A new form of capital is ascending: cloud capital—networked algorithmic machines that grant their owners remarkable powers to modify our behaviour. And just as financiers needed neoliberalism, today's tech lords need a new ideology to legitimise their rule. I call it techlordism.

For half a century, neoliberalism was the undisputed creed of the global elite. Born from the ashes of Bretton Woods, it sanctified the emancipation of financial capital from the regulatory shackles of the New Deal. Its genius was not originality but attitude.

Unlike Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill—who fretted over precisely when markets might fail—neoliberals declared the market infallible. Even when Wall Street cratered our economies, they insisted that mortal intervention would only make things worse. That suited the financiers perfectly. But that era is over.

A new form of capital is ascending: cloud capital—networked algorithmic machines that grant their owners remarkable powers to modify our behaviour. And just as financiers needed neoliberalism, today's tech lords need a new ideology to legitimise their rule. I call it techlordism.

Neoliberalism's job was to provide an ideological and pseudo-scientific cover for the incessant recycling of dollars through US deficits. Techlordism's job is far more radical: to provide the ideological cover for colonising everything—human endeavour, state institutions, and Wall Street itself.

Consider the three fronts. First, techlordism must legitimise replacing fallible, recalcitrant humans with cloud capital in every realm, from medicine to poetry translation to raising children. Why? Because the deeper the penetration, the greater the cloud rents for the technofeudal class.

Second, it must legitimise colonising the state—privatising public data, hooking systems into the tax office and the Pentagon, as Elon Musk's DOGE and Peter Thiel's Palantir have already done.

Third, it must legitimise colonising Wall Street, merging cloud capital with financial services to create unfettered cloud finance outside traditional markets.

The new ideology is already here. Techlordism mutates transhumanism, just as neoliberalism mutated classical liberalism. It replaces the neoliberal Homo Economicus with an amorphous HumAIn—a human-AI continuum—and substitutes the divine market with a new divinity: the divine algorithm, rendering decentralised markets obsolete in favour of Amazon-style centralised matching.

The repercussions are breathtaking: ubiquitous surveillance, automated targeting on the battlefields, macroeconomic instability (as cloud rents destroy aggregate demand), the end of democracy as even an ideal (cheered by Peter Thiel), and the death of universities replaced by personalised AI augmentations.

And yet, the full ugliness of techlordism is best seen not in abstract theory but in the unspoken manifestos of its vanguard.