Observing the emergent broligarchy’s elaborate conspiracy to extract as much wealth and power as they can from Donald Trump’s second coming, it is justifiable to feel sick in the stomach. Men of tremendous wealth, with a history of treating the mothers of their children sadistically, of endorsing books justifying torture and the elimination of human rights, of making zillions from government and military procurement while tirelessly working toward disbanding government programs that offer a sliver of protection to the poor, have decamped at Mar-a-Lago kissing Trump’s ring and preparing for direct government power.

From their perspective, the deal they cut with Trump is an incredible bargain with a rate of return that no conventional business can hope to emulate. For a few hundred million dollars that they invested in Trump’s re-election, within minutes of his victory they amassed extra wealth to the tune of hundreds of billions. To be precise, the value of Peter Thiel’s Palantir shot up by 23 percent while Musk’s Tesla saw its stock rise by 40 percent to a capitalisation level higher than most of the rest of the global car industry combined.

For a few crumbs off their table, that they ploughed into the Trump campaign, the Big Tech brotherhood are in the process of receiving three amazing gifts: Gargantuan government contracts. A tremendous goldrush following the elimination of regulations that will allow them a gloves-off onslaught against the public’s concerns over their ways and wares (e.g., autonomous vehicles, rogue AI bots and drones, massive increases in electricity consumption). And, lastly, immense state-sanctioned bargaining power in their dealings with workers, suppliers, competitors and the rest of us.

And then there are, of course, the non-trivial concerns about their broader ambitions. Thiel’s favourite book is, reportedly, The Sovereign Individual. Its authors, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, literally and without the slightest hint of irony liken the broligarchs to the Olympian gods before going on to argue that it is only right and proper that they dominate the world. “Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies,” they proclaim. As for Thiel himself, his explanation of why he likes this shoddy book so much is that it offers an “accurate” prediction of “a future that doesn’t include the powerful states that rule over us today.” What Thiel neglected to say, of course, is that his dream is not one in which exorbitant power has withered but, rather, that it is a dream in which men like him monopolise it. At least he is honest enough to acknowledge that his version of freedom is incompatible with democracy.

But is any of this truly novel? However reprehensible the broligarchs’ practices and convictions might be, is it not possible that we are surrendering to a recollection of the past that is so recklessly optimistic that, by contrast, the present looks like a deterioration, when it is nothing but a recapitulation of our past?

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That’s all true. However, there is a superpower, a hyper-weapon, that the broligarchy possess today that their Big Business and Wall Street predecessors did not. It is a form of capital that never existed until recently: cloud capital which, of course, does not live up in the clouds but down on Earth, comprising networked machines, server farms, cell towers, software, AI-driven algorithms – and on our oceans’ floors where untold miles of optic fibre cables rest.

Unlike traditional capital, from steam-engines to modern industrial robots that are produced means of production, cloud capital does not produce commodities. Instead, it comprises machines manufactured so as to modify human behaviour. These produced means of behavioural modification train us to train them to determine what we want. And, once we want it, the same machines sell it to us, directly, bypassing markets. In this light, cloud capital performs five roles that used to be beyond capital’s capacities: It grabs our attention. It manufactures our desires. It sells to us, directly, outside any traditional markets, what it made us want. It drives proletarian labour inside the workplaces. And it elicits massive free labour from us to sustain the enormous behavioural modification machine network to which it belongs with our free voluntary labour: As we post reviews, rate products, upload videos, rants and photos, we help reproduce cloud capital without getting a penny for our labour. In essence, it has turned us into its cloud serfs while, in the factories and the warehouses, the same algorithms that modify our behaviour and sell products to us are deployed – usually by digital devices tied to the workers’ wrists – to make them work faster, to direct and to monitor them in real time.