A term rightfully growing in popularity, TF is a usually-extreme push to see current affairs as part of a long arc away from market capitalism and towards rent-seeking feudal structures. A turn away from the progress in democracy, wealth distribution, and open trade that capitalism brought, TF represents to its proponents a large and almost leaping step backwards taken with technologies sold as bringing us forwards. Through the smartphone, you are enslaved; through the platform, you are fenced in.
I'd like to use this essay to explore a conspiracy: TF arrives in political economy at the tail end of a two-decade trend of European-medieval fantasy in popular western media. Ranging from historical to fantastical, the medieval media trend pits individual passion against systemic law; ethnic and family bonds against political ambition; personal promises against political divides. The medieval fantasy genre is about individuals in conflict with systems.
When or if technology appears, it is more magical than technical. No six-shooters or far-ranging rifles, but inexplicably powerful swords or enchanted words that change minds. Technology in fantasy is much closer to our experience of the internet: it works, though we know not why. So it is that medieval media, more than The Western and Sci-Fi, is the ascendent genre of today's popular culture outlets.
These aren't cowboys we are watching
The myths of the US region called the Silicon Valley barely touched in their first generation the archetypes of medieval Europe: lords and vassals, peasants and fiefdoms. That by the 2020s critics of the Valley's super wealth and amateur governance should call upon these historical symbols as metaphor to comprehend the current era is a refreshing, de- or re-mythologizing of the proud, humorless culture of the Silicon lords. Let us stop listening to what they think they are doing, and start examining and describing it ourselves.
The myth Silicon Valley would really like to glue itself to is that of the US American cowboy. This myth is far less well understood. Mostly people think cowboys libertine or libertarian freedom fighters, even if that freedom was mostly their own selfish version, and consisted mostly of quasi-romantic alcoholism, sociopathy, and wandering. Cowboys seem cool; medieval peasants not so much. Medieval knights of course have their fandoms, but the binding ties to landlords and moral superstructure of chivalry rub US capitalists wrong. Too many ties that bind; not enough nihilistic freedom.
US American versions of the frontier myths, what we call The Western, are about the gradual decline of nature in the face of technology. Eden with railroads. More to the point, a reverse-Eden, in which adventurers have found in the New World their fairy tale and decry the despoiling of paradise by the tools of their own countries. That it was terrifying technology that brought the cowboys out to the paradise in the first place is all part of the tragicomic ineptitude that permeates The Western. It tells the story of cyborgs being upset at their presence having killed nature. Consider the tortured logic of those first pilgrims killing Native Americans with blankets. To be the cancer in paradise is to be morally ambivalent and susceptible to deep self-delusion. The Western is a deluded genre. It speaks of the Earth as though it were already dead; as though emptiness is the endpoint of all existence; as though the mistakes of the colonizer are universally committed; as though no other way of living was ever really imaginable. Eden has to fall, after all, in the Christian fairy tales, for the new and Real World to begin.
If Silicon Valley cowboys spent any time scratching at the myths they allude to in their self-aggrandizing memoirs and contracted biographies, they would likely move quickly past discomfort at the nihilistic violence and petty nobility in the characters, and slide quite comfortably into the fundamental nihilism in the stories white people told about the way the west was won.
And they aren't robots, either
Medieval media does not ask questions about what it means to be human. Characters are human, or human-like, and may ask questions of race and belonging, but these are ethnonationalist stakes, not ontological ones.
Sci-fi is about the repositioning of human spirituality in a world overtaken by artifice. Sci-fi makes us uneasy by asking where metaphysical purity goes when the ecosystem is synthetic. Climate collapse, foggy days, distracted conversation, constant stimulation - these are the raindrops, deep roots, and hum of insects in the cyberpunk cities that sci-fi visits.
Silicon Valley visits these spaces too, in its darkest and funniest moments. The idea of virtual reality - a promise never kept but constantly remembered. Sooner or later, or much later, or never, we will all be living in goggles. We will all be obese but happy; all fit but violent. We will "all" be something configured and dreamed up by technological wizards. The world of sci-fi never arrives; the ecology never retreats; the human condition never changes. It falls uneven in our world, the future coming to some and not others, and coming unbidden or unwelcome, resented or tolerated but never really embraced and, being shunted aside, collecting dust. Those old smartphones, how old do they look now? That old monitor, that old computer, router, server, GPU, "smart" bracelet, TV, watch, shoe...the forgotten futuristic looks 1000 years older than the oak table from your grandmother, the gold ring from your father. Sci-fi stories are parables of the disposal; artificial ecosystems that collapse under the weight of the pretensions of their "founders", who are now dead dust settling on the VR headsets of yesteryear.
Sci-fi is the funniest of the genres, because it gets the most wrong while pretending to be right. It is the most Quixotic of the three, because it must place itself not just in imagined realities, but weighted and prejudiced realities, where authors' social biases have to give shape to the world-building for a coherent symbolic system to take shape. Westerns and Medievals, at least, can call upon historical reference to some degree. Sci-fis have to make it all up, and as such, fall flat on their face more often. It's my favorite genre of the three, naturally.
Techno-feudalism and Medieval Media
Maybe we like the knights and peasants pushing against immoral and injust systems because in obvious ways we feel the same. Westerns are harder to digest in a world where most people cannot afford a home, let alone to wander out into the desert seeking lawless and thus 'free' worlds they can conquer. There are no material frontiers left after colonialism. If or until the human species gets to a new world, the Western will continually lose its deeper literary relevance to society's path. Western's themes, in short, won't resonate with generations who barely go outside. It'll seem less philosophical and more romantic, like the great nature paintings of the late 19th and early 20th century. It'll slide into the shelf with Eden and the other old paradises, another fairy tale that is more aesthetic than intellectually pleasing.
Sci-fi will continue blundering awkwardly into old, silly questions about human nature. Purity tests, moving boundaries, cataclysms, the death of the soul - sci-fi will keep playing with all of these and I cannot wait to see what it makes up next. I admit that fantasy world-building interests me not, but sci-fi world building always seems exciting, because there is so little for a good author to go off of. They can cheat and crib from history or fantasy, but this is low sci-fi, not worth the read unless there's good sex and violence in it. High sci-fi really has something funny to say about what a soul looks and sounds like on the internet. It doesn't teach so much as preach through its presentation of a made-up world as the one we're headed towards. To not only endorse the concept of fate, but give it a name and a shape is an incredibly funny thing to do. The arrogance of a sci-fi author is hard to measure; and I think they know it, too, which makes them maybe the second-funniest class of writer (the first being of course, horror authors).
Techno-feudalism might just be the academic political economist's version of medieval fantasy, brought back to life through the necromancy of op-eds and monographs. Closed commons, lords of the land, rent-paying peasants.
What a fool believes
Feudalism relies on people believing a great number of things. Here are the few I can think of:
1) That the wants of peasants do not exceed what the lord provides
Platforms give us what we want, because they know better than us. Algorithms and AI are tremendously magical entities that we need not understand in order to be understood by. The author is not dead; the audience is, because it no longer need consciously express itself in a surveilled world where the watchers know before we do what we want and how we want it. And these desires do not extend much beyond material ones. You don't want god, or democracy, or fraternity. You are tired, overworked, burnt out; what you want is a beer or a necklace, a game or a show, and these are already provided for you before even asking. Simply turn on the screen, log in, have a look - it's all there, pre-curated. The lord provides.
2) That the tools of the lord are the best possible
Don't open up your smartphone; it'll void the warranty. Don't download the LLM model; it won't be as fast as the newest ones. Post your photos to get in touch with friends; hold your meeting online, it'll be faster.
The tools of the platforms are better than anything you could create on your own. Why are you making mixtapes? There's an app for that. It's better, bigger, and faster than what you might make on your own. Why are you writing music? There's an AI for that now. Don't you know you need not create anything anymore? Anyway, whatever you do create is the property of the lord, and that's as it should be.
3) That the system is naturalistic
We have never not had platforms. Everything's a platform, if you think about it. Anyway, can you imagine your life without platforms? How did people even get stuff done before the internet? How did people make friends?
These arguments could go on, and maybe if I was clever enough I could add more points. I'll stay right here, though, with these three. If you can convince people of just these three, you can manifest something like techno-feudalism at least as a moral-values system.
That technology has made things faster, more convenient, and more diverse cannot be argued with. Of course I have more access to more media now more than ever. And shouldn't that make me distinct from a medieval European peasant, who would live and die within fifty feet of the same spot and probably couldn't read?
Like good sci-fi, technofeudalist arguments scatter shot spaghetti bowls of ideas against our shared future walls. They say right now, sure, people are literate and diverse in their consumption. But as corporations shrink their numbers to single digits, democratic governments look more like extensions rather than competition for these corporations, and media devices and offerings homogenize in their methods of delivery and content type...then the media world of the feudal will make itself clear. People will talk less, write less, sing less, and cook less. They will outsource increasing portions of their daily activities to the increasingly automated platforms tools that can do it faster, which is considered today to be synonymous with 'better'. Life will accelerate until people lose control of it. They will rely on machines to keep them just barely competent enough to have jobs. I used to use AI to speed my job up; now I have to use it just to keep up. This will be the bumper sticker on the front of our brains, the unhappy haunting motto we choose not to whisper to each other over drinks, but see every time we look down into the glass.
I hope this has been a fun ride, and not too depressing. Sci-fi is, as I said, the funniest genre for being the most incorrect. In the horror incurred by the gap between what it tries to predict and what actually happens, sci-fi locates a nexus of surreal joy. Technofeudalism is likely incredibly wrong about the future. Yet it gives us such a refreshing new mythos to throw back at the hyper elite and narrow-minded in Silicon Valley, it has to be applauded and celebrated for a good long time.
If it is correct in its predictions, it'll be our own fault of course, for talking it into being.