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technofeudalism is here.
the digital economy stopped being a market. it became a set of platforms (uber, amazon, google, openai) that extract rent from every transaction crossing them. you don't own a shop on main street anymore. you rent one from airbnb at 15%, and the rules change tomorrow if they want.
if the platform is the economy, the platform owner is the lord. everyone else is a tenant. small business cannot out-compete a network. workers cannot bargain against an algorithm. ai is about to make tenant-labor optional too.
technofeudalism is just math. networks generate n² value between users. once one hits ~10% of tam, takeoff velocity is irreversible. nobody starts a second uber. the railroad and telegraph and pipeline monopolies of the 1800s are now apps, and they consolidate faster because the marginal cost of adding a country is zero.
the evidence:
- thiel, 2014: "competition is for losers."
- the us top 10 by market cap is almost entirely platform plays.
- post-reagan antitrust has been mostly dormant.
- ai capex is concentrating in a handful of firms.
so what do we do?
markets and democracies both rely on voluntarism plus distributed power. we are losing both. the response has to restore at least one.
three threads worth pulling:
1. governance of networks that isn't "one dude." we govern nation states (badly) and firms (worse). we do not yet know how to govern a network. that is the open design space.
2. alternatives to the network, not a war against it. you cannot out-network the network. you can build commons-based infrastructure where the rent flows back to contributors instead of a holding company.
3. third spaces and local economies. when the global network goes feudal, the move is local sovereignty. boulder, not silicon valley. neighbors you can name, not user ids.
the window for any of this is open right now. it is closing.
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