Modern oligarchs like Musk, Bezos, Gates, and Zuckerberg are exactly like medieval lords. The top 1% controls all resources, and it is almost impossible to buy an apartment today. We own nothing and just pay rent or subscribe to their platforms. These billionaires have total power to fire thousands of workers anytime and buy politicians for their own interest. They say they work for humanity, but it is just fake marketing. For example, they are silent on wars in Palestine and Ukraine. Majority of ordinary people and developers are too naive. They believe these lies and fail to see the real system
it’s capitalism, no more, no less…
Thanks for sharing. I liked this video quite a bit.
I do think some sort of feudalism is approaching, but I don’t think it’ll be quite as described (90% serfs and such).
I believe there is simply too much equality, right now, to the point that a lot of what could happen to lead to such a system won’t happen for fear of immense social repercussions.
The Western world is still mostly democracies. People will vote for extremists in extreme situations, and extremists will act in extreme ways, including causing wars and destruction for a lot of people. Stability and normalcy won’t be attained by techno-feudalism. It will be a constant fight. The middle-class is already too large to allow large swaths of itself to be reduced to serfs.
That being said, I don’t necessarily doubt that it will continue to shrink, slowly, and that the lower class will continue to be squeezed for all they’re worth.
Related: what “subscriptions” (recurring payments) do you pay for?
I pay rent (which includes water, internet, and light bills), a public transport pass (not strictly necessary, but it makes it more affordable), university tuition (PhD), and food. My parents actually cover my cheap phone plan (it’s like 5€/month, I think). They also cover half my rent, because they have the money and insisted on it. They’re both public school teachers, by the way, in case reading this you’re thinking that I’m some sort of lordling.
The US is fixing their elections as we speak, and supporting far right groups to take the west one by one, and will help them fix elections, also with russia’s help. Tech gives them new tools to control the populations. Our democracies are already terminally ill.
It’s a lot worse than you seem to think.
The US is fixing their elections? I feel I would’ve heard of this…
Tech gives them new tools to control the populations.
Well, this is certainly a concern, at least.
You aren’t aware the Republicans are trying to fix elections? Jesus Christ.
I’m not American, and frankly American politics aren’t exactly what I’m most worried about or interested in at any given time… Sorry for my ignorance.
All I’ve heard about is that there was some gerrymandering thing going on with trying to make new red districts, namely in Texas, while the Democrats retaliated by trying to make some new blue districts, namely in California. Surely that’s not what you mean? Seems to be that they’re trying to stack the horrendous system Americans have in their favour, but I wouldn’t call that rigging elections. Do you maybe mean the thing with voter registration and needing an ID to vote?
If there is some rigging going on, I would actually be interested to know LOL I remember hearing about the voting machines being rigged, but I thought that was a Republican conspiracy.
It’s a long story. Republicans stole the 2000 election. Democrats let them fillibuster the recount and scotus let Republicans have it. After that they started vote fraud campaigns with the intention of fixing elections. Mostly voter suppression, removing voters from rolls, ways to remove them from certain districts that are blue, etc.
The president seized control of the party in 2016, made it very explicit in 2020, trying to steal it in every way, something the party had been on for 20 years but he rushed it forward with less subtlety. 7 ways from sunday. Voter suppression, trying to throw out votes, signature matching, trying to stop the counts when they are ahead. Encouraging their partisans to send death threats to voting officials and trying to bully them into not doing their jobs honestly.
Too much to list, but then of course just tried to take the election anyway on fraud allegations, even as they were the ones cheating, as always accusing their victims of being the aggressor. So they tried the alternate slates of electors to get congress to vote in the loser anyway. Then when that didn’t work attempted to take Congress hostage with an angry mob while engineering security services to stand down, and the president and his secret service detail to show up and make congress sign over the republic at the head of an angry mob.
In the 3 month coup attempt to overturn the election, and afterwards, they got the hard drives and inner workings of all the voting systems, via mike lindell’s website and organization. They got the software and hard drives and inner workings of all the voting machines, all the battleground states at least, MI, GA, AZ, PA, WI to name a few.
Bannon spearheaded a precinct level takeover of partizans in on the steal, they got precinct level guys in every county, and the party otherwise purged everyone in the party, and without it they could, that opposed stealing the election. And the aformentioned death threats, hundreds and hundreds that biden did nothing about, literally a handful of light prosecutions when hundreds looked at just by reuters investigations crossed the legal line.
Now they control the feds, most of the states, they’ve their hacks in a majority of counties, and have large democratic counties beset by hostile state governments in red states. Many such red states passed laws in 2021 further restricting voting, but also allowing state legislatures, that are gerrymandered to hell where they control them, of voting electors for the candidate that lost the popular vote. The popular vote was designated around the turn of the 20th century or thereabouts to determine electors it used to be awarded by state lawmakers. Many took that back, including GA, AZ, I think WI, Texas tried and failed to include that part in their voter suppression bill, but many other states followed suit.
We could go on, but it’s already incredibly fucked, and will become moreso, and the democrats are as weak and unpopular as ever, unwilling to mount the type of popular reform, and build and run a political machine, that could take it from them, even as their succession fight might be the last chance before the fix is in too tight.
I hope my assumptions are wrong. but I notice that compare to my family,my life quality decreased
Well, I don’t know your life, so I can’t really say… If that is the case, however, that’s truly a shame.
In my case, it’s hard to say. At my age, my parents were living extremely frugally, though, admittedly, so am I. I have some better things lined up, though, working on my education and such… I hope to surpass my parents in terms of life quality, eventually.
It’s good that people more broadly, especially in the imperial core, are starting to question the “truths” about the world and its ways they are taught. But I’m annoyed with the general usage of these terms like “techno-feudalism”, when capitalism and especially imperialism would work better, wouldn’t it? Everything must serve the capital, after all, and the internet in general - being probably the most significant invention in human history after using fire or something and having been developed to this point and made available globally in an astoundingly short amount of time - is poised perfectly for everyone to witness its decline under imperialism. So using “techno-feudalism” for this is understandable, but in the end it’s just the most recent and visible symptom of capitalism in general.
I disagree.
The American government created a lot of various incentives to encourage ownership to a greater percentage of citizens compared to other countries at the time, including giving out free land, building infrastructure to develop new land, and creating programs which put people into homes that they owned.
That government support in young adults to establish themselves economically has significantly shrunk over the past generation. We’ve also seen an increasingly divergent economy where the split between haves and have nots have only gotten bigger.
A working class American in 1950 could claim that they were better off economically than the rest of the world and be right. That claim is no longer valid.
