Anyone who uses a digital platform today to communicate, shop, or work rarely pays with money. They pay with data, attention, behavioural profiles, and with the tacit acceptance of an order they did not choose. The infrastructure belongs to a few. Access is granted, not owned. The rules change without notice. What is emerging here is not a market distortion. It is a form of domination that structurally stands closer to feudalism than to the capitalism it supposedly continues. If this sounds exaggerated, a closer look is warranted.
#Rent, Not Market
The term techno-feudalism captures an economic shift that Yanis Varoufakis encapsulated in the 2020s: classical capitalism generates profit through production. The platform economy generates rent through control. Whoever owns the infrastructure — the marketplace, the operating system, the social network — need not manufacture anything. They skim what others earn on their infrastructure, no differently from a medieval lord who grants the peasants the right to work his land. The digital fiefdoms are merely invisible, globally scalable, and algorithmically managed.
So much for the economic diagnosis. It hits the mark, but it does not go far enough. For the question it does not pose is the decisive one: why does a civilisation that considers itself free organise its own infrastructure along feudal patterns? The answer lies not in economics. It lies in a civilisational logic that Lewis Mumford described as the mega-machine as early as 1967.
#The Invisible Machine
Mumford recognised that the first complex machine was not a mechanical apparatus but a social structure: an invisible edifice composed of living but functionally rigid human parts, erected to make possible the grand designs of a collective organisation (cf. Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, 1967). The pyramids were not built by machines but by human beings functioning as machine parts. The principle was not technology but organisation: a structure that degrades the individual into a functional component and presents this degradation as necessity.
Mumford’s sharpest observation concerns the reception history: the only lasting contribution of the mega-machine was the myth of the machine itself — the belief that this machine is inherently invincible and yet, provided one does not resist it, ultimately beneficial (cf. Mumford, 1967). This myth holds rulers and ruled captive to this day. When you try today to participate in social life without the major platforms, you feel how effectively this myth lives on in algorithmic form: the platform is beneficial because it connects. It is invincible because there is no alternative.
#The Promethean Core
In the Everlast AI Debate (2026), Gwendolin Kirchhoff exposed the nerve that connects techno-feudalism with transhumanism: a promethean impulse running through the entire technological civilisation since the Enlightenment. It is a promethean project that began with the Enlightenment — the idea of rebuilding life, and now ultimately of rebuilding consciousness (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Everlast AI Debate, 2026, from 17:34). The question she posed was not about the usefulness of individual technologies: what kind of impulse is this? What kind of motivation? The answer she gave was uncomfortable: there is definitely a need for control in it, a drive toward domination (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, from 18:02).
Techno-feudalism is not the corruption of a good system. It is the consistent unfolding of an impulse that has understood technology as an instrument of domination from the outset. What Gwendolin Kirchhoff described in the debate as the alchemical-promethean impulse of destroying and replacing manifests in techno-feudalism in its social dimension: the organic structures of human cooperation — markets, public spaces, political participation — are not improved but replaced by proprietary infrastructures under the control of a few.
Joscha Bach articulated the counter-position in the same debate: the current vector is not that we fall back into agrarian feudalism but that we fall forward into techno-feudalism (cf. Bach, Everlast AI Debate, 2026, from 25:11). He described the consolidation logic of capital that drives the directional vectors of technological development into the securing of existing power blocs. His analysis remained economic. Kirchhoff’s question went deeper: what manner of spirit drives this consolidation?
#Spengler and the Hubris of Prometheus
Oswald Spengler recognised in 1931 a tragedy, not a triumph, in technological civilisation. One conceals the transitoriness of all living things with rosy optimism about progress, which at bottom no one actually believes (cf. Spengler, Der Mensch und die Technik, 1931). What technology gains in mastery of nature, culture loses in depth. Techno-feudalism confirms Spengler’s diagnosis in a way he could not have imagined: a civilisation that treats its own members as data sources has not overcome transitoriness but digitised it. The platform promises immortality through data. What it delivers is the conversion of the living into the calculable.
Jochen Kirchhoff (1944-2025) radicalised this line by describing transhumanism as the attempt to push human life back into the inorganic and to bind and fetter it there so that it can no longer escape (cf. Kirchhoff, J., Raeume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle, 2006). Techno-feudalism is the societal shape of this pushing-back: not the fusion of the body with the machine, but the fusion of society with the platform. What is lost is not comfort but the capacity to create orders that are not algorithmically managed. If you imagine what a society would look like that shaped its own forms of cooperation rather than having them assigned by platform operators, the loss becomes palpable.
#Not Return, but Intensification
The most common objection to the techno-feudalism thesis is: the past was worse. Joscha Bach raised it himself in the debate: the far more brutal extraction of feudalism, the lower life expectancy, the absence of liberal freedom (cf. Bach, 2026, from 115:41). The objection misses the point. The diagnosis does not claim that digital feudalism repeats the agrarian kind. It claims that a civilisation that turns human beings into functional parts of its own infrastructure re-erects a structurally feudal relationship — not despite but because of its technological progress.
Mumford called it the persistent disregard of organic limits and human capacities that undermines the valuable contributions to the ordering of human affairs (cf. Mumford, 1967). Techno-feudalism undermines not through violence but through comfort: the platform is so convenient that the surrender of autonomy is barely perceived as a loss. Precisely therein lies its pathogenesis: not in what it takes, but in what it disguises as progress.
Whoever reads techno-feudalism only in economic terms sees monopolies. Whoever reads it philosophically sees the promethean impulse in its societal condensation: a civilisation that converts its own aliveness into infrastructure and celebrates this process as liberation. The counter-position would be not return but maturation — a distinction equally foreign to the Dark Enlightenment current and to the platform economy itself. What you make of this diagnosis — whether you use the platform as a tool or let yourself be used by it — is already a philosophical decision.
#Sources
- Kirchhoff, G. (2026). Everlast AI Debate: Gwendolin Kirchhoff vs. Joscha Bach. [Video, unpublished].
- Kirchhoff, J. (1998). Was die Erde will. Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Luebbe Verlag.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2006). Raeume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle. Klein Jasedow: Drachen Verlag.
- Mumford, L. (1967). The Myth of the Machine. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
- Spengler, O. (1931). Der Mensch und die Technik. Munich: C. H. Beck.