Dear Yanis,
You have described our age as technofeudalism: the mutation of capitalism into a platform-based sovereignty that extracts rents rather than profits. In mapping this shift, it is equally important to track the philosophical fuel driving the so-called lords of cloudalism.
The new tech-feudal elites do not merely accumulate wealth; they curate their own canon of philosophers. Yet what they read and what they take away from these readings is systematically inverted when measured against emancipatory standards.
- From Leo Strauss they borrow elitism and the idea of esoteric truths reserved for the few.
- From Carl Schmitt they adopt the permanent state of exception, the friend–enemy logic of politics.
- From Nietzsche they pick the Übermensch and contempt for the “herd.”
- From Heidegger they take a pathos of destiny and the fatalism of technology.
- From René Girard they adopt sacrificial logic — the stability of power through scapegoats.
- From Adorno, Habermas, even Sloterdijk or Byung-Chul Han, they borrow vocabulary — only to turn critique into a decorative alibi.
If we assess these selective appropriations through the lens of Silvia Staub-Bernasconi’s fourfold matrix (order, access, legitimation, enforcement), the picture becomes brutally clear: every emancipatory dimension is reversed into its authoritarian opposite.
Their project is not one of commons, inclusion, or peace. It is one of hierarchy, exclusivity, exclusion, and violence.
The following table shows the contrast in condensed form:
| Dimension (#TheStaubBernasconiMatrix) | Goal (Normative) | Tech-Feudalists: Philosophical Reference | Effect (Inversion) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Order | Anarchy | Schmitt / Strauss | Hierarchy, state of exception |
| 2. Access | Commons | Nietzsche / Rand | Exclusive access, privatization |
| 3. Legitimation | Inclusion | Heidegger / Sloterdijk | Destiny, exclusion |
| 4. Enforcement | Pacifism | Girard / Schmitt | Sacrificial violence, friend–enemy logic |
Ah Yanis… it is not grand diagnoses that we lack. The question remains: what is to be done?
| Dimension (#TheStaubBernasconiMatrix) | Ziel (Normativ) | Tech-Feudalisten: Bezug / Philosophen | Effekt (konkret) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Anordnung | Anarchie (#anarchie) | Carl Schmitt (Souveränität, Ausnahmezustand), Leo Strauss (Elitenherrschaft) | Stärkung hierarchischer, autoritärer Ordnung |
| 2. Zugang | Commons (#commons) | Nietzsche (Übermensch), Ayn Rand (radikaler Individualismus) | Exklusiver Zugang, Privatisierung, Elitenzirkel |
| 3. Legitimation | Inklusion (#inklusion) | Heidegger (Schicksal, Technik), Sloterdijk (Elitenrhetorik) | Abgrenzung, Schicksalspathos, Exklusion |
| 4. Durchsetzung | Pazifismus (#pazifismus) | René Girard (Opferlogik), Carl Schmitt (Freund–Feind) | Gewalt, Opferung der Vielen zur Stabilisierung der Wenigen |
Die Frage ist: WAS TUN?
https://t.co/tQegoTSOkD#Technofeudalism
— dissent.is/███████ (@sms2sms) August 4, 2025
✅ anamnesis
✅ diagnosis
❎ prognosis
❎ therapy
✅ anamnesis, ✅ diagnosis — clear on debt power and the technofeudal shift.
❌ prognosis, ❌ therapy — remain first-order: better rules for the same game, not a new game with commons-based coordination and non-coercive enforcement.
prognosis ❌
- Stays inside the state–market dialectic. Forecasts consolidation of platforms, but the imagined future is still “better capitalism by public means,” not a cultural shift of coordination.
- No agent of transition. Who moves resources out of cloud-rents into commons? Parties, states, unions? The mechanism is unspecified.
- First-order change (Watzlawick). Predicts parameter tweaks (regulation, public cloud) rather than second-order shifts in property, access, legitimacy, enforcement.
- Underplays everyday communism (Graeber). Prognosis does not model how non-market cooperation scales as an alternative attractor.
- Tech horizon is incomplete. AI is centered; hard discontinuities (e.g., quantum, crypto-economies, protocol politics) are not integrated into the trajectory.
therapy ❌
- Remedies reproduce the problem. “Democratise technology,” “public cloud,” “digital dividend” keep platform logic, surveillance incentives, and behaviour markets intact.
- Property stays put. No redesign of ownership/use over data, models, and algorithms; rent extraction remains the business model.
- Representation over participation. Leans on electoral/administrative fixes; lacks designs for forkability, contributory ledgers, local autonomy, and exit rights.
- Misses power in four dimensions (our Matrix):
- Order: keeps central orchestration.
- Access: keeps gates, not commons.
- Legitimacy: keeps expert/state validation, not inclusive processes.
- Enforcement: keeps coercive/administrative means, not non-violent, self-binding rules.
- No pathway from critique to practice. Little about how to seed resilient, bottom-up infrastructures where debt power cannot bite (care, food, housing, networks).