Technofeudalism

What technofeudalism means

Technofeudalism is the claim that the world’s biggest tech companies have stopped behaving like ordinary capitalist firms and now operate more like medieval lords, charging rent for access to the digital land they own while the rest of us work on it for free. The idea was popularised by the economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis in his 2023 book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. His argument is deliberately startling: capitalism, he says, has not been reformed or tamed but quietly replaced by something older in spirit and newer in form.

Capitalism, in Varoufakis’s telling, rested on two pillars. The first was the market, where buyers and sellers meet and compete. The second was profit, the reward a business earns by making and selling things. He argues that both pillars have been pushed aside by big tech, and replaced by two feudal features: the platform, which is not an open market but a private domain, and rent, the toll you pay simply to use it.

If that is right, then the familiar language of customers, competition and profit no longer captures what is happening. We need the older vocabulary of lords, vassals and serfs. The word is meant to jolt: by reaching back to feudalism, Varoufakis is insisting that the change is one of kind, not just degree, and that tinkering with the system will not be enough to fix it.

How technofeudalism works

At the centre of the theory is what Varoufakis calls cloud capital: the platforms, algorithms and recommendation systems that increasingly organise economic life. The people who own this cloud capital, the likes of the firms behind Amazon, Apple, Google and their Chinese counterparts, he names the cloudalists. They are the new lords, and the territory they own is digital rather than physical.

Cloud rent, vassals and serfs

Two groups work this digital land. The first are traditional businesses, which Varoufakis calls vassals. A company selling through Amazon’s marketplace, or an app maker distributing through the App Store, can reach customers only by paying for the privilege, through fees, commissions and advertising. They keep producing and profiting, but a slice of everything they earn flows upward as cloud rent. The second group is the rest of us, the cloud serfs. Every review we write, photo we upload and hour we scroll adds value to the platform, makes its predictions sharper and its pull stronger, and we are paid nothing for it. Our free labour is the modern equivalent of peasants improving a lord’s estate.

How we got here

Varoufakis points to two developments. The first is the privatisation of the internet by American and Chinese big tech, which turned a shared public space into a set of walled domains. The second is the response to the 2008 financial crash: the enormous sums that central banks created to refloat the economy flowed largely to the tech giants, funding the construction of their cloud fiefdoms. Rent, he argues, has come back from the margins of the economy to sit at its centre.

Varoufakis is not the only thinker reaching for this language. The French economist Cedric Durand used the term in his 2020 book Techno-feodalisme, and a wider conversation about neofeudalism has been building among writers who sense that competition and profit no longer describe the economy as well as they once did. Pointing to a chorus rather than a single voice does not prove the case, but it does suggest that something about the old vocabulary has started to feel inadequate to a lot of people at once.

Technofeudalism in everyday life

The pattern is easiest to see in the marketplaces we use without thinking. A small seller on a giant retail platform must often pay to advertise on the very site that lists their goods, while competing against the platform’s own-brand versions of the same products. App developers hand over a substantial share of their revenue to the store that distributes their software. Creators build whole livelihoods on platforms that can change the rules, or bury their work, overnight.

That last point links technofeudalism to enshittification, the slow decay of platforms once their users are locked in and the rent can be squeezed harder. A ride-hailing app can raise its commission on drivers; a marketplace can bury an independent seller beneath its own products; a social platform can throttle the reach of posts unless creators pay to promote them. In each case the toll rises because there is nowhere else to go. In the world of physical goods, the same squeeze shows up as planned obsolescence, where products are built to be replaced. Both are ways of extracting more from people who have few easy alternatives. The relationship also deepens commodification, since the digital space we depend on is itself owned, fenced and rented out. And our daily scrolling is the rent we pay in attention, which is why the theory sits so close to the attention economy.

Is it really feudalism? The debate

Technofeudalism is a contested idea, and it is worth being clear about what it is not. It is not a literal return to the Middle Ages. Real serfs were legally bound to the land and could be punished for leaving, whereas we are free to delete our accounts, even if doing so is costly and inconvenient. The comparison is an argument by analogy, meant to make a pattern visible, not a precise historical match.

Serious critics push back harder. Writing in places such as Jacobin, some economists argue that this is still capitalism, simply in a new and concentrated form. Rent, they point out, has always existed inside capitalism, and the tech giants still chase profit and still compete fiercely. Renaming the system, they warn, risks misdiagnosing it and reaching for the wrong solutions. Varoufakis replies that when something changes enough, it deserves a new name, and that clinging to the word capitalism hides just how different rent extraction is from old-fashioned profit making.

You do not have to settle that dispute to find the underlying observation useful. A handful of platform owners now sit between us and much of economic and social life, collecting a toll on almost everything that passes through. The feeling that this arrangement is simply how things are, with no serious alternative on offer, is itself a form of capitalist realism. Whether you call it a new feudalism or a strange new chapter of capitalism, the question it forces is the same: who owns the digital ground we all now stand on, and what do they get to charge us for standing there?

Technofeudalism, surveillance capitalism and data colonialism

Technofeudalism is the boldest of three attempts to name the same shift. Surveillance capitalism keeps the word capitalism and treats today’s system as a mutant version of it. Data colonialism reframes the extraction as a new empire, claiming human life as territory. Technofeudalism argues that we have left capitalism behind entirely. The three disagree about the label, but they point at the same thing: a small number of owners growing immensely powerful by controlling the platforms through which the rest of us now live. Learning to see that, under whichever name fits best, is what lets you ask who the new lords are, and on what terms you are willing to keep paying the rent.