“Technofeudalism”, a term created by Greek economist Yannis Varoufakis, encompasses the emerging economic and political order in which a small group of tech oligarchs and platform owners exert near-total control over digital networks, data flows, and algorithmic modulation, bypassing democratic institutions and public safeguards. Unlike classical capitalism, where capitalists compete in markets and depend on wage labor, techno-feudal lords extract value through surveillance, behavioral manipulation, the capture of attention, and control of what should be our data and information commons. We get reduced to data-serfs, generating value simply by existing and interacting within privately owned digital territories where the rules are opaque (try reading Meta’s “Terms o Service”), consent is illusory, and exit is difficult.
Technofeudalism can be compared to Medieval feudalism because power is centralized in a few hands — now, tech “broligarchs” and their bought-and-sold politicians instead of landed gentry with their knights. Today, a tiny elite controls the essential mediums for collective life. In the Medieval era, the basis of survival was land. Today, most of us are forced to use digital platforms to participate or even survive in post-industrial society.
After the Enclosure Acts of the Middle Ages took the common lands and distributed them to the nobility, peasants were bound to their lord's estate. They owed labor or tribute in exchange for access to subsistence. Similarly, the Internet was built by public funds yet given freely to private corporations with no citizen oversight, as Ben Tarnoff documents in Internet for the People. We find ourselves trapped in digital ecosystems—social media, e-commerce, gig work platforms—where our data, attention, and behaviors generate profit for platform owners.
How can we resist this digital condition and reinvent it into something entirely new? Instead of retreating into land-based communities or transformational festivals, ritualism, hedonism, or stylistic movements modeled on the past, I believe we must image new strategies. When I say “we,” I mean anyone interested in what my friend Douglas Rushkoff calls “Team Human” or my friend Jamie Wheal calls “Homegrown humans”. We, the vast multitude of us who already fight for a system based on social justice, democratic participation, regenerative ecological practices, and compassionate care. Instead of dropping out of the fray, we have to educate ourselves about what’s happening. We can then use — repurpose — the digital tools available to us now, for imagining and creating viable social, political, and economic alternatives. That seems to me the truly avant-garde path forward at this critical juncture.
As one contemporary example, Audrey Tang, a trans woman, author of Plurality, available for free online, and the digital minister of Taiwan. A former student radical, Tang was hired by the Taiwanese government. Within ten years, the digital tools she introduced transformed the relationship between the government and the people. From around 10% trust in government, the Taiwanese now have over a 70% trust in their government. If a Taiwanese citizen creates a proposal and gains support for it online, the government must seriously consider implementing it. Tang also pioneered “pre-bunking”: training the population to recognize “deep fakes” and understand how manipulated information and “fake news” (from mainland China) could be used to create fissures and fear in the populace.
Personally, I do not think that “analog” resistance methods or protests will do much against this well-planned, systemic digital assault, although they are still needed, of course — for emotional connection, for real life intervention, to demonstrate solidarity and awaken collective courage. We also need working prototypes of authentic communities that are moving toward resilience and some level of self-sufficiency. However, we need to win the cultural war by envisioning a new digital horizon for humanity— defining the alternative — while we build the technological tools and counter-institutions to make this alternative a powerful and perhaps joyful reality.
Personally, I am not a reductive materialist. After exploring different analog alternatives, like psychedelic shamanism, mysticism, and occult philosophy in depth, I made a transition to “idealism,” which finds consciousness, not matter, to be the foundation of reality. We are temporarily differentiated aspects of a unitary field of consciousness. There may be many other forms of consciousness — subtle beings — in the universe. The universe has so many dimensions beyond our ordinary perceptions of it with our limited sensory organs. From this idealist perspective, seeking worldly power and societal control makes no sense and can never produce happiness. As an alternative, we can build new social models that support collective flourishing and conscious evolution, even in a time of intensifying resource constraints.
But we will only be able to do this if we embrace and reappropriate the new tools and technologies currently emerging — Artificial Intelligence, above all. A fascinating aspect of this new technological threshold is that not even those building the systems know exactly what is happening within them. Tech CEOs like OpenAi’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei — among others — believe we will achieve “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) in one to three years. This is the threshold where AI becomes “better” than any human at any activity that can be performed by a computer. Altman says the difference between now and the world after we reach AGI will be as great as the difference between now and the world 1500, when we had no factories or electricity or democracy. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) believes AGI “will have a more profound impact on humanity than fire, electricity, and the internet.” And this is only a few years away! It is kind of crazy that we aren’t having massive civil society “analog” discourses and live-action community meetings to discuss this upcoming rupture in our entire social and civilizational structures.
Confronting this inevitable social disruption, we have the potential to use AI to build new tech platforms and media networks that could supersede the legacy systems and companies, making them obsolete. With AI, one rapidly developing area is natural-language programming or “vibe coding,” where people can design and build applications and platforms with no background in programming. Along with all of its many risks, AI also promises an extraordinary, unpredictable democratization of tools for creating, designing, programming, and imaging an alternative with multiple analog effect on real life and social structures.
Traditionally, the avant-garde move is to embrace the possibilities as the well as the dangers of the new, novel, and unknown — to go into the liminal spaces where the outcome is in doubt, much like the indigenous shaman venturing into the imaginal and psychic dimensions to extract the new vision for his community. We have reached a liminal threshold condition where our entire post-industrial civilization is shivering, collapsing into technofeudalism, and perhaps also reconfiguring. This is an opportunity for artists — for all of us.
Originally published in Purple, Issue 44 — The Analog Issue.