I’m sorry, but you do not have enough coins for democracy

SA: What does this have to do with feudalism?

CD: Feudalism is completely different from technofeudalism, in that peasants worked with their own tools and brought some of their products to the lords. They effectively worked a couple of days for the lords, but the dominant form of their labor process was solitary or familial. In technofeudalism, there is a massive socialization of labor, and the digital world plays a very important role in the increasing socialization.

Two crucial dimensions to technofeudalism echo the medieval times. The first is similar to feudalism in that there is a relation of dependency both politically and economically. To put it sim­ ply, our dependency today draws from the fact that no one can live without Google or Microsoft. I mean, my mother can, but she’s 82 years old. To her, it isn’t a drama if she cannot access Google, but it is for most of us. That’s an obvious fact of depen­ dency, but it goes further. Think about states. Nations are increasingly reliant on these technofeudalists. There is a lot of literature on how these firms are providing crucial infrastructure to the op­erations of states and their communication networks. Take for instance the sub­marine cables. Up until the 2000s, they were state owned. But now most of them are owned by private corporations. The same goes for cloud services. The German ministry signed a contract with AWS [Amazon Web Services] for its cloud last November, for example. Private companies are playing crucial roles for the op­erations of the world, which means that the sovereignty of the state is in decline; they’re subordinated to corporations. Other companies are dependent on them, as well. Even large companies like Walmart rely on their cloud services, which means that these cloud monopolists are taking an increasing share of value created along the chain. And this is what’s so strange. In the beginning, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Tesla were all completely different companies. They weren’t in the same business. They were selling books or a search engine or word processing or cars. But now, they’re all converging towards the monopolization of the means of coordination. And that’s how we’re going back to feudalism. They are monopoliz­ing something that nobody can escape. They’re both curating that space and regu­lating it. That has a political aspect but also an economic one, since they can make money out of it.

SA: Perhaps this is a detour, but how did feudalism end?

CD: It ended thanks to trade routes and the ability of the glebe to escape from the
dependence on the territorialized fusion of economic and political power. The
transformation between the lords and the peasants then changed from one of pure domination towards market relations, which entailed a move towards productivity.

SA: If trade routes brought the end to feudalism, then this also had to do with the spread of goods and communication, right? But now, all the trade routes are owned by these companies. Would you then say that the root of all evils is a consequence of decades of privatization with no market regulation?

CD: I think that’s a very good way of summarizing the increasing retreat of state
legitimacy and action. One of the biggest errors of policymakers was to say, “Okay,let’s see what they can do. Let’s trust them. Let’s follow them.” As a matter of fact, that was exactly the same error that was made vis­à­vis the financial industry. Before 2008, there was this very complex financial product, and at the end of the day, nobody was able to regulate it because nobody understood what was happen­ing. It’s a similar process. And so, if there’s a lesson to be taken from that, it’s that it is very important for the state apparatus – the public entities, the commons, or whatever you want to call it – to retain competencies to understand what’s being done.

SA: Isn’t this related to the high degree of specialization in industries?

CD: I agree that there is an increasing sophistication linked to specialization that makes it difficult for people in separate fields to engage with one another, but I don’t think that has any kind of implication for the organizing of states. You can have public bodies where people are able to understand what is going on and are talking with one another. There is the idea of an academic na­tion, where some people are able to articulate the discussion, and there is the idea of innovation systems that link the private and public sectors. There are people who are able to build bridges and help organize the institutions. This is more costly, of course, as you need more and more institutions. But we shouldn’t have a fatalistic view on this. Do you remember Libra?

SA: No.

CD: It was a project to have a currency on Facebook in 2019. Can you imag- ine? It would have been incredible. The single most widely used currency in the world. But policymakers and foreign bankers said, “No way.” That entity would have too much power. Libra was stopped. And so, we can stop things like this. Another positive example is China. They’re at the frontier of tech, but they’re regulating it. They discipline their tech bosses. In many Chinese companies, there’s a thing called a golden chair, which is a share that allows you to veto a company’s strategic decisions without your being able to receive dividends. That’s one form of political control, and I think things like this need to be considered.

In the big picture, I think China will appear to be the most reasonable way of dealing with tech businesses in the 21st century. It’s just more stable. They also have a strong ecological agenda, international relations, and think that the private sector should have some supervision. I’m not very enthusiastic about the lack of pluralism, or privacy, and so on and so forth there. It’s not that I like that, but China just seems less crazy.

SA: What do you make of what’s happening in the US?

CD: You know, I used to play music and read novels, but for the past months I have not been able to, because it takes too much energy, trying to make sense of what’s happening. My interpretation is that they’re really trying to concretize this hypothesis of technofeudalism. They’re weaken- ing the state, transferring the state’s capabilities to the private sector, and giving more space to it. It’s completely incredible, for instance, that on the first day Trump took office, he signed an executive order suspending the federal state’s supervision of AI. Then, of course, there’s DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency], which [has been] weakening regulation capabilities and screening civil servants who would resist the companies’ power. They’re really trying to implement technofeudalism and allowing companies to build their own sovereign space without any limitations imposed by the state. It will fail, however. That’s my hypothesis. Managing society without political mediation is simply too complex. Then, at the international level, people are al- ready reacting, and this will increase. There will be a reinforcement of state capabilities. I’m not that pessimistic, to be honest, because I do not think they will succeed. They’re trying, though.

SA: You aren’t nervous? I mean, isn’t this exactly what they set out to do with Project 2025?

CD: There’s a plan, for sure. And it’s a very systematic dismantling to create confusion –