemology. On the contrary, it actually encloses history. It actually says this is of the now without explaining why and pretending there’s some kind of dialectical process unearthed here, some kind of method through which we’ve actually come to the term “neo-feudalism,” we’ve actually said “neoliberal capitalism is dead and we’ve called it a day” but who’s done that? Nobody. None of the authors on neo-feudalism have actually zoomed in on GAFAM: Google, Amazon, big tech. None. On the contrary, the epistemology is really—there is something—back in the ’90s, we used to really, absolutely criticize [that] they are based on good old digital market determinism, the idea that there are markets and that are determined by digital, which we all disagreed with. In general, the neo-feudalism debate—that’s what I argue in the article—loves its dichotomies: its global-local, Eastern-Western, them-us. And, alas, we’re not there. That serf, we’re not there. We’re not there as scholars. We’re there as a collective subject. We’re not there as anything. So the neo-feudalist debate is problematic because it, basically, aspires to real 19th century romanticism and, basically, aspires to prove that history—historical fact—have actually happened when it actually manufactures them. Greece is necessarily involved in what you’re going to read because, in Greece, we don’t particularly like classicism. We don’t particularly like anything that is Western and, therefore, the idea that somebody’s called it a day on us—despite the fact that we don’t use Facebook, Amazon and Google that much—still makes us feel strange.

MOre from media theory 8.2

• Machines That Create: Contingent Computation and Generative AI
• The Contingency of Process, or Why There is No Computation-in-itself
• Mediated Futures in Anesthetic Space: Noise, Speculation, and Lowell’s Telescope
• Affinities of Affectivity: Entanglement, Contagion and Exploitation in Smartphone Society
• Whose Time Is It? Book Presentation: Stamatia Portanova in Conversation with Iain Chambers, Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova, Introduced by Geoff Cox
• The Ghosts of Gaza
• The ‘Narrative Turn’ Revisited: A Brief Note on Political Storytelling

CREDITS

Images AND VIDEOS (in order of appearance)

hitesh0141 (2017). [Photograph of a man reading the newspaper]. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/photos/reading-newspapaer-newspaper-man-2706960/

OrcaTec (2018a). [A close-up video of hands moving chess pieces]. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/videos/chess-chess-pieces-chess-board-19598/

OrcaTec (2018b). [A video of two people moving chess pieces]. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/videos/chess-chess-board-strategy-play-19600/

Media_Hopper_Studio (2025). [A video of people walking down a street]. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/videos/crowd-people-street-park-nature-256703/

joshua_ulmann (2021). [A close-up video of a hand swiping through Instagram on a smartphone]. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/videos/phone-app-touch-screen-mobile-phone-64594/

jadeallencook (2022a). [A video of a man flipping through a book next to a bookshelf]. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/videos/books-book-store-library-reading-140591/

jadeallencook (2022b). [A video of two people reading books while sitting on the floor between bookshelves]. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/videos/books-book-store-library-reading-140587/

Coverr-Free-Footage (2015). [A close-up video of a hand using a marker to write on a whiteboard]. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/videos/whiteboard-planning-strategy-1658/

Coverr-Free-Footage (2016). [A video of an out-of-focus man using a marker to write on a whiteboard]. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/videos/whiteboard-sketch-planning-business-2303/

Evangelos Chatzikonstantinou (2024). [A video of the city of Thessaloniki]. Pexels. https://www.pexels.com/video/thessaloniki-drone-5-20716721/

Stratos K (2022). [A video of the sunset over the city of Athens]. Pexels. https://www.pexels.com/video/sunset-over-city-13702234/

Music

Title: Medieval Modernity (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/maserpan/ambient-soundtracks/medieval-modernity/)

Artist: MASERPAN (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/maserpan/)

Source: https://freemusicarchive.org/

License: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)