SA: What does this have to do with feudalism?
CD: Feudalism is completely different from technofeudalism, in that peasants worked with their own tools and brought some of their products to the lords. They effectively worked a couple of days for the lords, but the dominant form of their labor process was solitary or familial. In technofeudalism, there is a massive socialization of labor, and the digital world plays a very important role in the increasing socialization.
Two crucial dimensions to technofeudalism echo the medieval times. The first is similar to feudalism in that there is a relation of dependency both politically and economically. To put it sim ply, our dependency today draws from the fact that no one can live without Google or Microsoft. I mean, my mother can, but she’s 82 years old. To her, it isn’t a drama if she cannot access Google, but it is for most of us. That’s an obvious fact of depen dency, but it goes further. Think about states. Nations are increasingly reliant on these technofeudalists. There is a lot of literature on how these firms are providing crucial infrastructure to the operations of states and their communication networks. Take for instance the submarine cables. Up until the 2000s, they were state owned. But now most of them are owned by private corporations. The same goes for cloud services. The German ministry signed a contract with AWS [Amazon Web Services] for its cloud last November, for example. Private companies are playing crucial roles for the operations of the world, which means that the sovereignty of the state is in decline; they’re subordinated to corporations. Other companies are dependent on them, as well. Even large companies like Walmart rely on their cloud services, which means that these cloud monopolists are taking an increasing share of value created along the chain. And this is what’s so strange. In the beginning, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Tesla were all completely different companies. They weren’t in the same business. They were selling books or a search engine or word processing or cars. But now, they’re all converging towards the monopolization of the means of coordination. And that’s how we’re going back to feudalism. They are monopolizing something that nobody can escape. They’re both curating that space and regulating it. That has a political aspect but also an economic one, since they can make money out of it.
SA: Perhaps this is a detour, but how did feudalism end?
CD: It ended thanks to trade routes and the ability of the glebe to escape from the
dependence on the territorialized fusion of economic and political power. The
transformation between the lords and the peasants then changed from one of pure domination towards market relations, which entailed a move towards productivity.
SA: If trade routes brought the end to feudalism, then this also had to do with the spread of goods and communication, right? But now, all the trade routes are owned by these companies. Would you then say that the root of all evils is a consequence of decades of privatization with no market regulation?
CD: I think that’s a very good way of summarizing the increasing retreat of state
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