The Fallacy of Techno-Feudalism (2024)

https://petrapalusova.com/articles/tech-platforms-digital-economy-techno-feudalism

by gasull • 1 year ago

53 73 1 year ago

skybrian2• 1 year ago

(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.)

https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they...

m000• 1 year ago

So her criticism is that Varoufakis' 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 "fascism" in modern day, how close is it to Mussolini's fascism? When we talk about "democratic government" how close is it to the Athenian democracy?

This is just being pedantic over the terminology, as means to discredit Varoufakis' thoughts and arguments.

gasull2• 1 year ago

The analogy doesn't match the main characteristics of feudalism, therefore it's a fallacy.

anonymars2• 1 year ago

Right, isn't that what makes it an "analogy" and not a "definition"?

lo_zamoyski• 1 year ago

when we talk e.g. about "fascism" in modern day, how close is it to Mussolini's fascism?

Putting aside your main argument, I will only comment that this example does not serve it. "Fascist", like "Marxist", are thrown around by the left and the right, respectively, to smear anything they don't like.

So while pedantry can get in the way of understanding, so can sloppy use of terminology.

When we talk about "democratic government" how close is it to the Athenian democracy?

Like Mussolini's variety of fascism, Athenian democracy isn't really the basis for a definition of democracy. Democracy has a general definition that is not defined by empirical contingencies given that label. That puts the cart before the horse.

ajkjk2• 1 year ago

Fascism is thrown around by the left to describes things as fascist that are fascist and then the people who don't like being called that whine that it's a smear instead of reckoning with the criticism. Cause no one reckons with criticism anymore, it's passe.

captainbland• 1 year ago

If I had a criticism, it's possibly that techno-fascism is increasingly becoming more apt.

We're already seeing it in the measures the US government is taking towards autistic people, where RFK Jr's characterisations of autism ("will never pay taxes, will never hold a job") were knocking on the door of the motivation for the Nazi Aktion T4 programme (essentially that lack of contribution to the state makes you unworthy of life). All the while simultaneously planning build a big centralised register of autistic people.

We've seen the expansionist rhetoric. We've seen the xenophobia. We've seen the disregard for rule of law and constitutional norms. All of which is being underpinned by a billionaire class who are increasingly seeing human labour as disposable, even if their trust in the future of transformer based AI may be 'optimistic' in this respect, who have aligned themselves with the executive. This represents the fusion of corporate interests with the state, albeit with a more plutocratic twist than the 20th century fascists.

This isn't a soap box, it's purely a matter of semantics. There's much less of the kind of geographic constraints and other trappings of lordship and monarchy so much as people capturing a republic and twisting its apparatus to suit an authoritarian purpose.

arrosenberg• 1 year ago

At the end of the day, it’s all gangster shit.

verisimi7• 1 year ago

When we talk about "democratic government" how close is it to the Athenian democracy?

Indeed. Rather than each citizen voting on each issue, we have 'representative democracy' where 100,000's (perhaps millions) elect one person to vote and represent them for all those decisions. Arguably modern 'democracy' is far closer to 'slavery' than 'Athenian democracy' in its implementation, especially when you consider the forcible extraction of (~40-50%) of wealth (tax).

jampekka8• 1 year ago

In Athenian democracy there were more literal slaves than citizens with voting rights.

ordu• 1 year ago

This is just being pedantic over the terminology, as means to discredit Varoufakis' thoughts and arguments.

I hadn't see the attempt to discredit Varoufakis' thoughts or arguments. What I did see is a critique of an analogy. If you like, I can agree that this is a pedantic take, but it is important sometimes, and I believe that this case is of that kind.

What the point of analogies? I know two of them:

1. an appeal to emotions: you can show some similarities between a regime and a fascism and you kinda won. Everyone knows that fascism is bad, don't they? But it is a political thing, and if you don't want to be a mindless zombie in hands of a politicians, you must know what exactly fascism is, and to break the analogy apart to see where it matches and where it breaks.

2. explanation. If you can to draw analogies between an unknown thing and a known thing, it can be easier to understand the unknown one. It can help really, but again you need to stop at some point and to figure out where the analogy breaks, where its limits of applicability are. If you try to push analogy beyond its limits you'll form wrong opinions about the unknown thing you are trying to learn.

(1) uses failure mode of (2) (overextending an analogy) to fool people. So pedantic approach to analogies is something you should have around you ready at all times.

malfist• 1 year ago

This article is just another example of worshipping at the alter of billionaires.

The whole argument hinges on falsehoods. They argue that participation is optional in the current web ecosystem and that's just simply not true, not only for the web as a whole, but individual fiefdoms too.

Try getting a job without LinkedIn. Try buying a phone that doesn't run android or iOS. Try selling an app without sharecropping an app store. Try running a browser that's not based on chrome or Firefox.

And there'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.

And the other argument is that feudalism stiffled innovation with its rigid hierarchies, that that'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.

Technofeudalism is here, you have no choice.

forinti• 1 year ago

It is also quite strong in the corporate space. All the major vendors are cornering us into their clouds.

skybrian2• 1 year ago

I’m out of the loop. What happens if you apply for jobs directly, without using LinkedIn?

graemep• 1 year ago

I agree that is a weak example. I think the others are strong, and it is increasingly true outside tech too - lots of brands are just rebadges from a few actual manufacturers.

coliveira• 1 year ago

It is still possible to find a job without LinkedIn, but more and more companies are requiring a LinkedIn account in the application. So the future looks bleak in this area too.

antihipocrat2• 1 year ago

Even the choice of how payments are made is being eroded. I see a not too distant future where cash and physical cards are replaced by a single digital option via our phones. Associated data relating to the transaction is then captured by the techno lord as well.

It's also very naive to think that these companies will continue to innovate. Once monopoly is achieved rent seeking becomes more profitable than innovating.

0thgen11• 1 year ago

"You're just worshipping the billionaires" is not a good rebuttal to the author's arguments. You haven't addressed

"Try getting a job without LinkedIn. Try buying a phone that doesn't run android or iOS." Your argument here would apply to everything then, why restrict it to "techno"? Try driving a car without buying gas from a small number of oil companies. Try using electricity without going through utility monopolies. Try using a credit card without going through... yada yada.

Does that mean we currently live in oil-gas-electro-feudalism? If you really think that, then your fundamental argument is: 'the social order is the same as it's always been', which just seems unnecessarily reductionist.

The term techno-feudalism is clearly politically loaded rather than empirically descriptive, and I think your response makes that pretty clear.

haddr• 1 year ago

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…

klabb32• 1 year ago

I read the book and the post. I’m glad to see the rebuttal so weak, it strengthens my conviction that Yanis is onto something and is using historical analogies appropriately.

While most arguments are just technical gotchas, there’s a fundamental topological difference: in a feudal system you have one lord (apparently, you could generally not move without permission). With the new ”cloud serfs” you maintain multiple relations with different lords. Thus, you currently have more freedom of association- and migration compared to actual serfs, to a meaningful extent.

The system is very recent though, and consolidation of power (often through acquisitions) is already massively common and in every lord’s playbook. If they could, the mega-corps would absolutely want to buy other megacorps. Overall the system looks nothing like the idealized version of ”free markets” as taught in schools.

dgb233• 1 year ago

Free markets are wonderful, but they require free agents to participate in them. That includes consumers and workers. Noam Chomsky even described Amazon as a totalitarian employer once I think.

I find it distasteful to use the ideal of free markets to defend large, oligopolistic corporations, their atrocious business practices towards consumers, workers and partners and their irresponsible treatment of the environment.

Those aren't your entrepreneurial ventures that participate in a free market. They are established institutions that can exert extreme power in economic, legal and political terms.

0thgen11• 1 year ago

Sure, there are pressures for resource procurement that influence our decision making.

The difference is whether the hierarchy is baked into the legal system and less difficult to vertically navigate.

dgb233• 1 year ago

There's also an issue that many tech savvy people miss: Most people have a very hard time using and understanding software, even if they use it regularly.

The attack surface of people who are easy to manipulate or exploit by Big Tech is shockingly large. But it's not just about personal responsibility or social pressures, but in large parts just about a lack of technical competency and internet literacy that the vast majority of people can't afford to get and maintain.

specproc• 1 year ago

I think the weakest of some pretty weak points by the author. The involuntary and extractive nature of the system is precisely what makes the feudal analogy strong.

matheusmoreira• 1 year ago

It's obviously not a perfect analogy. Doesn't mean it's not happening.

Voluntary participation

That's only true for large groups of people. It's false for individuals. Try "voluntarily opting out" of whatever instant messaging platform is dominant where you live. You will be ostracized. Network effects make switching difficult.

Digital serfdom and monetization of data

Benefits are irrelevant. Surveillance capitalism is sinister and exploitative despite the benefits it offers. Once data has been collected and transmitted, it's out there and it will never be fully deleted. There's no telling what it will be used for.

The increasing regulation is evidence that people are resisting technofeudalism, not that it doesn't exist.

Innovation and competition

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.

Thus we get absolute nonsense like "anti-circumvention" laws which lead to "felony contempt of business model". 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.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...

Access to resources

The world wide web is now centralized in the hands of relatively few big tech companies and it's only getting worse over time. Nobody buys domains and starts their own site these days, they create social media accounts. Can't access much of anything without an Instagram or X account these days. Try joining a community without Discord.

Global connectivity vs. local feudal systems

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's easier than ever and you don't even need to commit violence. The lash is no longer literal but economic.

Regulation and governance

Yeah, people are seeing the effects and they are resisting. This is evidence that there is something worth resisting.

0thgen11• 1 year ago

"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's easier than ever and you don't even need to commit violence. The lash is no longer literal but economic."

This feels like it rests on a belief that "nudging" and subliminal messaging are actually effective. The evidence on that stuff is pretty weak, and the evidence we do find has small effect sizes.

The reality is more likely that the "online world" is insanely complex and hard to control. Even with a tech oligopoly, the number of players and interests groups in massive. If companies had the power to completely control the entire world and every aspect of life, they would have (assuming they had the incentive, which I'm sure you believe they do).

tartoran• 1 year ago

It seems to me the online space is weaponized to for example, control outcomes in elections, close people into ideological bubbles and such.

jampekka8• 1 year ago

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't mean much if exercising them comes at heavy penalties in practice. This seems to be a huge blind spot in liberalist ideologies.

gasull2• 1 year ago

Interesting. Do you have a link on this?

jampekka8• 1 year ago

E.g. in feudal Norway there was no (de-jure) serfdom: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Norway

Also e.g. Finland had a manoral tenant system until the 1920's where the tenants were free to leave.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenant_farmer

whynotmaybe• 1 year ago

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundhold

crispyambulance• 1 year ago

Well, what would be a more “accurate” word, then?

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.

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.

The first three basically boil down to the idea that citizens are free to “opt-out” or find/create alternatives. Are they? I guess in theory, but in reality that’s a far more complicated problem.

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.

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.

vidarh• 1 year ago

Moreover, the point of the analogy is to point out that the purported freedom from these restraints, such as the purported freedom to "opt-out", are in practical terms a mirage for an increasing proportion of the population.

Whether you agree with him or not, this should be no surprise from Varoufakis, given his familiarity with Marx, as it has been a central thesis of socialist thought from the beginning that de jure freedoms means nothing without the means to exercise them, and as such, the belief that the freedoms of a capitalist society are freedoms mediated by wealth or limited by lack of it, and by extension the belief that the working classes aren't substantially more free than serfs.

cynicalsecurity• 1 year ago

The article feels very AI-ish.

antihipocrat2• 1 year ago

I thought the same, but it's impossible to know - have to give the benefit of the doubt.

So many people I know are using AI to generate every written word in their working and personal lives - these people are more than capable of writing well themselves if they needed to. I think the horse had bolted already.

8harath• 1 year ago

That’s already been normalized in my view… or at least, let’s make it the norm from now on....

throw310822• 1 year ago

I agree that the analogue with feudalism is stretched, and I can'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.

I don't get why instead we shouldn'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.

verisimi7• 1 year ago

Feudalism has a negative connotation for sure, but again isn't that just a branding issue? The existing system is not great, imo. I think one can argue that the feudalism of the past had a far milder impact on individuals and was far less forceful than the governance of the present day. It is not possible to opt out of either system, but the level of resource extraction in the present system (40-50%) seems far higher than in feudal times.

0thgen11• 1 year ago

Can you explain how feudalism in the past had a far milder impact on individuals?

0thgen11• 1 year ago

I guess one difference is, the factory workers pushed towards engaging in brutal labor actually had it rough.

It's unclear whether the current system bring "horrible conditions" that need addressing. I don't want 9000 email providers, and the centralization of platforms has probably made life better. The argument that it crushes innovation might be true, but the number of "startups" that seem to gain large amounts of VC funding is quite high (they must be innovating something).

My gut reaction is generally "centralization / monopolies = bad", which is probably the feeling of a lot of people here. But we should actually ask ourselves whether the natural tendency towards centralization actually makes sense economically, especially since many aspects of the internet (communication, email, AI, compute time, etc) are all looking more like "utility" markets (where naturalistic monopoly formation has long been accepted by economists).

masa331• 1 year ago

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

hliyan• 1 year ago

where the analogy does not hold true: 1. Voluntary participation

Ten (or even five) years ago, I would have wholeheartedly agreed that our current economic system is entirely voluntary compared to feudalism.

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.

vjerancrnjak3• 1 year ago

This is actually a very old observation.

Wage labor (private tyrannies), consent under coercion (work or starve), availability of exploitative contracts, "free market" supported by corporate welfare, state, intellectual property etc.

You've given examples for all of the points.

0thgen11• 1 year ago

Isn't "work or starve" just a fact of nature? In what system do people not have to work to survive? (aside from a system where robots do all the labor)

stephc_int13• 1 year ago

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.

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.

Techno feudalism is a lot less about datacenters and network bandwidth than it is about captive users and content producers.

And this is why this analogy, although imperfect, is relevant.

kiisupai• 1 year ago

Evgeny Morozov wrote a lengthy critique of the term in 2022, having it used it himself some time back:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii133/articles/evgeny-moroz...

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.

0thgen11• 1 year ago

A lot of the counter arguments people have made seem to be: "no one can choose whether or not to participate in the system, therefor it's serfdom".

I'm curious why people don't just extend this to everything then? In order to survive in the modern world (whether it's a capitalist or socialist economy): I'm required to work, I'm required to follow the law, I'm required to adopt social customs of my peers, I'm required into a certain language, I'm required to use utilities. So why the focus on "techno-feudalism", if all of you would describe _any_ system of requirements as feudal?

Feudalism isn't just defined by "lock in", it also describes the social structure of individuals, and how contracts were made.

It seems that the real reason for calling the current system "feudal" is because it comes politically loaded with "bad / coercion", not because it actually fits the description. It's the same as when people call capitalism "wage slavery". Rhetorically convenient, but intellectually lazy.

tmnvix• 1 year ago

I'm curious why people don't just extend this to everything then?

I think because there is a difference between being required to participate in systems controlled by a democratically elected government (or society in general in the case of cultural systems like language) that are at least purportedly put in place for your benefit compared with being required to participate in privately controlled systems that fundamentally prioritise extracting something from you.

0thgen11• 1 year ago

What is the difference exactly? Being forced to work for the democratically elected government versus being compelled to work for private businesses?

jzellis• 1 year ago

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

anenefan• 1 year ago

I chanced upon most of Yanis Varoufakis's televised speech [1] [1a] he made at Australia'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't make for good argument.

[1] https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2024/03/14/how-europe-and-aus...

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:

    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.

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!

[1a] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AI8RG6nMGg

The Fallacy of Techno-Feudalism (2024)

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