Feudalism 2.0: How Big Tech became the new kings | Opinion

There’s a certain confidence with which Big Tech moves today — a confidence that doesn’t belong to private companies but to sovereign powers. Google decides what the world knows. Meta decides how the world communicates. Amazon decides what the world buys. These are not platforms anymore; they are empires. And like every empire before them, they extract.

We are living in Feudalism 2.0, or techno-feudalism, where the lords are not monarchs in castles but CEOs in boardrooms, and the peasants are not bound to land but to platforms. Our labor isn’t farming wheat — it’s producing data. Every click, scroll, message, search query, location ping, and digital footprint becomes the raw material of a globalized extraction machine.

And like in traditional feudalism, Big Tech operates beyond nation-states. Governments regulate within territories; platforms operate across them. Your citizenship matters less to your digital life than your internet connection.

But here is the uncomfortable truth: we built this system. We traded control for convenience. We traded agency for speed. We traded digital autonomy for the illusion of free services. Now we face a question older than the nation-state itself: who really rules? And if the answer is “platforms,” then we need a revolution. Not political. Technological.

The new feudal order

In medieval Europe, peasants had no legal right to the fruits of their labor. Anything grown on the land ultimately belonged to the lord. Feudalism wasn’t just an economic model; it was an ideology of dependency.

Big Tech has recreated this model with terrifying elegance. We don’t own our data; we merely produce it. We don’t control our digital identities; we rent access to them. We don’t consent to extraction; we’re nudged into it with dark patterns and default settings.

The modern argument is that “if you don’t like it, use something else.” But this is a false choice. Feudal peasants could technically leave the manor, too — they just had nowhere else to go. Today, try living meaningfully without search engines, email, communication platforms, or cloud services. Try applying for a job, accessing health records, or even navigating a city. Opting out is practically impossible.

This is not user retention. This is dependency engineering. And when a technology becomes essential to existing in society, it crosses into the territory once reserved for sovereign power.

The most striking part of Feudalism 2.0 is its geopolitical structure. Big Tech does not ask for permission; governments ask for meetings. Big Tech does not negotiate; it sets terms of service. Big Tech does not obey borders; it redraws them in code.

Google Maps has redefined international borders, showing different boundaries depending on the viewer’s location. Meta decides which political parties get visibility and which narratives are amplified or suppressed. Amazon’s logistics network operates on a scale larger than many countries’ GDPs.

We didn’t vote for any of them. We didn’t elect them. But they govern us every day. This is post-national power: unregulated, unaccountable, and structurally incentivized to continue extracting at scale. And our digital identities — made of preferences, behaviors, biometrics, and histories — are the mines.

The web3 promise: A new Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution broke the old feudal order by giving ordinary people new tools, new rights, and new leverage. Web3, if built correctly, could do the same. Not as a buzzword. Not as a speculative casino. But as Industrial Revolution 2.0 — a fundamental restructuring of power.

Decentralized technologies can redistribute control in the same way industrial machinery redistributed labor:

• Ownership: Users control their data via self-custody.
• Identity: You are not a profile in a database but a sovereign digital entity.
• Interoperability: You can migrate across apps without losing history or reputation.
• Transparency: Algorithms operate in the open, not in black boxes.
• Incentives: Platforms reward participation instead of extracting from it.
  

The point is not to destroy technology but to rebuild its power structure. Because if the future must be digital — and it will be — then the question becomes: Digital for whom? The Kings of Feudalism 2.0? Or the people who actually generate the value?

Retail adoption: Reclaiming everyday agency

For ordinary users, the revolution begins with something deceptively simple: ownership of digital identity.

Today, losing access to your email or social media account is more catastrophic than losing your house keys. This isn’t just bad UX. It’s a sign that we don’t own anything about our digital lives. Web3 enables identity wallets, verifiable credentials, ownership-based logins, and user-controlled data vaults. Retail adoption isn’t about NFTs or DeFi; it’s about ordinary people reclaiming rights they never realized they lost.

A digital world where your data follows you, not the platform. Where you choose who sees what. Where your participation generates value for you, not for a monopoly that sells you back your own habits in the form of ads.

Institutional adoption: Breaking the monopolies

Institutions face the same problem, but on a larger scale. They are dependent on Big Tech infrastructure: cloud storage, AI models, ad networks, and data analytics. This dependency concentrates national-level power inside a handful of corporations that no single country can meaningfully regulate.

Web3 infrastructure — decentralized storage, open AI models, programmable networks — offers institutions a way out. Not because it is cheaper or trendier, but because it is sovereign. It shifts power away from corporate monarchies and toward open ecosystems. This is why some governments, central banks, and enterprises are experimenting with blockchain: not out of curiosity, but out of fear.

The fear of being vassals in someone else’s digital empire.

The revolution will be decentralized — or it won’t happen

Every revolution begins before people recognize it as such. Web3’s revolution is not about coins or speculation. It is about the political structure of the digital world. Rights. Power. Agency. Ownership. Governance. These are the stakes.

Feudalism 2.0 was built slowly, invisibly, one consent box at a time. Undoing it will take deliberate design, cultural shifts, and technologies that refuse to centralize control.

And that’s the irony of our moment: Web3 must destroy Feudalism 2.0 — not through violence, but through architecture, because the world doesn’t need new kings. It needs protocols. It needs open rails. It needs sovereignty that scales. It needs a revolution where people finally take back what was quietly taken from them: their (digital) autonomy.