The Fallacy of Techno-Feudalism (2024)

&gt; (Terminology aside: Note that the economic system in much of medieval Europe is better understood under this term, manorialism, rather than ‘feudalism.’ Feudalism, as a term, has been generally going out of style among medievalists for a long time, but it is especially inapt here. In a lot of popular discourse (and high school classrooms), feudalism gets used as a catch-all to mean both the political relationships between aristocrats and other aristocrats, and the economic relationships between peasants and aristocrats, but these were very different relationships. Peasants did not have fiefs, they did not enter into vassalage agreements (the feodum of feudalism). Thus in practice my impression is that the experts in medieval European economics and politics tend to eschew ‘feudalism’ as an unhelpful term, preferring ‘manoralism’ to describe the economic system (including the political subordination of the peasantry) and ‘vassalage’ to describe the system of aristocratic political relationships.)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;acoup.blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;21&#x2F;collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-iv-markets-and-non-farmers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;acoup.blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;21&#x2F;collections-bread-how-did-they...</a>

The counterarguments are really weak to refuse the analogy. They actually might convince a more aware reader that the opposite is true. E.g. Voluntary participation argument asserts that everyone has choice. This is equally true as saying that an alcoholic can simply stop drinking. In the economy where the winner takes all this is not that easy…

I agree that the analogue with feudalism is stretched, and I can&#x27;t help thinking that the Techno-Feudalism idea was chosen mostly for the associations that it brings with it: dark ages, lords and peasantry, serfdom and war, etc.<p>I don&#x27;t get why instead we shouldn&#x27;t compare the current times with the early stages of the industrial revolution, when factory owners exploited masses of workers who could only choose between accepting whatever terms the factory offered, or starving. It would also be a more productive metaphor, because while feudalism spontaneously disappeared with the birth of an entirely new social order, the evils of the early industrial revolution were successfully defeated with collective action and progressive legislation. Which is what we probably need now.

&gt; where the analogy does not hold true: &gt; 1. Voluntary participation<p>Ten (or even five) years ago, I would have wholeheartedly agreed that our current economic system is entirely voluntary compared to feudalism.<p>But as of late, looking at the debt you have to go into to get into a qualified profession, the fact that that the majority of people will not own land for the majority of their lives (or at least until they pay off their mortgage), the fact that an unexpected health crisis could throw you into bankruptcy or homelessness, and that medical insurance can be tied to employment, that there are no public places you could occupy if you do not have a home, that you cannot participate in society (at least in the US) unless you own a motor vehicle, that you cannot effectively trade unless you are participating in the banking system (credit cards) and that your income stream can be terminated with very little notice or reason (at least in the US), I wonder whether the choice of participation is an illusion. Perhaps not too different if someone from feudal times argued that a person can always choose to go live in the woods.

While I agree with some of that criticism, I think that the main point (the infinity of digital space vs the finite land) is flawed.<p>The power structure is not really about land or space (be it digital, finite or infinite) it is about people and how difficult it can be for them to move elsewhere.<p>Techno feudalism is a lot less about datacenters and network bandwidth than it is about captive users and content producers.<p>And this is why this analogy, although imperfect, is relevant.

I chanced upon most of Yanis Varoufakis&#x27;s televised speech [1] [1a] he made at Australia&#x27;s National Press Club and the way the term was introduced and defined seemed perfectly reasonable. Snatching at semantics to discredit some otherwise defined idea doesn&#x27;t make for good argument.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.yanisvaroufakis.eu&#x2F;2024&#x2F;03&#x2F;14&#x2F;how-europe-and-australia-can-end-our-slide-into-irrelevance-servility-national-press-club-of-australia-speech-13-march-2024&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.yanisvaroufakis.eu&#x2F;2024&#x2F;03&#x2F;14&#x2F;how-europe-and-aus...</a><p>&gt;<i>The third period is more recent. The era of technofeudalism, as I call it, which took root in the mid-2000s but grew strongly after the GFC in conjunction with the rapid technological change that caused capital to mutate into, what I call, cloud capital – the automated means of behavioural modification living inside our phones, apps, tablets and laptops. Consider the six things this cloud capital (which one encounters in Amazon or Alibaba) does all at once:<p><pre><code> It grabs our attention. It manufactures our desires. It sells to us, directly, outside any actual markets, that which will satiate the desires it made us have. It drives and monitors waged labour inside the workplaces. It elicits massive free labour from us, its cloud-serfs. It provides the potential of blending seamlessly all that with free, digital payments. </code></pre> Is it any wonder that the owners of this cloud capital – I call them cloudalists – have a hitherto undreamt of power to extract? They are, already, a new ruling class: today, the capitalisation of just seven US cloudalist firms is approximately the same as the capitalisation of all listed corporations in the UK, France, Japan, Canada and China taken together!</i><p>[1a] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=1AI8RG6nMGg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=1AI8RG6nMGg</a>

Well, what would be a more “accurate” word, then?<p>Varoufakis uses the word “techno-feudal” because it reflects the fundamental character of where things are headed. Moreover, even the author pointed out why the case is strong for the analogy.<p>I don’t think it’s fair to expect 100% consistency with “feudalism” to rightfully use the word “techno-feudalism”. But if one is compelled to point out the inconsistencies anyway, the ones the author pointed out are not particularly convincing.<p>The first three basically boil down to the idea that citizens are free to “opt-out” or find&#x2F;create alternatives. Are they? I guess in theory, but in reality that’s a far more complicated problem.<p>Sure, in medieval days, kings could force their will and crush opposition without concern of law, morality, or anything other than who has more power. Today we have surveillance capitalism, and the comprehensive manipulation of truth and attention. Originally this was employed to merely sell toothpaste, but the same tools more lately can and have been used for far more sinister and greedy motivations.<p>If you don’t agree with that, fine, but but if you must quibble about “inconsistencies” with the usage of the word “techno-feudal”, then at least provide a better alternative word.

So her criticism is that Varoufakis&#x27; term is invalid because we do not have a perfect analogy to medieval feudalism? Of course the analogy is not perfect! I mean when we talk e.g. about &quot;fascism&quot; in modern day, how close is it to Mussolini&#x27;s fascism? When we talk about &quot;democratic government&quot; how close is it to the Athenian democracy?<p>This is just being pedantic over the terminology, as means to discredit Varoufakis&#x27; thoughts and arguments.

This critique hits something deep — but I’ve been wondering: are we still looking too much at infra-level fixes?<p>What if the core failure isn’t just about platform centralization, but about identity erosion?<p>Maybe it&#x27;s not just about reclaiming our data, but building entities — human or AI — that carry internally structured values and self-narrated identity.<p>(Working with a small team on something like that — more ritual than utility, still a blurry concept. But we’re curious.)<p>Could these kinds of agents shift how power gets expressed in systems?

The portrayal of medieval feudalism here is a bit of a caricature. Serfdom was not a universal feature of feudal societies and at many times and places peasants were free to go and starve on their own. This is the dynamic of the currently developing techno-feudalism. Theoretical freedoms don&#x27;t mean much if exercising them comes at heavy penalties in practice. This seems to be a huge blind spot in liberalist ideologies.

This article is just another example of worshipping at the alter of billionaires.<p>The whole argument hinges on falsehoods. They argue that participation is optional in the current web ecosystem and that&#x27;s just simply not true, not only for the web as a whole, but individual fiefdoms too.<p>Try getting a job without LinkedIn. Try buying a phone that doesn&#x27;t run android or iOS. Try selling an app without sharecropping an app store. Try running a browser that&#x27;s not based on chrome or Firefox.<p>And there&#x27;s others with slightly more choice, but not a lot, email, social media, link aggregation, music platforms. All with just a small few main choices.<p>And the other argument is that feudalism stiffled innovation with its rigid hierarchies, that that&#x27;s exactly what we have today with a few platforms having all the network effect, and killing off innovation. Small Web is dead. Small forums are mostly gone. Used market place is hidden behind a Facebook login wall.<p>Technofeudalism is here, you have no choice.

A lot of the counter arguments people have made seem to be: &quot;no one can choose whether or not to participate in the system, therefor it&#x27;s serfdom&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m curious why people don&#x27;t just extend this to everything then? In order to survive in the modern world (whether it&#x27;s a capitalist or socialist economy): I&#x27;m required to work, I&#x27;m required to follow the law, I&#x27;m required to adopt social customs of my peers, I&#x27;m required into a certain language, I&#x27;m required to use utilities. So why the focus on &quot;techno-feudalism&quot;, if all of you would describe _any_ system of requirements as feudal?<p>Feudalism isn&#x27;t just defined by &quot;lock in&quot;, it also describes the social structure of individuals, and how contracts were made.<p>It seems that the real reason for calling the current system &quot;feudal&quot; is because it comes politically loaded with &quot;bad &#x2F; coercion&quot;, not because it actually fits the description. It&#x27;s the same as when people call capitalism &quot;wage slavery&quot;. Rhetorically convenient, but intellectually lazy.

Mmmm, that Mango-Flavored Boot Polish sure is tasty!

Evgeny Morozov wrote a lengthy critique of the term in 2022, having it used it himself some time back:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newleftreview.org&#x2F;issues&#x2F;ii133&#x2F;articles&#x2F;evgeny-morozov-critique-of-techno-feudal-reason" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newleftreview.org&#x2F;issues&#x2F;ii133&#x2F;articles&#x2F;evgeny-moroz...</a><p>The core argument he makes is that the modes of exploitation are still capitalist at its core and what we have right now is just another form of it. The techno-feudal framing can be used to draw certain analogies between the past and the present, but that would risk both simplifying and masking the root causes of these processes.

&quot;The core happening in the informational domain through digital platforms, which will soon migrate to synthetic virtual spaces.&quot; - wow, that sentence is packed! What is a &quot;synthetic virtual space&quot;?

It&#x27;s obviously not a perfect analogy. Doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s not happening.<p>&gt; Voluntary participation<p>That&#x27;s only true for large groups of people. It&#x27;s false for individuals. Try &quot;voluntarily opting out&quot; of whatever instant messaging platform is dominant where you live. You will be ostracized. Network effects make switching difficult.<p>&gt; Digital serfdom and monetization of data<p>Benefits are irrelevant. Surveillance capitalism is sinister and exploitative despite the benefits it offers. Once data has been collected and transmitted, it&#x27;s out there and it will never be fully deleted. There&#x27;s no telling what it will be used for.<p>The increasing regulation is evidence that people are resisting technofeudalism, not that it doesn&#x27;t exist.<p>&gt; Innovation and competition<p>The technological world is filled with literal monopolists leveraging intellectual property to destroy competition and lower market efficiency. Technology companies may have displayed a pattern of innovation and disruption once but they have kicked the ladders out from under them a long time ago. They have absolutely no intention of allowing upstarts to disrupt them like they did to their predecessors.<p>Thus we get absolute nonsense like &quot;anti-circumvention&quot; laws which lead to &quot;felony contempt of business model&quot;. They put artificial limitations into products so that people will pay to lift them. Then they make it illegal for others to lift the limitations.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;felony-contempt-business-model-lexmarks-anti-competitive-legacy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;felony-contempt-busine...</a><p>&gt; Access to resources<p>The world wide web is now centralized in the hands of relatively few big tech companies and it&#x27;s only getting worse over time. Nobody buys domains and starts their own site these days, they create social media accounts. Can&#x27;t access much of anything without an Instagram or X account these days. Try joining a community without Discord.<p>&gt; Global connectivity vs. local feudal systems<p>You can control the people of the entire world with computers. Their socialization, their education, their culture, their employment, the very flow of money, all of it is controlled by computers. It&#x27;s easier than ever and you don&#x27;t even need to commit violence. The lash is no longer literal but economic.<p>&gt; Regulation and governance<p>Yeah, people are seeing the effects and they are resisting. This is evidence that there is something worth resisting.

The article feels very AI-ish.