Liberty and Bondage in Technofeudal America

Do you ever feel like your phone is listening?

Since the 19th century, the traditional American narrative has celebrated the rugged individualist carving destiny from wilderness. From frontier homesteaders to postwar suburban pioneers, the ability to stake one's claim and build a lasting legacy has been central to American identity. Property ownership represented not just economic security but freedom itself. It was the exemplary physical manifestation of the American Dream and a bulwark against tyranny. To be American was to embody the quintessence of autonomy, a paragon of self-sufficiency who forged destiny through sheer volition. This idealized version of America, whether or not it ever truly existed, stands in contrast to our current technofeudal reality. 

Today's digital landscape operates under dramatically different principles. These principles are a product of a profound transformation that economist Yanis Varoufakis has termed "technofeudalism," a tech-driven economic system that has not merely evolved from traditional capitalism but has supplanted it entirely as a fundamentally different mode of production and extraction. As Varoufakis explains, "Profit drives capitalism, rent drove feudalism," and we have now progressed to a new system where the dominant mode of wealth extraction comes from rent rather than profit, creating digital fiefdoms like Amazon and Airbnb. This shift represents a disturbing regression in economic power relations, one that threatens to undermine decades of process towards a democratic control of resources.

When traditional capital is replaced by "cloud capital," the focus shifts decisively from growth, value, and profit to pervasive control as the deliberate strategic aim of this new system. The "cloudalists" are the new dominant driving force in our economy, wielding influence that extends far beyond conventional business boundaries to infiltrate nearly every aspect of our app-powered daily lives. In this new order, our preferences are no longer truly our own. The parallels to medieval feudalism are striking. Just as serfs once worked the lord's land in exchange for protection and the right to subsistence, we are now laborers to digital devices (the progenitors of our identity), in exchange for access to the VIP club of human connections that has migrated online.

Consider the typical American's digital existence: Waking to notifications on a smartphone they don't truly own, controlled by software they cannot modify, and spending leisure hours generating content and data for their cyber overlords. At each point, their experience is shaped by algorithmic systems they neither rule nor fully understand. Whereas American ideals promised meaningful ownership of both physical property and the public commons,  we now lease access to digital tools that can be revoked at any moment. The shapers of occidental thought are left perpetually vigilant, muting microphones and shrouding camera lenses, scrutinizing every word typed lest their digital personas be banished from the very spaces where modern life unfolds. The land of the free has been subverted, and it has become the domain of the surveilled.

In Varoufakis's framework, "we're more than serfs, we're cloud serfs producing capital. And that has never happened in the history of the world." Within this novel condition, our productivity is the very thing that constrains us. Today's tech platforms position themselves as essential utilities delivering social ‘good’ with each algorithm update and terms of service revision, actively forging steel chains of dependency. With this performative corporate benevolence, a savior complex masquerading as a service, tech giants are able to cast themselves as indispensable pillars of modern society while systematically minimizing their societal harms. They have meticulously cultivated a rhetoric of inevitability, framing their accumulation of power not as self-serving but as a necessary innovation for the advancement of humankind. 

Traditional capitalism, for all its flaws, theoretically rewarded innovation and risk-taking with profit, security and progress. The shift from profit to rent as the dominant form of income signals the regression from capitalism to a neo-medieval arrangement of lord and serf. The tech barons of Silicon Valley have more in common with the landed aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France than with the industrialists of the nineteenth century. They control territories (platforms) rather than merely owning productive assets, and they gather tribute (data and attention) rather than simply employing labor. This tectonic shift undermines the American conviction that diligence begets prosperity. This fundamental covenant held the promise of just rewards for honest labor and the possibility of ascension through the socioeconomic strata through merit. At its core, this transformation represents the ultimate perversion of ownership itself. The transition to technofeudalism undermines the tangibility and trustworthiness of human experience, where even our sense of possessing our own attention and social connections has been corporatized. When we cannot truly own, we cannot truly build.

For the American identity to remain vital, it must evolve to encompass digital freedom alongside traditional conceptions of liberty. The question we face is not simply economic but existential: What does it mean to be American in an age when our fundamental freedoms are increasingly mediated through corporate fiefdoms that command every aspect of our lives? What becomes of us when our most intimate choices and expressions become raw material for algorithmic profiling and behavioral modification? Like medieval peasants who once gazed upon the lord’s castle from their humble plots of soil, we stare into glowing screens connecting us to our digital overlords. The modern serf, as smart as he may be, willingly carries his lord’s surveillance apparatus in his pocket, dutifully charging it each night before bed.

The American who emerged from the frontier may yet find ways to resist digital enclosure and establish new forms of sovereignty within networked existence. The essence of American identity has never been grounded in particular technologies or economic arrangements, but rather a restless insistence on self-determination against concentrated power. It is an insistence that may prove our most valuable inheritance in an age of digital serfdom. 

Our response begins in our daily choices. I urge you, dear reader, to cultivate digital autonomy through intentional disconnection. Step away from screens regularly to rediscover the richness of unmediated experience. We must reclaim our attention, humanity’s most precious and limited resource, from those who would mine it for profit. By freeing ourselves from the algorithmic reward cycle, we can plant the seeds of a dignified digital existence that serves what technology should have prioritized from the beginning: genuine human flourishing.