From capitalism to technofeudalism#

A few months ago I wrote a piece about capitalism. The premise was that, to see the distinctiveness of our current capitalist world, it helps to go back in time to see what it looked like before. A bit like traveling helps to see the distinctiveness of your hometown.

What distinguishes our capitalist present from our feudalist past, I wrote, is the separation of labour from the means of production, the ensuing emergence of money relations and markets, and the resulting systematic imperative for capitalists to reduce costs to retain market share.

Today I want to complicate things a bit by exploring the argument that actually, in certain parts of our every day life, we appear to be moving back to a world of feudal relations. This is the idea of “technofeudalism”.

In the following text, I am again mostly reproducing the work of others, in an attempt to find my own words for a confusing world. And again I recognize that there are many stories to be told. This is just one of them.

Are we digital serfs?#

Let’s start with a quick recap: in a feudal society, it is the feudal lord who controls the land. He allows the serfs to use his land for their own reproduction, on the condition that they in turn provide him with the means to maintain (and maybe even expand) that control over the land (e.g. with agricultural produce and military service).

Now, when we open an account on Instagram, we are - in a way - also allowed to use the digital “land” that is controlled by Meta: we can use it for our own production and consumption, on the condition that we in turn provide Meta with the things it needs to control and reproduce that very digital world.

We are allowed to use Meta’s servers to connect with each other, and in return we give Meta our presence and our content (without which the platform wouldn’t exist) and our data (which Meta and its clients use to modify our behaviour to their benefit).

What makes this situation feudal is not so much that we provide the elites with the things they need to own and control the things that we need. This also happens under capitalism: what we produce is worth more than what we are paid, and the difference goes to our bosses, who in turn use (part of) it to buy their machines (that we subsequently need in order to earn a living).

Instead, what makes this situation feudal is the fact that it does not (directly) involve money and open markets. In contrast to workers in capitalist systems, we are not buying the products from our digital overlords in an open market with the money they pay us for our labour. Instead, we are allowed to use their digital lands, and - crucially - these lands turn out to be very hard to escape (see network effects). Just like our feudal ancestors, we are helplessly exploitable “sitting ducks”, unable to put our overlords under any serious form of competitive pressure.¹

This is why some people, like Yanis Varoufakis, are arguing that we are digital serfs. Or, put differently, why people like him are arguing that Big Tech is breaking capitalism:

“Ultimately, the cloudalist’s investment is aimed not at competing within a capitalist market but in getting us to exit capitalist markets altogether.”¹

But what does all of this mean for the future of our (digital) world?

A feudal escape from the race to the bottom?#

Some naive tech-optimists might have hoped that Big Tech would use its feudal power to do good: that it would use the fact that its users were stuck, to push for change on themes like sustainability and emancipation that would otherwise - in a competitive market - lead to unsustainable loss of market share. That it could help us escape the catastrophic competitive race to the environmental and social bottom.

But as people like Cory Doctorow have documented very clearly: this decidedly did not happen.²

Marxists missing markets#

Simplifying our world a bit, you could say that there are two ways to collectively shape the future: the “one person one vote”-model of democracy and the “one euro one vote”-model of the market.

The transition from feudalism to capitalism brought us the market, but it also kick-started the ongoing tug of war between liberals and socialists, with the latter trying to replace as much as possible of the market with democracy.

In the case of a feudal revival, however, we would have neither democracy nor a market. Without any form of collective agency, we would be back at the start: fully at the mercy of the sycophant feudal maniacs, the way our feudal ancestors were at the mercy of their feudal lords.

Not only would we lose the tiny bit of control over our digital future that we had, we would also lose the ability to defect from the worst relations of extraction.

We would live in a world where even marxists would start missing markets.

Fighting for capitalism, fighting for the commons#

Some people are trying to fight back though. And this fight resonates in peculiar ways with the anti-feudal resistance from the past. Like in the French and Russian revolutions, passionate advocates of market capitalism and stubborn defenders of the commons once again find themselves on the same side of an anti-feudal struggle.

Yet although they share an enemy in the feudal digital overlords, they are fighting for very different futures.

The former group, for example, insists that we shouldn’t be allowed to “freely” use the digital lands in exchange for in-kind services; we should sell our presence, data and content to the highest bidder, and we should spend that money in an open market of tech services: “one euro one vote”. This is, in a nutshell, the dream of the web3 movement which still resonates in parts of the ATmosphere.

The latter group, by contrast, likes to remind people that capitalism has been rushing us towards the planetary abyss, and that we should therefore probably try to replace the feudal nightmare with something else: for example a decentralized federation of locally governed digital commons: “one person one vote”. This is the anarchism of the Fediverse.

Organizing our escape in the Fediverse#

Given what is at stake, it is surprising that so few people seem to be aware of, and engaged with this struggle over our digital world. Much like many of the boomers and generation X (what’s in a name) could not be bothered to think through the geopolitical and economic implications of letting the Americans build our digital world, a big part of the younger generations seems to have thrown in the digital towel, accepting their lives as digital serfs.

Luckily, however, it’s not frustrations all the way down. I am also grateful for all the people that are trying to break free. As I wrote here, every interaction on the Fediverse - a boost, a favorite, a reply - is by default already a little exchange of mutual thank you’s: thank you for contributing to our collective escape. Of the right kind, that is.