Digital Feudalism or Digital Despotism: Revisiting the Materialist Conception of History in the Clouds of Surveillance Capitalism and Generative Artificial Intelligence

• In Event: Precarity, Debt, and Control in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

This critical analysis reexamines the notion of "digital feudalism" as it has been explicated by various thinkers since at least the 1990s as a neo-medieval economy, and society, like early modern Europe. It wonders if today's "surveillance capitalism" is aptly characterized by returning to the notions of feudal modes of production? Instead it explores the utility of exploring how a more enveloping mode of production is at the core of the fragmenting internet as more national competitive and defensive computing/network infrastructures seem comparable to a larger emergent "digital despotism," somewhat parallel to "hydraulic societies" beyond Europe. Now linked to spheres of influence anchored by the US and the PRC, as the more open Internet of the 1990s seems to be crumbling to adapt to the material demands of creating data environments rooted in generative artificial intelligence in its cognitive and physical forms, what might this line of comparative-historical analysis uncover?

Author

• Timothy W. Luke, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University