Corporate Techno-Feudalism: The Rise of Dark Capitalism
Modern Political Ideology Part 3
Corporate Techno-Feudalism: The Rise of Dark Capitalism
As discussed in Part 1, neoliberalism reshaped the global economy over the past five decades. It championed market liberalization, globalization, and deregulation, fostering unprecedented growth and technological innovation. However, this triumph came with significant costs.
In Part 2, we looked at economic inequality, job displacement, social fragmentation, environmental degradation, financial vulnerabilities, and political backlash as many of the key side effects stemming from the neoliberal world order.
In Part 3, we start to describe the shifts taking place that appear to be realigning the political system and economic landscape. I will suggest the name of the new ideology: corporate techno-feudalism.
Summary of the Theory of Techno-Feudalism
Techno-feudalism is a concept developed by Yanis Varoufakis in his book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, where he argues that traditional capitalism has been replaced by a new system of economic and political power dominated by Big Tech monopolies, financialization, and data extraction. This emerging system, which he calls techno-feudalism, diverges from classical capitalism by shifting the mechanisms of wealth accumulation, control, and labor relations.
At its core, techno-feudalism suggests that capitalism no longer operates through markets in a traditional sense but instead through digital platforms that behave like feudal fiefdoms, where users (the new serfs) work and produce value for free while corporations (the new lords) extract wealth via digital rent-seeking rather than competitive market exchanges.
What Type of Ideology and Transition is This?
First, there is no consensus about what replaces neoliberalism. But after the election of Donald Trump, the liberal press, independent press, and new-right media channels all seemed to agree that neoliberalism is dead. Within the MAGA/American First movement, there is no concrete ideology to guide the actions that are unfolding to redesign the federal government. Thus, corporate techno-feudalism arrives at a moment of opportunity.
Second, I want to avoid the debate about techno-feudalism entirely replacing, or killing, capitalism. Capitalism has many flavors. We talk about free markets in theory, but they almost never exist. We see mixed economies that intertwine political forces and private industry. For this reason, I use the term political economy to describe the combined effects of political organization (the rules of the game for society) and managing the means of production.
While Varoufakis argues that capitalism is being replaced by techno-feudalism, I don’t buy that argument. I think it’s reasonable to let techno-feudalism fall into another permutation of capitalism: dark capitalism, surveillance capitalism, or digital-platform capitalism all have some descriptive merit. The important point of this essay, and others that follow, is that corporate techno-feudalism appears to be taking the global field in the place of a fallen neoliberal world order.
Third, the transition to corporate techno-feudalism appears to be undemocratic. It also appears as a temporary force, but it might prove to be enormously hard to reject and conquer.
Let’s frame corporate techno-feudalism as portrayed by Varoufakis.
Key Characteristics of Corporate Techno-Feudalism
1. From Market Capitalism to Digital Rentism
In classical capitalism, wealth accumulation was driven by competitive markets, wages, and industrial production. Companies competed to sell goods and services.
In techno-feudalism, wealth accumulation is increasingly rent-based, where monopolistic digital platforms (Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft) dominate access to the digital economy.
Beyond simply producing and selling products, these tech giants extract value by monetizing data, imposing fees, and controlling digital infrastructure.
2. The Rise of Platform Lords (New Feudal Overlords)
Unlike classical industrialists who competed in the market, today’s tech titans function like feudal lords. They do not simply sell services; they own the platforms upon which others must operate.
Amazon controls e-commerce infrastructure, forcing third-party sellers to pay for visibility and logistics.
Google (Alphabet) and Meta control online advertising, making businesses dependent on their algorithms.
Apple and Microsoft control digital ecosystems, extracting revenue through app stores, licensing fees, and software subscriptions.
3. Users as Digital Serfs
In traditional capitalism, workers exchanged labor for wages. In techno-feudalism, millions of users provide free labor for tech platforms while being surveilled and monetized.
Social media users generate content and engagement for free, while platforms extract advertising revenue and behavioral data.
Gig workers (Uber, DoorDash, Instacart) function in algorithmic feudalism, where opaque software dictates their work conditions without direct employment rights.
4. Financialization and Algorithmic Control
Instead of reinvesting in productive industries, corporations and investors now focus on extracting value through financial and behavioral engineering.
Stock buybacks and platform moats dominate wealth creation, decoupling economic growth from actual industrial production.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning drive behavioral prediction markets, influencing consumer habits, elections, and financial markets with surveillance capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff’s term).
5. The Death of Free Markets
The classical notion of competitive free markets disappears as a handful of digital monopolies govern entire sectors of the economy.
Governments no longer regulate capitalism; they depend on and obey Big Tech to manage essential infrastructure (cloud computing, cybersecurity, finance, AI governance).
The idea of the “sovereign consumer” is undermined because algorithms manipulate preferences and restrict choices within walled digital ecosystems.
6. The Nation-State as a Vassal to Digital Empires
In classical capitalism, governments had significant power to regulate markets, break up monopolies, and provide public goods.
Under techno-feudalism, nation-states are increasingly subordinate to Big Tech, relying on their digital infrastructure for communication, surveillance, and economic management.
Tech giants, not elected governments, make decisions about censorship, information access, economic inclusion, and even war (e.g., cloud computing for military contracts).
Varoufakis’s Core Argument: Capitalism Has Already Died
Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is no longer the dominant economic system—it has already been replaced by techno-feudalism. In this new order:
Tech monopolies extract rent from digital real estate, just as feudal lords extracted wealth from land.
Human labor is increasingly unpaid or underpaid, with digital peasantry generating data that is exploited for profit.
Markets have been replaced by private, algorithmic fiefdoms, where competition no longer operates freely.
Political power has shifted from democratic governance to digital overlords, with state institutions struggling to regulate trillion-dollar tech empires.
Rather than moving toward a decentralized, democratized information economy, Varoufakis argues we are regressing into a digital feudal society, where monopolistic corporations function as neo-feudal lords, and the public is left with the illusion of choice while being digitally enslaved.
Again, I reject the idea that capitalism is dead. I view corporate techno-feudalism as a dark flavor of capitalism that exacerbates wealth inequality and weakens democratic institutions.
Where Will Corporate Techno-Feudalism Express Itself?
The Expansion of Corporate Techno-Feudalism: How Digital Overlords Will Extract Rents from Every Sector
Corporate techno-feudalism is not just a transformation of the economic order—it is a restructuring of power itself. As Varoufakis describes, the new lords of the digital age do not merely compete in markets; they own the markets. This shift from competitive profit-centered capitalism to digital rent-seeking allows tech monopolies to extract wealth in ways reminiscent of feudal landlords who once controlled land, labor, and resources.
Under this model, new forms of rent extraction will extend beyond online platforms into physical infrastructure, land ownership, healthcare, education, and politics. The key feature of techno-feudalism is not just monopolization but the ability to charge access fees for essential services, creating dependency on a handful of corporate gatekeepers.
Let’s examine how techno-feudalism will extract rents from five critical areas:
Digital Infrastructure: The Toll Roads of the Internet
Land and Real Estate: The Feudalization of Housing
The Health Sector: Profiting from Human Vulnerability
Education: Controlling Access to Knowledge
Politics and Elections: The Permanent Campaign Industry
Each of these domains will become a rent-seeking fiefdom, where monopolistic tech corporations dictate terms, extract wealth, and reinforce their grip on power.
1. Digital Infrastructure: The Toll Roads of the Internet
The digital economy is increasingly governed not by free markets but by corporate landlords who control digital infrastructure. From cloud computing to data networks, the modern internet is built upon private toll roads, forcing businesses and individuals to pay rent simply to participate.
Key Mechanisms of Rent Extraction:
Cloud Computing Monopolies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud now provide the backbone for the modern internet. Any company that wants to operate online must pay these firms for cloud storage, data processing, and cybersecurity services.
Algorithmic Gatekeeping: Platforms like Google, Facebook, and TikTok function as digital landlords, charging businesses advertising fees or data extraction rents in exchange for visibility. Search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing are no longer competitive fields—they are auctioned to the highest bidder.
Subscription-Based Everything: Increasingly, companies like Apple and Microsoft are shifting software away from ownership models toward recurring payment schemes (e.g., Microsoft Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud), making digital access an ongoing financial burden.
The illusion of open access is undermined by the concentration of digital toll booths, allowing a few tech giants to dictate the cost of participating in the economy.
2. Land and Real Estate: The Feudalization of Housing
The financialization of real estate under corporate techno-feudalism transforms housing into an asset class where Big Tech and Wall Street own increasing shares of the rental market and single-family housing stock. Homeownership declines as private equity firms, fueled by algorithmic buying, acquire massive amounts of property.
How Techno-Feudalism Extracts Rent from Housing:
Institutional Homeownership: BlackRock, Vanguard, and other financial entities use AI-driven real estate purchasing to outbid individual buyers, turning neighborhoods into corporate-owned rental properties.
Rent-Based Surveillance: Companies like Zillow and Airbnb are integrating smart home surveillance to monitor and extract behavioral data from tenants, creating new data-driven revenue streams.
Permanent Rentership: With wages stagnant and housing prices soaring, younger generations face a future of lifelong rent payments—not to individuals, but to corporate landlords who extract wealth without creating value.
If the medieval peasant paid rent to a feudal lord for land access, the modern digital serf pays perpetual housing fees to Wall Street landlords and algorithmic rent collectors.
3. The Health Sector: Profiting from Human Vulnerability
Healthcare is one of the most lucrative rent-seeking industries under techno-feudalism because it is non-optional. As privatized healthcare systems grow more complex, Big Tech is moving into the health sector, transforming it into an algorithmic toll booth for survival.
Methods of Rent Extraction in Healthcare:
Data Monetization: Companies like Google and Apple are investing in digital health records and wearable devices (Apple Watch, Fitbit) to extract biometric data, which can be sold to insurers or pharmaceutical companies.
Paywalls for Medical Access: AI-driven diagnostics and telemedicine (e.g., Amazon’s healthcare services) will soon require subscription fees, effectively making medical expertise a pay-to-play service.
Privatized AI-Driven Medicine: AI-based healthcare solutions will determine treatment access, prioritizing profit-driven efficiency over patient well-being.
With techno-feudalism governing healthcare, the need to pursue resources to live a healthy life will become a negotiable commodity, determined by corporate algorithms and digital rent-seekers.
4. Education: Controlling Access to Knowledge
Education was once a public good—a pathway to upward mobility. Under techno-feudalism, it becomes another domain of rent extraction, where access to learning is monopolized, financialized, and restricted.
How Big Tech Extracts Rent from Education:
The Rise of EdTech Monopolies: Google Classroom, Coursera, and Khan Academy are centralizing educational content, making learning dependent on Big Tech platforms.
The Permanent Student Debt Model: Instead of reducing costs, digital education often means students pay for access indefinitely through subscription-based models.
AI-Gated Learning: As AI replaces traditional instruction, students will be incentivized to engage with paywalled AI tutors, restricting knowledge access to those who can afford it.
Education, once a liberating force, becomes a digital rent trap, where learning is dictated not by democratic institutions but by corporate entities optimizing for profit.
5. Politics and Elections: The Permanent Campaign Industry
Corporate techno-feudalism rewires political power, as digital platforms monetize elections, shape discourse, and algorithmically influence voter behavior. Instead of democracy being driven by public deliberation, it becomes a corporate-controlled behavioral marketplace.
Mechanisms of Rent Extraction in Politics:
Algorithmic Voter Manipulation: Political campaigns now rely on Meta, Google, and TikTok ad algorithms that determine which messages voters see, based on monetized engagement patterns.
Pay-to-Win Elections: Candidates must pay social media platforms for visibility, effectively creating a system where winning elections requires renting digital influence.
Privatized Public Discourse: Free speech is increasingly controlled by corporate content moderation policies, giving tech platforms de facto control over political messaging.
Techno-feudalism ensures that elections are no longer about policy debates but about data wars, where those with the deepest pockets control the political agenda.
Conclusion: The Future of Corporate Techno-Feudalism
As digital rent-seeking spreads across all sectors, corporate techno-feudalism redefines economic and political relationships. Instead of individuals engaging in free markets, they exist in algorithmic fiefdoms, where access to digital infrastructure, housing, healthcare, education, and political influence requires perpetual payments to digital overlords.
If industrial capitalism replaced feudalism, then corporate techno-feudalism may replace neoliberal capitalism, locking citizens into a system where wealth flows upward through digital toll booths, rather than being generated through market competition. We are left with a government of, by, and for the affluent who control corporate boardrooms in all areas of society.
But wait: there is one more key area where corporate techno-feudalism is innovating at scale. The power of AI to disrupt and replace large segments of the white collar professional managerial class is coming. The implications are vast.
The next essay in this series will explore how President Trump is likely to doom the near-term economy into a productivity war rather than revive the economic growth engine. The potential fallout has vast implications for the political realignment of the two-party system that is currently taking place.
Question to readers: do you see corporate techno-feudalism as the new backdrop to the political economy—why or why not?
Implications for Future Essays
Now that we have a foundation for the concept of techno-feudalism, other future essays can explore:
How Corporate Techno-Feudalism Warps the American Economy – Looking at its impact on wealth concentration and job markets.
The Political Patronage of Corporate Techno-Feudalism – Examining how captured Democratic and Republican parties must align with Big Tech to score political victories using false promises and catchy slogans while undermining democratic governance, free speech, and corporate regulatory frameworks.
Escaping Corporate Techno-Feudalism – Exploring political movements beyond the two-party system and various policy solutions such as antitrust regulation, digital taxation, monetary reform, a digital bill of rights, and public alternatives to digital monopolies.
The killer question ultimately becomes: can we resist digital serfdom and reboot the political economy to ensure liberty and dignity for all?
Notes:
The Common Sense Papers are an offering by Common Sense 250, which proposes a method to realign the two-party system in the United States with the creation of a new political superstructure that circumvents the current dysfunctional duopoly. The goal is to heal political divisions and reboot the American political system for an effective federal government.
Notes on Corporate Techno-Feudalism and Neoliberalism:
Serfs did not require income in order to survive. From the perspective of the working class, this is not feudalism.
Very good article, Joe. I agree, capitalism has not been killed it is just shifting its modes of control for profit maximization. Capitalism has always embraced the latest technologies for control. Yanis accepts the conventinal definition of capitalism which I think has always been a convenient myth, propaganda to hide its primary mechanism of power, credit (debt) created by private institutions used for money. It is the central feature of capitalism which is why schools don't teach people about it. https://howardswitzer.substack.com/p/capitalisms