A new economic era fuelled by tech giants is to blame for Australia being pulled into a political game of chess between US and China, a prominent Greek economist has warned.
And Australia had a duty to help de-escalate what has become a cold war between the world's two super powers.
Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis pulled no punches in a speech to the National Press Club on Wednesday where he said the clash between the US and China had little to do with trade rows, Taiwan, or Chinese escalation in the Pacific.
Instead, it had everything to do with technology, he said.
The economist, who heads the Democracy in Europe Movement, said the pursuit of a war between two techno-feudalists - "one denominated in US dollars, the other in Chinese Yuan" - had left Australia in the middle of a crossfire against its better interests.
Mr Varoufakis warned that allowing Australia to become "complicit in Washington's pursuit of a new cold war" is the wrong call and Canberra must work to restore a reputation "tainted by blindly following America".
That taint had been caused by "our ill-considered slide from a strategic dependence on the United States to a non-strategic, self-defeating servility to Washington's policy agenda," he said.
And Australia had a duty to de-escalate the new cold war, he said.
"Imagine an Australia that helps bring a chess piece in Ukraine as opposed to a mindless forever war that is going nowhere," Mr Varoufakis said.
Too much power among corporate giants had driven society into a new economic age of techno-feudalism, he said.
His book Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism addresses concerns about governments and banks failing to understand or regulate emerging tech enterprises such as Amazon, TikTok, and Metaverse.
The coined term refers to a feudalist social system in medieval Europe where peasants were forced to live on a lord's land - working labour and sharing produce in exchange for protection.
Now, the land is digital and lorded over by the likes of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, Mr Varoufakis said.
Produce becomes currency, working labour becomes curating algorithms, and peasants become platform users, he said.
