There’s a common understanding that we’re living inside a new digital world order – one that feels like enclosure, where people are “controlled” by platforms they can’t easily leave, where behaviour is shaped at scale, and where #AI intensifies this mess. That’s why #fashernista terms like #technofeudalism are being used to argue that we’ve moved beyond capitalism into something structurally different: a system based not primarily on profit, but on rent extraction through “cloud capital.” In this narrow framing:
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Feudalism = land-based power, bonded labour, hierarchical obligation
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Capitalism = wage labour, markets, profit from production
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Technofeudalism = platform power, behavioural capture, rent from digital dependency
The “cloud lords” (Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple etc.) operate their own digital fiefdoms. We are the new “cloud serfs” producing data and metadata for free, generating value through participation while feeding systems that learn from us and reshape our behaviour. Even businesses and workers are pulled in, sellers depend on Amazon marketplaces, workers are managed through platform systems and, as the #EU is finding, entire infrastructures depend on AWS-style cloud provision.
From this narrowing view, capitalism starts to look secondary to rent extraction from controlled digital spaces. But is this actually a new economic system? The argument starts to break down, critics point out that many of these dynamics are not historically new as supermarkets already control supply chains and choice, advertising has shaped desire for decades, monopolies are standard capitalist patterns and enclosure of markets predates the internet by centuries. Even “lock-in” effects (like Amazon Prime convenience or #dotcons platform dependency) can be explained through familiar capitalist mechanisms: convenience, pricing, network effects, and infrastructure dominance. From this wider view, what we’re seeing is not a new epoch, but late-stage capitalism with intensified digital tools, not a structural break.
The more grounded #OMN view suggests something different, the change is not mystical “cloud feudalism”, but that data and metadata has become a primary economic resource. We now live in systems where behaviour is continuously captured as data, that data to be aggregated, sold, and operationalised, then feedback loops reshape what people do next and participation itself becomes productive labour. This shifts relationships, not only worker vs capitalist, not just consumer vs market, but user-as-infrastructure. Yes, people are no longer only buying and selling inside systems, they are constituting the system itself through participation. That is a shift in how production works, even if it doesn’t replace capitalism as the dominant structure, it is reshaping it.
The infrastructural question? Where the #technofeudal framing becomes useful is infrastructure. The real power isn’t just in apps or interfaces, it is in cloud hosting (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure), database and compute control and dependency of entire industries on a few providers. This is less “digital shopkeeping” and more systemic dependency at the infrastructure layer. At that level, switching costs are enormous, entire economies are built on top of systems owned by a handful of #nastyfew actors. Yes, that does mean the enclosure of the commons, not of in the old sense land, but of digital operational reality.
Where this leaves us? The danger is less about whether we label this “capitalism” or “technofeudalism”, more, assuming the system is stable, assuming it is neutral or assuming it is too new to understand through older tools. In reality, we have old capitalist dynamics operating the data-driven extraction layered on top of this older mess, with infrastructure consolidation amplifying both. Not a clean break – but a messy transition stage.
From an #OMN perspective, the useful question is not the label, it is where is agency located? Who controls infrastructure? How is knowledge produced and shared? What forms of network are open vs enclosed? Because whether we call it capitalism or #technofeudalism, the political problem is the same that control is concentrating, while participation is being harvested. And that is the terrain we actually have to work in, not the theoretical naming of it.