The "Technofeudalism" Alarmists Are Barking Up The Wrong Moat

These Are Not The Narratives You Are Looking For

The term “technofeudalism” has been making the rounds on BlueSky/snowflake-lib social media, painting a grim picture of our digital future: a world dominated by tech overlords, where we digital serfs are bound to their platforms and ruled by them and their cronies in government. It’s a catchy narrative, but like many such narratives, it risks obscuring the fundamental dynamics at play. Specifically, it ignores the fundamental difference between the sources of power in historical feudalism versus our modern corporate hellscape.

Feudalism, at its core, rested on a prototypical version of the modern monopoly of violence. In the age of cheap and plentiful handguns, it’s hard for us to understand a world where a fully-kitted-out knight’s armaments (sword, lance, armor, steed, decades of training) cost relatively as much as a sports or luxury car per item. Now, the history is indeed more complex than the stereotype — most peasants were in fact armed with some kind of dagger or sword — but a cheapo handgun or rusty old hunting rifle is still vastly more effective against the average soldier today than said peasant dagger would have been against a knight. There’s a reason why peasant rebellions are only second to slave revolts in their embarrassing futility and near-universal failure.

All of that is to say, the basis of feudal lords’ power was a pretty wide asymmetry of force. This power grew out of the need for security after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its attendant continent-securing army, and the state of affairs lasted for over a millennium after that because of its remarkable stability.

Contrast this with the modern corporation, even the largest tech giants. While they wield immense influence, their power is ultimately rooted in consumer demand. They don’t control armies; they control platforms, services, and products that people actively choose to use. Yes, these choices can feel constrained. Yes, network effects and economies of scale can create powerful lock-ins. Yes, the tech oligarchs are currently trying their best to seize the powers of government and wield them to protect their fortunes from market accountability. Commentators from [neo-fascist] Peter Thiel to [traditional capitalist] Warren Buffett alike have noted that tech economies often result in winner-take-all races to establish “moats” around specific companies and industries, and I kind of suspect these medieval overtones are part of where the snowflakes are getting the feudal part of their technofeudalism from.

But the true source of corporate power is an economy built on the basis of widespread consumer demand. Tesla’s P/E ratio is absurdly overvalued; it’s only a matter of time until it crashes, for the simple fucking reason that demand for their cars has plummeted, and they don’t run their product cycles in the same way that legacy auto companies just spent an entire fucking century refining into about as precise a science as you’ll ever see in the world of marketing. Zuck doesn’t make money if people aren’t buying MeUndies off his stupid Facebook ads. Thiel doesn’t make money if people aren’t buying those MeUndies using PayPal.¹ They can rig these markets all they want, but the whole thing stops working if there are no consumers left. And, importantly, this logic works pretty universally and in the long term; it won’t stop just because we succumb to a “new” logic like fascism — in fact, it’s the very logic that drove fascism to its own destruction, because the fascists had zero appreciation for and thus couldn’t create a national consumer economy. Illiberal regimes stagnate because they imagine they can reverse the fundamental logic of the consumer economy.

I think most of the current alarmism is just that the snowflakes are traumatized about all the headlines coming out of the second Trump admin, and they’re casting about for a grand narrative to fit all of their trauma into. These are the same people who made doomerism a thing, so it’s not surprising that they’d doomerize a run-of-the-mill fascist attempt into “technofeudalism”. And, to be generous to the snowflakes, Musk and Thiel’s Yarvin-inflected ideology is pretty explicit about pining for something that can fairly be categorized as technofeudalism.

But ultimately, technofeudalism both (1) gives these morons too much credit, and (2) per the thesis of this essay, fails to grasp the difference between the roots of corporate vs. feudal power. Even with their vaunted “moats”, the failure rate of those moats is just too high for would-be technofeudalist lords to successfully establish actual technofeudalism. There’s too much technological progress, too much disruption. The model can’t sustain itself. Notice that none of them are suggesting we choke the R&D state; if anything, they’re all panicking that Musk is ignorantly wrecking bioscience and other STEM funding, and frantically investing in AI to help keep their edge.

No, the current authoritarian attempt isn’t an early sign of technofeudalism, but more likely both an augur and a mere swerve in the road of a long historical trend towards corporatocracy. If it were incipient technofeudalism, we’d see more of a rush for them to reinforce their moats and divide the spoils of the administrative state between them — they wouldn’t be gutting the state like Musk currently is. A corporatocracy, OTOH, doesn’t mind if the administrative state gets gutted, because it’s confident in its ability to defend corporate power over its own corporate prerogatives, to keep their employees happy as free persons regardless of whether HR or an administrative state is providing/protecting the benefits and rights — what is HR, after all, if not an administrative mini-state within a corporation?

The historical case for corporatocracy as the next major historical shift is much stronger than that for technofeudalism. We’ve got 25, maybe 50 years of historical predicates for technofeudalism, if we really stretch for it. Corporatocracy’s obvious roots stretch back at least for the last 200 years, and can be argued to have even deeper roots in the origins of capitalism over 500 years ago.

As usual, the snowflakes should be taken seriously, but not literally. The threats to democracy today are genuine and serious. But they aren’t evidence of what the snowflakes think they are. A good general rule of life is that people who are panicked are rarely competent judges of grand historical narratives.

1. Okay, that’s not exactly true anymore, since he and the rest of the PayPal Mafia have successfully converted their early fortunes into aggressively diversified portfolios.