The internet shattered capitalism’s evolutionary fitness rather than defeating or entrenching it

Evidence

So now, let me try to do that: No, Dad, even though it gave capitalism a breathtaking boost for a couple of decades, the internet did not render capitalism invincible. But nor did it prove, on its own, its Achilles heel, as I initially suggested. What the internet did to capitalism was more subtle: in conjunction with the attention market that the technostructure had fabricated, and under circumstances created by the Minotaur’s spectacular rise, not to mention its 2008 fall, the internet shattered capitalism’s evolutionary fitness. And as I shall explain in the next chapter, it did this by incubating a new form of capital, which has ultimately empowered its owners to break free of capitalism and become a whole new ruling class of their own. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 232

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the core thesis that the internet broke capitalism’s fitness and incubated a new ruling class — key terminology for the rest of the book.
• SEED: Angle: ‘evolutionary fitness’ as a lens for why the internet neither killed nor saved capitalism but mutated it into technofeudalism.
• DEEPTHINKING: The thesis that capitalism was neither overthrown nor made invincible but evolutionarily broken, incubating a new ruling class, reframes the standard ‘capitalism vs tech’ debate.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 232
• XREF: connects to: Creative destruction, not peace, causes capitalism’s endemic crises — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 428; Digital networks that capitalism spawned are replacing capitalism with a new feudalism.; Internet self-representation conceals a capitalist infrastructure producing the self as commodity (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Internet self-representation conceals a capitalist infrastructure producing the self as commodity #complicates (0.85)
• The internet functions as a factory producing the self as commodity #complicates (0.85) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 18
• Technology’s cultural effects are mediated by late capitalism not deterministically #complicates (0.85) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 410
• The internet’s egalitarian founding promise hardened into corporate libertarianism #complicates (0.85) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 34
• Surveillance capitalism breaks the historical link between innovation and shared prosperity #complicates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 803
• Avant-garde norm-rejection and capitalist market expansion converged on dismantling social norms #complicates (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 853