Techno-feudal empire, re-incorporated

Written by Muhammad Adamu

Insight

X-feudalism tendencies are here to stay, look no further than the “family, field and factory”.

Techno-feudal empire, re-incorporated

In the book “Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism”, Philip Stern [10] provided a genealogical analysis of the cooperations that aided British colonialism. Partly narrative and historical, the manuscript laid out a realistic picture of how part of the British empire came about as an incorporated political and commercial entity. This led me to wonder: if cooperation such as the British South African Company (BSAC) and East Indian Company (EIC) provided the institutional foundation for British colonialism, might there be analogues to modern big tech cooperation i.e., Google (Alphabet), Apple, Facebook (Meta), Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM)/Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi (BATX) and the emergence of the techno-feudal empire?

Commentaries in magazines and popular media outlets have demonstrated the need to critically appraise big corporations’ overt control of social infrastructures as a technoscientific configuration for platform partnership, ownership and rentership. Such discussions emerged as a consequence of rentier capitalism in digital spaces where techno-feudalism is adopted to denote a transition to a more sinister economic and political model of social organisation. As a provocation, I considered how the ideological orientation of techno-feudalism might implicate the design and adoption of responsible digital technology in systematically marginalised communities more broadly. In this opinion piece, I share some ideas that might be relevant to the field of Human-Computer Interaction’s fourth-wave emphasis on the political relations and power dynamics of human-computer interactivity. The case I present pertains to how we, as users, researchers, or reflective practitioners, ought to politicise our engagement with the modern and the digital as given.

With the pervasive nature of emerging technologies, the most mundane aspects of social life are entangled with the products and services of big tech cooperation. We live in an exciting/troubling time where cooperate entities can (and have) redefined the underlying function of modern society through their control of basic socio-technical infrastructure. Often, the rhetoric of making the world a better place is adopted to direct their social innovation and philanthropy efforts, even when critiques have pointed to the underlying political dimension of big cooperation i.e. power and profit [7]. If Stern accounts of the genealogy of the cooperations that aided British colonialism via “cooperate empiring” [10] could be identified in the history of computing, then: 

• the age of discovery that led to the internet boom has furnished American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) and Microsoft with the domination of telecommunication protocols and operation system standards.

• the age of project can be characterised as when tech hippies start to form monopolies as oligopolies across sectors; just as Google has done in internet search. 

• the age of revolution and reform signals large-scale acquisitions and mergers where big cooperation becomes a proprietary marketplace with limited competition. Even the rapid relief tactics of breaking up the Standard Oil or the Bell Cooperation into smaller portfolios does not negate their status as oligopolies.

• the age of imperialism can be framed as when philanthrocapitalism furnished digital colony experiment via viz charted expansion retreats where transnational concessions and privileges are granted to discrete private (and philanthropic) entities such as the Rockefeller and the Gates and Melinda Foundation. 

Within a global network of privately controlled entities, capital creation and accumulation are redistributed across a multitude of soft successions. In this provisional cycle of expropriation/exploitation, users go from citizens that produce commodities within the kingdom of culture, to workers that produce surplus capital within the kingdom of labour. This tactical configuration has reframed the capitalist relation of markets and profits as we consciously labour as serfs towards the hinterland of society 5.0. And as the cognitive class, or the clerisy as Kotkin [7] rightly pointed out, we might have been overtly co-opted into a technocratic culture where autonomy is algorithmically decided, and sustainment provincially guaranteed. 

As members of the academia-industry complex, we might be conditioned to operate within a proverbial waiting room mentality – a space where the past gets recycled and the past-like present largely ignored – waiting for the next hype to adjust our perception and attitude accordingly (e.g., towards transhumanism, super intelligence, singularity and so on). With the anxiety that builds up when ambiguity prevails, we might have been coerced to embark on a journey to the unknown –untamed happiness or postwork society– and to reach ‘there’ is to engage in a computational exercise of “SHUT UP AND MULTIPLY”. Let me explain.

X-feudalism or Re-feudalisation

In the “Critique of Techno-feudal Reason”, Morozov [9] argues that techno-feudalism is merely another progressive imaginary under the banner of -ism; or rather a sinister rhetoric built on a seemingly non-existent industrial complex where intellectual ‘scavengers’ are forcefully attempting to reintroduce new dimensions to rentier capitalism. His critical interpretation of the plethora of modern feudalism shows how the ‘intellectual weakness’ – in terms of rhetoric disposition and epistemological orientation – and the ‘lack of analytical clarity’ demand an overhaul of its logic and convention. First, Morozov’s critique emphasises the ambiguity of terms adopted across the spectrum of modern feudalism(s). For Kotkin, neo-feudalism is a mutation of capitalism where ‘generalised precarity, extreme inequality and monopoly power’ are rendered as natural conditions of hyper-digital spaces [7]. For Arditi, “digital feudalism is a moment of capitalist retrenchment. We do not yet have a revolutionary ideology for the next social and economic phase. All we have is a system that alienates everyone and further encloses our existence in capitalism. Digital feudalism is not a harbinger of a new system, but rather the doubling down of exploitation” [1, p.149]. This doubling down can be identified in both family, field and factory settings: “there are those who prayed, fought and laboured” [7, p. 14]. 

Second, Morozov’s interpretive analysis of the re-feudalisation tendencies in the modern (or rather the distant suspicion towards feudal logic in the digital) points to how the state as a container/exerciser of power was relegated to the fringed of global relations. In response to such critique, Durand argues that as the “qualitative mutation of capitalism is taking place” across the globe [3, p.31], one needs to take a closer look into the capitalist/imperialist dimension of big corporations in discoursive, political and economic terms. For Morozov, the re-feudalisation of rentier capitalist society, which is in essence extra-modernity, globalisation, and digitisation, entails “politically enable expropriation given way to economically enabled exploitation……no reason to believe that techno-capitalism is somehow a nicer, cosier, and more progressive regime than techno-feudalism; by vainly invoking the latter, we risk whitewashing the former’s reputation” [9, p.94, p.126]. This is directing attention towards how techno-scientific forces are transforming rentier capitalism into a new global institutional structure that suppresses existing politico-economic systems such as financialised capitalism. 

As I will attempt to show in the remainder of this opinion piece, the re-incorporation of feudal features in modern conditions of sociability entails a continual appraisal of the effect of the commodification of public life. As we voluntarily engage with Facebook or X, are we not serendipitously embodied in acts of playbour (i.e. restricted play + immaterial labour): a surveillance trap, an oligopoly bondage? Relatedly, tobacco’s exchange value is determined by its production and use value, whereas in the digital realm, the user as a data point or quantifiable asset is underpinned by asymmetrical market exchange that stacks production/use as natural remedies with little remuneration value. Isn’t this re-feudalisation of society? Philip Stern had some ideas to share. 

Re-incorporation of the Fourth Reich

As identified earlier, Stern’s “Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism” laid out a realistic picture of how part of the British empire came about as an incorporated political and commercial entity. 

First: one could identify how the East Indian Company (EIC) has had such a strong influence on a global scale. Geo-politically, the company had a private army that at some point controlled the Indian sub-continent, and socio-economically, it controlled half of the world trade in the mid-1700s and early 1800s. With its own presidency and reserve armies, the company’s self-proclaimed administrative power and territorial politics of East Asia before British colonialism took full control of India as British Raj. The company was a sovereign entity in its own right – a kind of double agent for satisfying private interests and public concerns. With the Church and the Kings/Queens in Europe as the state, the pluralism between “the body natural mortal and personal, the monarch; the body, politic, perpetual and public, the monarchy” [10, p.5] are dissolved as these double entities bear duties that were socially assigned legal personality by law. Even when European corporations were perceived as discrete legal entities, the EIC was a perpetual body that was immortal to national boundaries. If the state or the church were cooperating to regulate the organisation of society, what was to be made of big tech as we experience techno-feudal tendencies? What would be the role of national governments such as the parliaments, the traditional emirates, and other agencies in the global south within a techno-empire? Oversight or Override!

I argue that venture colonialism still exists after the demise of the empire as its legacies continue when large cooperations tactically complicate the blurry line between private enterprise and the state. The public-private paradox can be identified in the territorial power vested in EIC in East India or the power exerted by the Gates and Melinda Foundation on global health where privileges and concessions are determined by commercial interests. What started as a collective enterprising of faraway expeditions or global philanthropy has provided the playing field for global empiring. 

Second: Stern historical accounts have shown how state-like entities such as EIC India or AT&T in the USA function in subordinating sources of sovereign power to themselves. Both entities acted as public service providers where they enacted upon themselves a natural monopoly. Similar trends can be identified with Microsoft and Google in Africa as they enact new patterns of governance across sovereign jurisdictions in critical sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, and education. The consequence of this is that as private entities assume public rights in the traditional institutional sense, they can consolidate the means and ends of organising society. With their political influence and economic leverage, they can direct public policies, infrastructures, and public discourses towards a series of quasi-independent structures of externalities. For example, with Bayer (formerly Monsanto) and Cortera (formerly DowDuPont) at the centre of global agriculture financing, propriety models have led to an import-oriented monoculture where African farmers are merely poster imaginaries for advancing climate-smart agriculture rhetoric. Isn’t this doubling down of expropriation/exploitation? 

I argue that the Rockefeller-Gate-led Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) are two double-edged examples of catastrophes made in history. These alliances are merely marketing schemes that were provisionally created as means towards social changes, or new future markets. With philantrocapitalism as an offspring of rentier capitalism, it has little to offer to social challenges brought about by its broader socio-political and economic structures. The sovereignty and responsibility of the state as an institution are parcelled to private entities where rights depend on economic position to other modalities of power. Both Birn [2] and Kumbamu [8] have shown how the Rockefeller and the Gates and Melinda Foundation have established a corporate-state complex where agriculture and healthcare modus operandi are re-configurated alongside new models of partnership, ownership and rentership. What else do you want, dear readership, to appreciate the position that X-feudalism is here to stay?  

In a techno-feudal empire, the new Lord and Baron will ensure that the line between private corporations and the state is dissolved. When we board the train to the Crazy Town, the ambiguity around which stop to alight denotes how we as humans might have been mobilised as Heideggerian “standing reserves”, thus a subjective utility to be commanded and used within the broader technoscientific landscape. Kashmir Hill digital veganism is a testament to the oligopoly bondage of the digital realm, we either shut up and multiply, or we politicise the personal accordingly [6]. In conclusion, X-feudalism is here, its tendencies can be identified in the monoculture of techno-science where power is distributed hierarchically in both “family, field and factory” settings. James Bridle’s “The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future” speaks to such possibilities.  

End notes: 

1. Arditi, D. (2023). Digital Feudalism: Creators, Credit, Consumption, and Capitalism. Emerald Publishing Limited.

2. Birn, A. E. (2014). Philanthrocapitalism, past and present: The Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the setting (s) of the international/global health agenda. Hypothesis, 12(1), e8.

3. Durand, C. (2022). Scouting capital’s frontiers. New Left Review, (136), 29-39.

4. Felski, R. (2015). The limits of critique. University of Chicago Press.

5. Harris, M. (2022) Are we living under ‘techno feudalism’? Intelligencer. Available at: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/what-is-technofeudalism.html (Accessed: 18 September 2023). 

6. Hill, K. (2019) I cut the ‘big five’ tech giants from my life. it was hell, Gizmodo. Available at: https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-life-it-was-hel-1831304194 (Accessed: 24 September 2023). 

7. Kotkin, J. (2023). The coming of neo-feudalism: A warning to the global middle class. Encounter Books.

8. Kumbamu, A. (2020). The philanthropic-corporate-state complex: imperial strategies of dispossession from the ‘Green Revolution’to the ‘Gene Revolution’. Globalizations, 17(8), 1367-1385.

9. Morozov, E. (2022). Critique of techno-feudal reason. New Left Review, (133), 89-126.

10. Stern, P. J. (2023). Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism. Harvard University Press.

11. Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology and other Essays. New York.