How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism

The Making of the Digital Economy

Author  Cédric Durand Translated by  David Broder
How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism

The promise of the New Economy gone, we have regressed into the age of techno-feudalism

The rise of the IT industry in the nineties promised a new era of freedom and prosperity. It didn’t deliver. Certainly, algorithms are everywhere, but capitalism is no more civilised than ever.

In fact, in the hands of private corporations, the digitalisation of the world drives us towards a darker future. The return of monopolies, the dominance of a few platforms, the blurred distinction between the economic and the political all epitomise a systemic mutation. Information and data networks push the digital economy in the direction of the feudal logic of rent, dispossession, and personal domination.

How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism offers a fresh genealogy of the Silicon…