Digital Feudalism or Digital Bourgeoisie?

Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece and a former economic consultant for the video game developer and publisher Valve Corporation, states that the major technology companies whose names we all know very well are the feudal lords of today's digital environments, and that Europe, in particular, cannot prevent this. In his book "Technofeudalism," he argues that the capitalist era has long since ended. He contends that with the emerging dominance of tech monopolies like Amazon and Google, the old order has been quietly replaced by a new global economic and political system.

This era of technofeudalism, which we can also define as the next stage of the transition from feudalism to modernism following the enlightenment process I mentioned in my previous article, shows us once again this truth: In the historical process, ideas and the phenomena they create repeat themselves even if the environment and conditions change.

Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law and one of the founders of the French Socialist Party, interprets this transition from feudalism to the bourgeoisie in his essay "The Right to be Lazy," written in 1880, as follows: "The bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility, supported by the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; but, once triumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion to bolster its economic and political supremacy. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the bourgeoisie had eagerly embraced the old pagan tradition and glorified the sensual pleasures and emotions suppressed by Christianity. Today, satiated and living in luxury, it disowns its own thinkers, the Rabelais and Diderots, and preaches temperance to the wage-earners. Capitalist morality, a pitiful parody of Christian morality, curses the sensuality of the worker. It aims to reduce the producer to the most minimal needs, to strip them of their pleasures and passions, and to condemn them to the function of a machine that works relentlessly without pause."

Indeed, we are currently experiencing a return from modernism, the nation-state perspective, and democracy back to digital feudalism, similar to what was experienced during the transition from feudalism to the bourgeoisie that Lafargue emphasized at that time. The workers of that era have been replaced by today's users who work, receive education, and socialize on digital platforms. The bourgeoisie of the past have been replaced by large technology companies that have become organizations with supranational status. Again, the concepts of liberty, fraternity, and equality of that era have been replaced by connecting the world to ensure the free(!) circulation of information, exporting democracy through social networks, and equalizing people at the level of "ones and zeros" with the big data created by collecting everyone's personal information.

For example, Facebook's goal was to connect people. Twitter's goal was to create a free and democratic discussion environment. But at the end of the day, people were subjected to political manipulation on Facebook. On Twitter, free discussion was replaced by bullying, cancel culture, and echo chambers. In the end, all of our personal data was marketed to third-party companies for various purposes.

As we know, large technology companies are also at the forefront of research and development in artificial intelligence. As Ayşegül İldeniz, who has held executive roles at technology companies in Silicon Valley, also emphasizes, they are trying to instill the following three things in artificial intelligence in these studies to make machines resemble humans:

1. To be able to learn

2. To reason and interpret

3. To have a historical perspective, that is, to remember.

That is when machines might see us, the workers or users—in other words, "humans"—as unnecessary or even harmful, like mosquitoes, or plan to condemn us to obsolescence.