Techno-Feudalism or Pax Machina

Outlining the shift of power in the digital era

Hegel is famously credited with the saying that history repeats itself. Marx commented that Hegel forgot to add that it [history] does so “first as tragedy, then as farce.” While one can agree with the first premise, the tragic part of events, the second premise, the farce part, is debatable because it is often equally tragic, if not more tragic. As we meander through the annals of history or recall images of déjà vu in our lives, we cannot help but say there are often strong similarities between past and present events.

Take, for instance, the painful but fascinating story of feudalism, which we have studied and perhaps even witnessed in one form or another. In its raw form, feudalism refers to an era in world history where monarchs worked with the landed gentry — the aristocrats and subjugated the inhabitants who were, more or less, their property. Because we live in the so-called era of enlightenment, we like to think this era, with the untold suffering it perpetrated on the masses, is behind us. Dig a little deeper, and you will find patterns with varying shapes and colors re-emerging in tragic ways. Under its textbook definition, feudalism is long gone, but human societies evolve only to reproduce instances of flagrant disparities between new lords and new peasants with different names.

Fast forward a few centuries, and you will find that the land-based feudal system, subsequently replaced by capitalism, gave way to a novel form of feudalism, only this time, the land is digital, the owners painfully few, and the serfs, all of us netizens of the world, toiling our lives away. Our plowing of the digital fiefdoms, in the form of clicking, liking, commenting, and reposting, adds value to the feudal property of digital overlords, while we receive nothing in return. Many have likened this situation to a re-emergence of feudalism and used the tantalizing labels of feudalism 2.0 or techno feudalism.

The central argument of this article is that we are on the cusp of a new historical era where Artificial Intelligence plays a crucial role in maintaining global order and stability. I propose the term Pax Machina in line with labels such as Pax Romana, Pax Mongolica, Pax Britannica, and Pax Americana. Let’s see how the story unfolds.

Starting with anecdotes

The idea of techno-feudalism started dawning on me in the mid-90s. For one thing, those who operated, sold, or dealt in computer technology, be they computer gurus, individual merchants, PC repair technicians, and IT department staff. Whenever I engaged in technical conversations with them, I felt, and perhaps was made to feel, how deficient and digitally illiterate I was. They possessed a vast, field-specific lexicon, which they used liberally, and all my knowledge of English and other languages could keep up with the conversation.

The next sequel to this story started about 10 to 15 years ago. I am an educator interested in leveraging technology to enhance my teaching. I then thought I had a pretty solid grip on technology and its sundry gadgets, and I wanted to embrace ICT in my classes and show the world that I was ahead of the game. I thought I had a firm handle on audio and video editing/production since 2005 and was keen on following up on e-learning developments.

At some point, however, I felt that there was always one technological tool, gadget or software that had popped up the night before and that I could not immediately add to my technological toolkit. As a trained pedagogue, technology was not coming to my service but was more like guiding and controlling me. Almost always, my time was siphoned trying to replenish my technological toolkit. In 2017, I published a paper titled “Who’s Steering, Technology or Pedagogy?” This was the trigger to the question of whether I was being overpowered by technology or whether technology was subservient to pedagogy.

I must confess that when I came across Yanis Varoufakis’s thinking on how technofeudalism is now impacting the current socioeconomic landscape, I sensed a connection with my encounters with technology in general and AI in particular. Do not infer from these stories that I am anti-technology. Like most readers, I am reaping the fruits of technology in several ways. Still, I feel compelled to share my observations and misgivings about it to ensure we equip this non-biological beast with the guardrails so it works for us.

The broader background

Now, let me frame this conversation in broader terms. Societies are generally governed by a prevalent worldview that presents a lens through which the world is interpreted, a grand narrative internalized by most (and resisted by few) to make sense of the world.

Roughly speaking, there was a time when power lay with oligarchies of sorts, such as autocrats, military leaders, landowners, the church, and the holders of knowledge. With the Industrial Revolution, this feudal architecture was eroded and displaced, along with the world of ideas that governed it.

Before the Industrial Revolution, a few influential individuals disposed of the land, and the serfs working in their fiefs paid rent. Then, power, money, and control shifted to a capitalist class boasting ownership of the means of production, goods, and services. Business tycoons gave meager wages to their workers, who helped them accumulate capital to unprecedented degrees.

This lasted for over three centuries, during which the capitalist system perfected its tools, created a working class and a robust middle class, and minted capital owners as the new Tsars who ran multinational companies, monopolized production and distribution, and installed a capitalist world order which most peoples, nations, and cultures now adhere to.

The advent of computer technology, the internet, and social media ushered in a new era where power shifted from these cross-continental corporations to a few individuals who now own digital fiefdoms and control the world in clear and insidious ways. The power accumulated by the new digital lords supersedes and exceeds most other types of power, including the State, Big Pharma, Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the State, and perhaps even the Deep State.

There is something familiar but also new about this unfolding saga. On the one hand, technology is mesmerizing, glossy, slick, and transformative. On the other hand, it echoes stories of a past era — feudalism- except that this time, this is cyber, digital, or techno-feudalism. Under this new form, most of us serve as techno-serfs. The new lords have exclusive access to and monopoly of advanced technology, especially artificial intelligence in its emerging forms, as I will show later.

Let’s get back to feudalism and feudalism revisited

What is feudalism?

At its core, feudalism was a strongly hierarchical system of government on top of which sat a monarch or a king. Not being able to control all the land, the monarch delegated part of oversight to a small class of nobility who, in turn, used the services of a military class of knights and awarded fiefs so they could derive income.

At the base of the pyramid was the lowest stratum of peasants and serfs. These serfs were not precisely slaves, but they maintained the feudal economy by working on the land, living on it, receiving physical and legal protection, and paying rent. Their work consisted in cutting crops for harvest, sowing, ploughing, haymaking, threshing, hedging and more”.

How has capitalism devolved into techno-feudalism?

Let me first sketch, in broad strokes, the link between feudalism and techno-feudalism. This was capitalism. Let’s say that capitalism upholds a market economy, private ownership of the means of production, private property, capital accumulation, free and unfettered access to goods and services, profit, wage labor, and unions.

This is quite a mouthful, but it may not need much further elaboration. With capitalism, new socioeconomic and political concepts and practices emerged, including the self-made man, from rags to riches, millionaires and billionaires, enlightenment, liberalism, voting, democracy, the class system, a robust middle class, world organizations, globalization, multinational companies, competition, colonialism, world wars, and a few other descriptors. Another mouthful, but let’s stop there.

What is techno-feudalism?

According to its leading proponent, Yanis Faroufakis, techno-feudalism is an economic formation whereby traditional markets have significantly decreased in favor of highly organized and highly controlled internet platforms.

These internet platforms, or digital fiefdoms, are owned and operated by one person or a select few. They control our lives without making any such declaration. Favoufakis calls them a neo-feudal aristocracy and refers to the phenomenon as neo-feudalism and even new-medievalism. This says that capitalism has “devolved” into techno-feudalism.

In the same vein, German sociologist Neckel captures this process under re-feudalization, meaning that feudal practices are revived under circumstances reminiscent of those of the medieval period.

Techno lords are a superclass, a caste of technological neo-Brahmins in whose digital land we sweat, much as serfs do, without us knowing it, and against no protection to speak of.

There are many illustrations for such a class, but here are the most visible and robust giants: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Meta, X, WeChat, Alibaba, and 5/6-G. Each time we navigate their platforms, we leave digital traces such as cookies, likes, comments, and shares. Seemingly, when you hit the acceptance of terms button, you effectively give the platform the right to use (and misuse) your personal data; after all, you follow the crowd, you don’t think twice about what this click entails; the fine print where you give away your personal information seems to be of little or no consequence.

How does techno-feudalism operate?

How we work for these platforms and how this work generates profit are interesting questions. In his thesis, Ethan Snow explains how technofeudalism converts our personal online activity into profit by hitting us with expertly targeted ads that condition our behavior, shape our desires, and otherwise determine our actions: “Under Technofeudalism our data is gathered from searches, location information, mic recordings, physical waste, and is then compiled into data sets tied to every individual which is then packaged and sold to buyers.” (pp-1–2).

Who are the new techno lords?

We are still governed by formal political and administrative structures made of constitutions, parties, elections, courts, and law enforcement systems. Many commentators and scholars add another less visible layer of power holders working hand in hand with the existing power structures. This layer includes lobbyists, big pharma, insurance companies, Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, and the so-called deep state.

The truth is that regulatory force is slowly moving from these long-established institutions into the hands of this neo-feudal tech aristocracy. In contrast to current governance, techno lords are unelected. Under the current status quo, presidents come and go as a function of periodic elections legitimizing their rule.

Techno lords, on the other hand, hold their positions through complete control of cyberspace. Under its myriad names, cyberspace is now the locus of our human transactions, be they commercial, financial, political, environmental, social, emotional, or otherwise.

The new aristocrats accrue power, rent, and stature through “every breath you take, every move you make, every step you take”, and every click you undertake. Like Big Brother in 1984, they hold the key to ejecting you from social media, determining election outcomes, manufacturing the media landscape, and engineering our collective Weltanschauung to their hearts’ content.

I have not yet said much about another superstratum, the real masters and movers of the universe, whose power now supersedes the most advanced digital platforms such as Amazon, Upwork, Intel, Invidia, and others.

This is a small group of AI chiefs, the Bezos, Musks, Zukerbergs, Gates, and Altmans of the world and their likes, charting the future of humanity and “giving life” to artificial neural networks that are or will be far superior to our humble human brains.

The leaders of AGI, and later ASI, are super-busy coding the metadata for the future of humanity and non-biological intelligence. While the small actors listed earlier occupy the passenger seat in the new automation, the AI fief chiefs hold the steering wheel and command absolute power.

Conclusions

The clips I have tried to render through the above lines show that a considerable paradigm shift is underway. Superpowers, regional powers, international organizations, states, multinational companies, lobbyists, the military-industrial complex, and a few others are holding tight to weaker and weaker strings of power while a new tech aristocracy, and more specifically, the emerging AI firms, are anointing themselves uncontested, unelected, and supreme leaders of the world.

These giants, the likes of Open AI, Google, Amazon, Ali Baba, Stable Diffusion, and a handful of others, are getting everyone with a handheld device or a PC to work for them. In their hands lies the future of humanity. They are the emerging Tech Lords, the new “techtocrats”, and we are their subjects! Beyond this descriptive diagnosis, we must make allowance for reconsidering this balance of power and repudiate the lord-subject equation.

Yanis Varoufakis and others framed this unfolding phenomenon as a form techno-feudalism. I like the label; it says history reinvents itself even though circumstances change. Power shifts but remains in the hands of those who have the gold, and the gold now is data, knowledge, technology, and intelligence. With all the discourses accompanying the role of technology in democratization, another question arises: how to make sure humanity at large stands to gain from the advances in technology, and just the select few.

I also like the label Pax Machina. Machina stands for machines, computer systems, software, apps, and artificial neural networks that populate our users’ radars and screens. In the not-too-distant future, we will literally swear by them.

They are the inventions of us, homo sapiens, and more specifically, of a few technology-saturated individuals and firms. I am not sufficiently clear on who will impose the peace (in Pax Machina); will it be the human inventors or the machines themselves? I would like you to think of the comments box below as an invitation to share with our readership where you think we are heading and the kinds of corrective action we need to undertake to take charge of this shifting landscape.

Finally, remembering the first part of the historical labels as they evolved, Pax Romana, Pax Mongolica, Pax Americana, and so on, it will be important to step back and ponder the type of peace Pax Machina will establish on earth. Historians have conveniently captured these developments as “peace”, but to what extent peace will prevail is another question I will leave you with.

References

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