SOCIAL AWARENESS: TECHNO FEUDALISM

SOCIAL AWARENESS: TECHNO FEUDALISM 

The New Serfs: Are We Living in a State of Techno Feudalism?

Good afternoon, readers.

When we think of feudalism, our minds typically drift to history books: images of kings, lords, castles, and vast stretches of land worked by peasants. It was a rigid hierarchy where security was traded for freedom, and the primary source of power was land ownership.

We like to believe that capitalism—with its markets, competition, and social mobility—freed us from that. But if you look closely at the digital landscape of 2024, a disturbing theory emerges. Many economists and philosophers, most notably Yanis Varoufakis, argue that we haven’t transcended feudalism at all. We have simply rebranded it. Welcome to the age of Techno Feudalism.

The Land is Now Digital

To understand this concept, we have to look at where value is created. In classical feudalism, the Lord owned the land. The serfs worked the land, and in return for protection and a place to live, they paid rent—usually in the form of crops or labor. The serfs didn't own the means of production; they merely existed at the pleasure of the landowner.

Today, the most valuable "land" isn't acreage in the countryside—it is cyberspace.

Platforms like Amazon Marketplace, Google’s search index, the iOS App Store, and Facebook’s social graph are the new digital fiefdoms. They aren't just companies; they are private territories. If you are a small business, you don't have a choice but to set up shop on Amazon’s land. If you are a developer, you must pay tribute (a 30% tax) to Apple’s fortress to reach your users.

Renting Our Existence

In a healthy capitalist market, you sell your labor for a wage, or you sell a product for a profit. In techno feudalism, we don't sell anything to the tech lords—we pay rent just for existing.

Consider this: You don't "buy" software anymore. You pay an Adobe subscription every month. You don't own movies; you pay Netflix rent to access them. You don't own your social network; you pay with your attention and your data to use Meta’s platform. We have moved from a model of ownership to a model of perpetual tenancy.

Even more insidious is "cloud serfdom." We store our memories (photos), our communications (emails), and our work (Google Docs) on servers we do not control. The "Lord" of the cloud (AWS, Google, Microsoft) can, theoretically, evict us or change the terms at any time.

Capital vs. Tribute

The critical difference between capitalism and feudalism lies in profit.

In traditional capitalism, profit comes from exploiting labor to sell goods for more than it costs to make them. In techno feudalism, the massive wealth of a Jeff Bezos or a Mark Zuckerberg doesn't primarily come from "selling" things. It comes from rent extraction.

Amazon makes more money from AWS (renting server space) and marketplace fees (renting digital shelf space) than it does from selling products at a markup. Google extracts rent from advertisers who have no other way to reach audiences. These are tollbooths on the digital highway, and we pay the toll whether we realize it or not.

The Social Consequence

Why does this matter for social awareness? Because the social contract is breaking.

Feudalism created a stagnant society where your birth determined your future. Techno feudalism is doing the same. A brilliant musician cannot succeed without paying rent (visibility) to Spotify. A talented writer cannot find an audience without bowing to the algorithm of Substack or X (Twitter).

We are seeing the emergence of a "platform class" (the tech lords and their shareholders) and an "app peasantry" (the rest of us who produce content, create value, and innovate, only to hand the lion's share of the value back to the platform).

Breaking the Bonds

This isn't a Luddite call to smash our smartphones. Rather, it is a call for digital awareness. We are taught that the internet is a free, democratic space. It is not. It is the most efficient system of rent collection humanity has ever devised.

The first step to dismantling a feudal system is to realize you are a serf, not a free citizen. It means understanding that when a platform is free, you are not the customer—you are the inventory. It means demanding interoperability (the digital equivalent of the right to cross a lord's land without paying a toll) and supporting decentralized technologies that return ownership to the user.

Until we treat data as property and algorithms as infrastructure that must serve the public good, we will remain peasants in a kingdom we built for them.

What are your thoughts? Do you feel like a tenant in the digital world, or do you feel like an owner?

Grateful thanks to AI ASSISTANT DEEPSEEK for its great help and support in creating this blogpost!🙏