Revisiting Feudalism in the Digital Age; The Case for Technofeudalism
The Revolution will not be televised
Art taken from What Is Technofeudalism?
So what is all the fuss about, i did share a hint of this blog on my telegram channel Here, but as you can from the article above where i snatched the art, technofeudalism is not that much of a new concept, but i recently became aware of it. So me being me i had to write about it and share my findings and opinions
Topics
What Is Technofeudalism
Technofeudalism is a contemporary socio-economic system characterized by the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few tech giants. Unlike historical feudalism, which revolved around land ownership, this modern paradigm is anchored in control over digital infrastructure, data, and intellectual property.
History of Technofeudalism
So before i go on and start explaining the different points and aspects of technofeudalism it is fair that you know where it started and how it stated.
The Concept has been visited by many different scholars over the years, even though it might not have been called technofeudalism. We can notably mention two people who did bring the term and the idea to the masses. First being Yanis Varoufakis and Jaron Lanier.
Who is Yanis Varoufakis?, he is a greek economist and a former finance minister who argues that capitalism ate itself and brought its demise with technofeudalism he is famously known for his book Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails i did log that to my tbr but did not get to it cause its not related to the topic we are discussing here, luckily he did write a book about Technofeudalism called Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism I did get through this book not an interesting read but was intriguing discovering a new topic.
Who is Jaron Lanier?, Well i am sure most of you know about him but for those who don’t he is one of the pioneers in virtual reality and a critic of big tech, he was also featured on the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma and also his book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now well while not directly talking about technofeudalism he did cover the areas where technofeudalism deploys.
Now for the question where did it exactly start? There is no point in history that we can say here, but we can go back to the days of the early critiques of capitalism by thinkers like Karl Marx highlighted the exploitation and power imbalances reminiscent of feudal societies. Yanis has a background in Marxist and Keynesian economic theories, which he uses to analyze contemporary economic systems so we can see the inspiration to this, and also the rise of big corporations and the data economy. This is as the history of technofeudalism goes.
Digital Inequality
We are living in a time that is dominated by online content and digital platforms. Where everything that once used to be analog is turning into a digital format, and here is where we see the rise of Digital Inequality while a few entities dominate the digital platform reminiscing back to the days of the feudal lords. It, therefore, leads to the concentration of wealth and authority, stifling opportunities for social mobility and deepening social strata, currently in place, and the emergence of new forms of inequality. It only enhances this further, with the digital divide being even worse, as people not able to use technology or not literate in the digital sense are further left behind.
The Evolution of Property Concepts
In this background of technofeudalism, traditional concepts of property are taking a new shape with the advent of a digital mutation of society. Today, digital assets and data are the new currency; We can see this with the rise of NFT and Cryptocurrency, it’s very unlike physical property, which prevailed in earlier times, thereby redefining ownership and control in the digital age. This has far-reaching consequences on the distribution of wealth, power dynamics, and individual rights.
In the past, property used to revolve around physical assets, including land, buildings, and goods. The latter had explicit legal regimes governing ownership, usage rights, and transferability. Under technofeudalism, the really valuable assets are often intangible: data, intellectual property, and digital platforms. These new forms of property are free from many physical constraints and can be replicated, shared, and controlled as never before.
Data has turned into one of the most valuable commodities in the digital era. The likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon have become business empires by their capacity to collect, analyze, and monetize user data. This is a move from physical to digital property where economic power is control over data. Unlike traditional property, data can always be harvested and applied to generate profits, thus creating new forms of exploitation and form of control.
The companies that control huge social media networks, search engines, or e-commerce websites wield tremendous power over their clients and competitors. These large, significant platforms operate with network effects—a situation in which the utility of the service increases with the number of other people who use it—dramatically favoring their owner in the market. Control in digital platforms would resemble much the same kind of control over land, where a few powerful entities dominate large parts of the digital landscape.
Intellectual property (IP) too has undergone a change in the age of technofeudalism. The digital environment allows for fast creation and distribution of intellectual goods, as in the case of software, digital media, and online content. However, in respect to traditional IP frameworks, this ease of replication and distribution often poses challenges to the same. Companies and individuals have to deal with this maze of copyrights, patents, and trademarks to protect their creations, sometimes with overlaps in ownership and the right to use them.
The Role of Open Source
Open source software (OSS) is a type of software in which the source code is made available for everyone to view, edit, or enhance. Key principles surrounding open source are collaboration, transparency, and community-driven development. All open source software comes with a free-to-use tag, thus nullifying every factor that acted as an entry barrier and democratizing access to technology. This counteracts the monopolistic tendencies of technofeudalism by providing alternatives to proprietary software.
Open-source software often comes at no cost for licenses, thus reducing costs for individuals and businesses. Hence removing the underlying concept of feudalism. As an example let us take Amazon, Amazon is a proprietary digital platform where you can shop for stuff you like, so how does feudalism apply there, Bezos here owns the platform Amazon where he neither sells or buys the stuff but owns the place or metaphorically speaking the land where buyers and sellers come to meet. Then he harvests money from both the sellers for setting up their shops on that land and the buyers who visit the land. So if we were to assume that one replaces this with Open Source platforms the aspect of feudalism can be slowly scraped off.
There are organizations and polices that try to bring aspect to life. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI) are just two of the many organizations that campaign for policies that would promote open source development, while opposing laws and rules that would make permanent the dominance of the tech monopolies. You can also be a member of this movement by just singing up to their site.
Governance and Regulation
Governments are significantly handicapped in regulating Tech giants. Healthy regulatory setups that ensure the fairness of business activities, consumers’ rights, and prevent any hint of monopsonistic tendencies are required to remain afloat with the advancements in technologies. Also another reason why governments do not regulate much of the digital platforms owned by tech giants is for Surveillance. The way technology is increasingly being used for keeping tabs on people’s activities raises huge privacy concerns, We have for instance countries like china where they have dominant messaging and finance platforms like wechat Which is so integrated into the chinese community that is is hard to move away from it, Here’s how essential WeChat is to everyday life in China, Why It’s So Hard for Meta, PayPal and X to Build a Super App Like WeChat. China also has a Social Credit system, where you are given certain points for being an obdient citizen, tweeting good about your country and so on, The Truth About China’s Social Credit System. We are also witnessing this in action where Ethiopia is deploying its own super app telebirr and forcing Digital ID’s maybe social credit system next but who am i to say.
Well as things move forward and privacy becomes a myth day by day, it is hard to predict what the feudal lords will be using the data for.
Cultural and Psychological Effects
Among the most far-reaching of cultural consequences from technofeudalism is the homogenization of culture. With a reach across the globe, tech titans like Google, Facebook, and Amazon do much to disseminate content. However, its spread is one-way, with the directionality of the content heavily biased in terms of culture—the majority comes from a Western, more specifically American, cultural perspective. This broad dissemination threatens local cultures and traditions that would be consumed by the global audience. In such a case, the larger products of these tech giants may overpower native languages, traditions, and stories and eventually erode cultural diversities. We can credit the rise of cancel culture to the dominance of technofeudalism slowly eradicating the idea of free speech, thought.
It also shapes significant new consumer behaviors. The algorithmic design of tech platforms determines how purchasing occurs, how media is consumed, and what lifestyles are led. These are designed to optimize for engagement and revenue, resulting in the larger culture of gratification and continuous consumption. One-click shopping, individualized recommendations, and constant advertising in every aspect of life make up a materialistic society that has pushed the identity of consumers even more toward tech-driven trends and preferences.
Social interaction has been fundamentally changed with the rise of technofeudalism. Social media platforms have come to dictate, through a few tech giants, how people find each other, talk to each other, share information, or updates. There might be an overemphasis on virtual relationships, which would ultimately affect the natural kind of relationships and the building of communities. The curated realities presented on platforms like these could create a culture of comparison and competition, where one is constantly assessing themselves against an idealized other, often leading to dissatisfaction or a sense of inadequacy.
The unending nature of online connectivity, together with the demands that arise from social media, can result in increased anxiety and other mental health conditions. Consequently, these notifications round the clock, FOMO, and addiction due to social media cause stress, sleep problems, and a reduced span of attention. Moreover, those perfect digital self-representations on social media are known to cause enhanced unworthiness and depression when one is comparing his life to how others seem to live seemingly great and perfect on their profiles.
People become accustomed to the convenience and efficiency of technical solutions such that they tend to depend on digital tools for the most common activities, ranging from communication, navigation, and decision-making to entertainment, we have noticed this due to the recent crowd strike blue screen of death incident, the cost paid on heavily relying on tech giants. And eventually, such dependence lessens human critical thinking and problem-solving abilities since one normally gets used to outsourcing these functions to technology, we can see this in recent studies. This are some notable once
Final Thoughts
While possibility of 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 still lingers fighting against a system that has set its roots deep is indeed hard. And my overall take on this is we are already doomed, we can’t do nothing about it, but being privacy conscious and using FOSS apps might help. Also do try to read the privacy policies and data collection stuff more commonly known as the EULA because companies do state how and what they do with your data there.