Technofeudalism summary

Imagine you’ve just been beamed into an alien city. 

It’s a bustling but otherwise unremarkable kind of place. The shops are filled with the usual kinds of things: gadgets and games, music and movies, clothes and shoes. People place orders; goods are wrapped and tills rung up.

But as you stroll about, you notice something odd: every building, every bench, even the street beneath your feet, belongs to one man – Jeff. What’s even odder is how the shops’ window displays change every time a new customer stops to look at them. You ask a passer-by what’s with that. “Oh, that’s just the algorithm,” she shrugs. Jeff owns that, too. 

The algorithm has an uncanny way of predicting what people want. Every home contains a “digital assistant” called Alexa that sets reminders, dims your lights, and orders fresh milk. Alexa loves information. It tracks habits and documents whims. It knows your favorite song and what time you get up. And it tells Jeff everything. It’s his data, after all. 

Welcome to Amazontown! 

The world’s largest e-commerce platform might look like a capitalist market, but it’s not. Even in a monopolized market, where one corporation controls the supply and price of goods, buyers can talk to each other and form associations. But Amazon’s users neither interact nor exchange information. The market’s invisible hand has been replaced by an algorithm. 

On closer inspection, Amazon.com looks more feudal than capitalist. Under feudalism, aristocratic lords owned all the land, which they divided into estates called fiefs. The lords rented these fiefs to subordinates called vassals. Jeff’s “land” may be digital, but it’s also a kind of fief. In order to gain access to Amazontown and the customers who shop there, vassal companies have to fork over up to 50 cents of every dollar they bring in. 

Facebook, Alibaba, TikTok, Uber, and the other Big Tech companies work in a similar way: they’re all in the feudal business of renting out fiefs. Which poses a question: Is an economic system dominated by corporations running cutting-edge software on medieval hardware still capitalism? And if the answer’s no, shouldn’t we find a new name for that system – something like “technofeudalism,” say? That, in a nutshell, is the big idea we’ll be exploring in this Blink. First, though, we need to back up a bit and define some terms.