October 2025

“Truth of fact and truth of fiction are incompatible; yet [the biographer] is now more than ever urged to combine them. For it would seem that the life which is increasingly real to us is the fictitious life; it dwells in the personality rather than in the act. Each of us is more Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, than he is John Smith of the Corn Exchange. Thus, the biographer’s imagination is always being stimulated to use the novelist’s art of arrangement, suggestion, dramatic effect to expound the private life. Yet if he carries the use of fiction too far, so that he disregards the truth, or can only introduce it with incongruity, he loses both worlds; he has neither the freedom of fiction nor the substance of fact” (Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography,” in Granite and Rainbow, p. 155).

I suppose it’s one of the accidents of life that I happened to read Woolf’s essay shortly before reading Lacey’s book. And I also suppose that such accidents are a factor in making one’s life what it is. Regardless, I couldn’t stop thinking about Woolf’s comment as I made my way through the two sections of Lacey’s new novel. One section is basically a fictional story about a late-night encounter of two old friends in the wake of estrangement. The other is something like a memoir of one woman’s life in which she tries to make sense of her life in the wake of a failed relationship. In each, we find characters constructing narratives to “expound the private life.” I think that Lacey avoids the result that Woolf warns against — that is, I think that she holds onto both the world of fiction and the world of fact. The two women in the story grapple with each other, comparing their different accounts of what led to their estrangement. In the memoir, the woman deals with the trauma of being a guest in her own house — and even in her own life — after the man she calls The Reason informs her by email that he’s leaving her for another woman. In each case, we find characters constructing and re-constructing narratives in which their memories of their lives and their sense of self might find a home.

I know I’m something of a dinosaur, but I found the physical construction of the book mildly frustrating. The memoir and the story are published back to back (or back to front?) in the same binding. After (or while) reading the memoir, one can flip the book (to what would ordinarily be an upside down position) and begin reading the story from the other direction. I found it frustrating because I constantly wanted to compare a passage in one to a passage in another. I see the relationship between the book’s title and this construction, and perhaps Lacey is using the structure to force me into the same sort of narrative construction as I seek to understand how the two elements might or might not fit together.

On her website, Lacey suggests that pondering this question might help one decide whether to read The Möbius Book: “Belief in abstractions is both the peril of the delusional and a necessity in love; how do rational people accept this paradox?” As we create the narratives that constitute our sense of self, we face the risk of delusion; as Woolf might say, we risk losing the substance of fact. And yet to love another we need an understanding of both self and the other that gives meaning to the random facts of our existence. Reading this book has pushed me to see just how the narratives I construct relate both to my personal experience and to the way I’m perceived by those who love me.

In 1993, when Varoufakis’s father first connected his computer to the internet, he said, “This is a game changer. … Now that computers speak to each other, will this network make capitalism impossible to overthrow? Or might it finally reveal its Achilles heel?” Varoufakis wrote this book as an answer to these questions, framed asa letter to his now deceased father. In short, he says, internet technologies have indeed surplanted capitalism, though they didn’t do it alone.

Varoufakis’s main point in this book is that the emergence of what he calls technofeudalism has roots similar to those that brought about the market economy a couple of centuries ago. The rise of capitalism followed the enclosure of public lands with the support of the government, changing these commonly held lands to private property, and the invention of technologies such as the steam engine. He sees the same set of events in the rise of technofeudalism: “first, the ransacking of the internet commons, made possible by politicians, and then a sequence of spectacular technological / inventions… . In short, in the last two and a half centuries, humanity has had to reckon with two singularities, neither of which required machines to attain sentience. Rather, each required a comprehensive plunder of a commons, a complicit political class, and only then a marvelous technological breakthrough. That’s how the original Age of Capital transpired. And that’s how the Age of Cloud Capital is now dawning” (pp. 70f).

Technofeudalism, he says, has its cloud proles, individuals who labor for big tech companies under forced conditions in which they are both shaped and judged by algorithms that are invisible and incomprehensible. And it has its cloud serfs, who provide data to big tech for free. The efforts of both proles and serfs are directed toward supporting the tech firms who amass more and more cloud capital.

I found this an interesting read, and I think it’s a good addition to books like Chris Hayes’s The Siren’s Call (see comments in last February’s page and Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification. We can quarrel about the terms — is it advanced capitalism or technofeudalism? — and I appreciate Varoufakis’s use of Simone Weil’s work to make the point that language matters: “When a word is properly defined, [it helps] us to grasp some concrete reality or concrete objective, or method of activity. To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis — to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving human lives.” The main point — and, I think, it’s a crucially important point — is that we can overcome challenges like those of economic inequality and climate disaster only if we take back control of our lives what we have too easily surrendered to big tech firms that currently control so much of our online lives.