How feudalism ended and what that tells us about big tech

By Pau Aleikum edited by Jaya Bonelli

Yanis Varoufakis's Technofeudalism makes a claim that's easy to repeat, but hard to check: “capitalism” is no longer the best way to describe how today's big platforms make money – rather, we should be talking about “feudalism”, where big platforms act like medieval lords collecting rent. I found the book convincing, but a bit quick. It employs the full lexicon of the matter: serfs, lords, fiefs and vassals, but without stopping to explain how the original feudal system really worked. This is not just a matter of historical rigour: you cannot say that you want to dismantle the current feudal system if you have not looked at how the original one ended.

So, let's slow down. First, let's go over how a feudalist medieval structure worked, in plain terms. Then, in what ways today's platform landscape resembles it and in what ways they differ. Then, how the medieval structure was taken apart. And only then, what that might mean for the digital version.

A quick caveat: historians have argued for fifty years about whether "feudalism" was ever a single coherent system, and critics of Varoufakis say that the platforms are just capitalism doing its thing. Both have a point. I will use the word anyway, as shorthand for how the countryside worked in western Europe between roughly 1000 and 1400. Hold on to it, but loosely.

How did the land work?

The single most important unit, for most people, was the land: a village and its fields, owned by a lord and worked by peasants. Some were free, but many were serfs who, a few steps away from being slaves, were servants tied to the land and forced to obey the will of the lord who owned it.

Being a serf came with four conditions:

1. You could not leave. You were bound to the estate: if you ran, you could be brought back, and your status was inherited by your children, and so on. In exchange, you got a plot, a roof, a share of the common pasture and the lord's protection against raids and bandits, which was not nothing in a violent century. But an exit – freedom – was not on the menu.
2. You paid in labour and fees. Typically, you would be working the lord's own fields about two or three days a week, more during the harvest season. Plus, there was a list of “dues” that read much like a modern price list: a cut of every harvest, then extra fees for life's big moments, like marrying someone from outside the estate or dying and leaving your plot to your heir.
3. The lord ran the court. Disputes, minor offences, transfers of land, fines: all of it went through the manorial court, presided over by the lord or his steward. There was a jury of tenants, so the decisions taken were not a matter of pure whim, but the judge and the landlord were one person, and the fines went into his pocket.
4. You had to use the lord's facilities, and pay each time. This is the part I find most relevant to our comparison. Under what in France was called banalités (but was a common practice elsewhere in Europe), peasants were made to grind their grain at the lord's mill, bake in the lord's oven and press their grapes in the lord's press, and to hand over a cut on every use. The lord did not have any need or incentive to make better flour, because he owned the only mill you were allowed to use, and so he set the toll.

This is – in a very schematic and simplistic nutshell – the machine we're dealing with, and it is not, by any means, meant to be an exhaustive account of the medieval economic environment. We're focusing on the parts relevant to a “technofeudalist” analysis, so it's just about underscoring a few details. Remember that it's not a battlefield, or a spreadsheet; rather, think of bound labour, compulsory dues, a monopoly on the tools and private justice, all sitting on a piece of land you could not leave…

The parallels with “today’s Technofeudalism”

Now, where are the similarities with today's digital ecosystem? In Varoufakis's work of making a comparison between the two systems, there are certain key components of the feudalist system where the resemblance to today stands particularly strong. In particular:

• The mill - as the sole facility of its kind that you were permitted to use, one (somewhat) necessary for your everyday life.
• The court - insofar as the landlord's judgement, no matter how biased towards his own interests, triumphs and ultimately decides what's right and wrong.
• The land you cannot leave - escape the land and you will be brought back, or made into the serf of another land, and another lord. No matter what you do, your serfdom status does not leave you – with all that it entails.

Now, let’s go point by point, in detail.

The mill. Take Amazon, for example: it owns the marketplace, and sellers pay to be found there. It does not need to make the best product in any category. Marketplace Pulse, which tracks this closely, estimated in 2023 that a typical seller now hands Amazon more than half of every sale: a 15 per cent referral fee, 20 to 35 per cent for fulfilment and storage, up to 15 per cent in advertising that has become unavoidable in practice, and a growing list of surcharges on top. Five years earlier the total was about 40%. The base cost of selling through Amazon, i.e. the standard referral fee of 15 per cent, hasn't moved in a decade – instead, all the growth came through the supplementary parts that have slowly become indispensable, the parts you can't opt out of. That is a banalité with a dashboard – small additional fees adding up to an inescapable amount.

Apple's version is even clearer. Although processing a card payment usually only costs 3 per cent of the transaction, Apple takes up to 30 per cent of every digital purchase made inside an iPhone app; and, for years, would not let apps encourage you to buy on the website, where it would often be cheaper. When a court ordered Apple in 2021 to let developers link out to their own websites, Apple complied by charging 27 per cent on those external purchases too. In April 2025, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers called that a willful violation of her injunction, so she struck the fee down and referred Apple for possible criminal contempt. An appeals court backed her in December; the Supreme Court will take it up this autumn, while Apple argues in a lower court that the fair rate for a link is somewhere between 5 and 15 per cent. Notice what exactly the fight is about: it's not about the “quality” of the oven Apple “provides” (or really, requires you to use), but about how much you owe the “lord” for baking bread somewhere else. A 30 per cent cut – not because the process costs or warrants it, but because Apple is the only oven: so it bakes (pun intended) the rules…

And under both companies’ monopolies (and those of many more), sits the actual mill: the cloud. AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, with a long tail of smaller players behind them, hold over 60 per cent of the world's cloud infrastructure. Almost every "independent" platform, and most governments, grind their grain there - like the mill of all mills.

Next order of business: The court. Let’s illustrate it by going back a few years: on the 8th of January 2021, shortly after the 6th of January Capitol attack in the US, Google removed the social network Parler from its app store, after reports that it had been used to coordinate the efforts to storm the Capitol. On the 9th of January, Apple did the same, and that evening, Amazon Web Services told Parler it would stop hosting it. Just after midnight on the 11th, Parler went completely dark. I have no sympathy whatsoever for what was posted there, but look at the mechanism, not the content and target: three private companies, in about seventy-two hours, with no judge or appeal, removed a company from the internet. In so doing, they decided, unilaterally, that such a platform did not deserve to exist. It is not about who or what they decided to cross out; it is about the power that they had to do such a thing – and, in so doing, to impose their own sense of right and wrong on others. The same thing runs every day at lower volume: app rejections, seller accounts suspended with the stock locked in Amazon's warehouse, channels demonetised, listings that vanish with no explanation. This is the manorial court without the jury, the power to make unquestioned decisions over what should and shouldn't be.

Lastly – the land you cannot leave. Now, this is the weakest parallel, and I want to underline that. Nobody will physically drag you back if you delete Instagram tonight. The binding is practical, not legal: fifteen years of photos, the group chats, the people who only know how to reach you there, the seller reviews that took a decade to earn. And legally, you're protected: Europe's GDPR has given you a legal right to take your data with you since 2018. But almost nobody uses it, because a zip file of your posts is not your network, which is the real value of these digital platforms. If the serf could not leave because the law said so, we do not leave because leaving means arriving nowhere in this hyperconnected day and age.

So, to sum it up: a toll on every transaction, a monopoly on the facilities, a private court and a practical inability to leave. That is a lot of the feudalist structure put in place. And yet, the fact that physical coercion is missing in our case is crucial. The lord could have you dragged back, fined, put in the stocks. A platform can only switch you off. This difference matters when we get to how this ends. It took a physical entity – the plague – stronger than feudal physical force to catalyse its end, but what really worked in the long term was a slower and duller dismantling of the system. Maybe the same can happen with platforms – by introducing something that exceeds their economic arm-twisting.

How the land was taken apart

The popular story is that the Black Death killed feudalism. But that’s only half true.

Yes, the plague of 1347 to 1350 did kill at least a third of Europe. Suddenly, land was plentiful and hands were scarce, and peasants started walking to the next village where someone paid more. At first, the lords' answer was not to negotiate. England passed the Statute of Labourers in 1351, freezing wages at pre-plague levels, forcing workers to take the first employer who asked, capping what craftsmen could charge, and punishing anyone who moved. The ruling class was still trying to regulate and attribute supply, demand and power, by decree, but slowly, the attempts came to fail - and wages kept rising for a century, with similar trends appearing elsewhere in Western Europe.

But this was not solely the effect of the plague, and there is one detail from the history books that is worth underscoring. The same plague hit eastern Europe too, but there the lords used the labour shortage to make serfdom harsher, a "second serfdom" that lasted into the 1800s. It was the same catalyst, but it yielded the opposite result. The difference, as far as historians can tell, was in the fact that the peasants in eastern Europe tended to be less organised and less mobilised, making it easier for the lords to take advantage of them and maintain their sovereignty. The plague – a kind of “shock” factor – opened a door for both ecosystems; to walk through it, you had to be organised. Around the shock point, four slower things happened, each tackling one of the key conditions of serfdom.

1. Against the interdiction to leave the land: Towns grew and offered a legal outside. Pre-plague, there was a German statute Stadtluft macht frei, “city air makes you free”, according to which if you fled your land and lived inside a chartered town for a year and a day, your lord lost his claim on you, exemplifying towns’ status as somewhat separate from the feudal system. After the plague, as people moved to towns and the towns grew, they slowly crystallised into viable alternatives to the feudal land system, becoming a second option that could alter the price of the first.

2. Against paying in labour and fees: Labour dues turned into money. Lords who could no longer force three days of work a week started accepting cash rent instead. Once your obligation is a sum of money, rather than a specific task done in a specific setting, it can be earned anywhere, and the bond to that specific field loosens.

3. Against the lord’s manorial court: The crown grew and took the manorial court away. Kings absorbed it into the royal courts, building royal coinage, standing armies and tax systems that reached past the lord to the tenant. The manorial court did not vanish, it became small and irrelevant in comparison.
4. Against the obligation to follow the rules of the lord’s system in order to survive: And the peasants revolted, although mostly unsuccessfully. The English rising of 1381 was crushed in weeks. Its demands, an end to serfdom and to labour service, came true over the next century anyway, because enforcing the rules of the lords’ system proved itself to be more expensive than making small, although accumulating, concessions.

Now, with that laid out, there are two facts to keep in mind:

• Serfdom in England was effectively gone by around 1500, a hundred and fifty years after the plague.
• The banalités, the compulsory toll on mill, oven and press, survived in France until the night of 4 August 1789, when the revolutionary assembly abolished them in a single sitting^[1].

What’s the key takeaway here? That the most feudal part of feudalism was the last to go, and it took a revolution and a law. But still – nobody beat the toll by building a better mill, because building your own mill was still a crime – and the iron hand did remain. At St Albans in England, the abbot confiscated his tenants' hand mills and paved the abbey floor with them.

But in 1381, the rebels dug them up - and within weeks the king cancelled every concession and reform previously made.

Back to technofeudalism: how could this system crack?

Now, of course, history does not always repeat and an analogy does not predict or prove anything. But if the feudal manor system rested on four points of support and lost them one at a time, the useful question about technofeudalism is not “when does it fall?” but “which supports are cracking, and how do we push it?” Here is my scorecard.

Similarly to labour dues changing to cash rent, we can think of open protocols - a protocol nobody owns. Email was one, until Gmail quietly became most of it, which is a warning. The newer candidates are ActivityPub and AT Protocol for social networks, and, more interesting to me, the standards being written right now for AI agents to talk to each other: Anthropic's Model Context Protocol and Google's Agent2Agent. If those stay open, the result is your assistant negotiating a flat rental, a payment, a freelance job or a second-hand bike directly with someone else's assistant, with no marketplace in the middle taking 30 per cent. If they get fenced, the result is the same fees with a friendlier voice. Your labour – your direct engagement with the lord's system, signing up to it and adding to his wealth – is no longer the only way to get by.

For being able to leave and maintain your livelihood, we have data portability. The clearest real case is dull and important: under the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple and Google were made to build a working transfer between iPhone and Android in 2025, contacts and messages and passwords and third-party app data included. Bluesky's AT Protocol goes further and lets you move your whole account, handle and followers, to another server without asking anyone. Adoption is tiny. But ten years ago, leaving one network and arriving somewhere with your friends still attached was science fiction, not policy.

For the royal crown superseding the manorial court, there are antitrust laws. The lord's court did not disappear because peasants stopped using it. It shrank because a bigger court arrived. The record of that bigger court over the last two years is instructive. In August 2024, a US judge ruled that Google illegally kept its search monopoly; in September 2025, the same judge declined to make it sell Chrome, ordering it to share parts of its index with rivals and banning exclusive default deals, while letting it keep paying Apple for the default. In April 2025, another judge found Google had illegally monopolised online advertising by owning both the exchange where ads are auctioned and the main tool publishers use to sell into it, the square and the scales at once; on the 2nd of September 2026, as I write this, she declined to break it up and imposed conduct rules instead. In November 2025, Meta beat the FTC outright and kept Instagram and WhatsApp. In April 2025 the European Commission issued its first fines under the DMA: 500 million euros to Apple for stopping developers from telling users about cheaper options, 200 million to Meta for its "consent or pay" model. And Apple, above, sits in willful contempt of a federal injunction and is still arguing about the rate.

In terms of finding a viable alternative to the rules of the lord’s system, and being forced to use their facilities, a possible analog would be within open models and cheap compute power. The plague made the lord's key value proposition - the use of their systems and facilities - available somewhere else, for a lesser cost. The nearest thing we have seen was 27 January 2025, when a Chinese lab called DeepSeek released a reasoning model with open weights, trained for a fraction of what American labs were spending, and Nvidia lost 589 billion dollars in a day, the largest single-day loss of any company in history. The castle did not fall, but it turned out to be cheaper to build than the lords had said. Open-weight models you can run on rented or local hardware can give the tenant somewhere else to go. But there's still a caveat: the chips still come from one company and the data centres still belong to three, so even if the castle got cheaper, it is still not free.

Now, as you can see, the courts keep finding the monopoly and keep declining to cut. The crown convicts the lord, but then lets him keep the mill. Compare it to 1911, when the Supreme Court split Standard Oil into 34 companies, or to the 4th of August 1789. The tools exist, and we can make it there, but what is missing is the will to use them at full strength, and if France is any guide, that will tends to arrive late, all at once, and under pressure from below.

And what’s the lesson from eastern Europe? Organisation. Similar shock but opposite outcomes, depending on who was organised. The Epic Games v. Apple case (to let developers to implement purchases outside of Apple) exists because one company could afford years in court. The Marketplace Pulse numbers - on the cut Amazon takes - exist because sellers compare notes. The 2023 Reddit blackout - in protest of new fees - happened because volunteer moderators talked to each other. The DMA (Digital Markets Act) exists because a bloc of 450 million people decided the terms of service were a public matter. Where users, developers, sellers and small publishers stay atomised, the shock passes and the toll goes back up, but wherever they organise, the same shock becomes a charter.

What I will leave you with

Feudalism did not lose a single battle – rather, over a century and a half, it lost, one by one, the four things it needed to be the only game in the village: bound labour, a monopoly on the tools, private justice and the impossibility of leaving. The lord was still there afterwards, in the big house, but he saw his role completely diminished: he was just no longer the person you had to go through in order to live.

I suspect that is a realistic hope for the platforms too. Not a rebellion, not a better app, but a slow loss of the foundational pillars of the system: some technical, some legal, some economic, some of it people deciding to move to the chartered town while it is still small and inconvenient. It is not that the lord has to die – he just has to stop being the only option, because being the only option was always the whole business model. If I had to guess which pillar is most solid today, I would say the mill: the fee on every transaction, sitting on infrastructure three companies own. My initial response, in this case? To start depending less and less on the lord, and to build our own infrastructure.

Image credits

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Figure 2. A watermill in the lower margin of Psalm 103, Luttrell Psalter, Lincolnshire, England, c. 1325–1340. British Library, Add MS 42130, f. 181r (detail). Released by the British Library under CC0 / public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Psalm_103;_a_watermill_-_Luttrell_Psalter_(c.1325-1335),_f.181_-_BL_Add_MS_42130.jpg

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