this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
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United States | News & Politics
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The billionaires that he works for are actively trying to destroy the country so that they can establish their feudal kingdoms.
Technofeudalism!
Is just feudalism; use of technology to enforce authoritarian rule was always present in feudalism.
While they certainly are similar in power symmetry, the rent model and dependency, there are some differences:
The Pope was literally the ultimate, central authority in European feudalism. At the time, it also encompassed most of the known world, making this a non-difference.
That really doesn't seem like a difference at all. Land was (and still is) used for its resources and power over others. Same thing with digital data. However, to say that data is replacing land, I think, would be extremely incorrect. Datacenters require land and there's been a significant effort to centralize land ownership, forcing people to pay rent to live anywhere.
True but also, the current techno feudal lords make their money not through land but data and renting their services by making it almost mandatory to join. But regardless of definition lets talk about solutions, because they should be effective for both. I believe foss projects, selfhosting and decentralized platforms like lemmy are a good way to avoid the dependancy feudalism builds upon. What is your take?
Feudalism is based on Chivalry where the Lords have a mutual responsibility to their subjects and serfs.
They are not trying to create feudal kingdoms, they are trying to establish little dictatorships.
That's the theory. However, as the European feudal lords answered to noone but maybe a king or the pope, they could, and did, abuse their absolute power over their serfs. It was literally an honor system where the consent of the governed was frequently ignored until rebellion occurred.
I could see argument for both sides of that. I lean towards feudalism being the goal as there is an explicit desire for serfdom and rank based upon wealth (even though they seem to ignite the fact that most of their wealth is in investments in the stock market, etc that would become meaningless if the nation-state were to cease to exist).