They told us we were entering a new era – a sleek, interconnected digital world where everything from groceries to government would be just a swipe away. And we did swipe, didn't we? Like peasants marvelling at the castle gates flung open, we rushed in, waving our data like currency. Only we weren’t the lords of this brave new world – we were the serfs. Again.
Corporate feudalism isn't looming. It's here. We live it every time we accept a T&Cs scroll disguised as freedom. In the old days, barons extracted rent for your pigsty and a portion of your grain. Today, Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg do it through subscriptions, surveillance, and “engagement”. The medium has changed – the mechanism hasn’t.
A handful of tech oligarchs own the servers, the algorithms, the infrastructure, the pipelines of information. You might think you own your house, but you rent your cloud storage. You think you're a sovereign consumer, but you're a data point in an AI model, shaped to boost shareholder value. We haven’t escaped the manor – we’ve just given it a UX makeover.
And the state? In the old feudal model, the monarch could at least theoretically put the boot in if the barons overreached. These days, the state genuflects. Politicians court Amazon to build warehouses that employ people on zero-hours contracts monitored by wristbands that vibrate if you idle for too long. It's not a job – it's digital indenture.
Look at the NHS – lured into data deals with Palantir, a company whose entire raison d’être is government surveillance. Or education, now gleefully outsourced to platforms that monetise your child’s attention span. Or transport, where Uber undercuts unionised labour while lobbying governments to deregulate further. We've handed our commons – our data, our infrastructure, our institutions – to private fiefdoms who wrap it all in the language of innovation while looting the public realm.
And the media? A PR wing for the new aristocracy. While tabloids shout about benefit fraud or migrant boats, the real theft – of democracy, privacy, sovereignty – carries on in boardrooms. The BBC used to hold power to account. Now it debates whether billionaires really do need to pay tax.
This isn’t capitalism anymore – it’s enclosure with better branding. We’re not citizens; we’re tenants in a gig economy, beholden to terms of service that can change on a whim. Try appealing your Amazon suspension. Try getting a human being on Meta’s helpdesk. Good luck. Serfs had more legal recourse.
And just like medieval serfdom, it’s dressed up as destiny. "That's just how the world works now," they say. "You’ve got to move with the times." As if handing control of essential infrastructure to a few unelected tech barons is "progress". As if disempowerment is the price of convenience. As if the right to repair your own tractor or use your own seed wasn’t something your grandparents fought for.
The irony is that we were sold this world on the promise of decentralisation. The internet would liberate us. Instead, it shackled us to fewer, more powerful actors than ever before. Google is the internet. Apple controls the walled garden. BlackRock controls the capital that funds it all. You can choose your brand – but not your master.
Feudalism used to be about land. Now it's about platforms. The peasants are still productive – only now they produce content, code, consumption patterns. And just like before, the value they generate flows upwards. Trickle-down, they said. Trickled us into servitude more like.
So what’s the answer? Unionise. Regulate. Tax. Break up monopolies. Nationalise where needed. Put the digital commons back under democratic control. Because if we don’t, the next generation won’t remember what freedom looked like. They’ll think terms and conditions were carved in stone.
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