Feudalism is about the right to violence. Do any of these organizations have private armies? No private armies (I suppose in modern times, also private air forces, tank battalions, nuclear warheads and nuclear triads, drone divisions...), no feudalism. Brutal suppression of underclass folks can be done with or without the state.
Feudalism itself had strong variance in the amount of suppression of the underclass. The albigensian crusade, for example (the anti-cathar crusade) was to suppress the egalitarian anti-clerical sect which had been successfully renegotiating the relation between clerics, nobility and peasants in the favor of the peasants for 100 years by then. That was successful in mostly killing them all. But the dithsmarchen were able to successfully have a de facto peasant republic for 200, 300 years after successfully repelling an invasion in the late 12th century and they got back into the holy roman empire by a negotiated settlement, by dint of being way more armed and harder to invade.
Modern feudalism will be the right to control your access to "required services" needed to be considered a normal member of society.
Ex - who needs to get physically violent with you when locking you out of the banking system, removing your ability to speak in online spaces, and crippling your ability to use network based services is much more effective at disenfranchising you, without the bad publicity of direct violence.
You won't be harmed physically, you'll just be permanently disenfranchised and second class.
The modern structure of society has effectively given government a complete monopoly on force and violence.
So the second a disenfranchised person responds with violence, it's easy to spin it as their fault, treat them as an instigator, and then respond with overwhelming force with police.
Regardless of your opinions on morality, the Luigi Mangione saga is literally this playbook.
And really, it only gets the attention it does because a majority of people literally despise their insurance providers in the US.
It's not about right to violence, it's about all kinds of rights in a pyramid form. Feudalism is about fiefdom, in that context even LG TV spyware is a form of digital feudalism.
Yeppp, I've been seeing this Jacob Coxon [0] guy popping up all over legacy media for the past couple days nonstop...he claims he quit OpenAI and Anthropic because the models are getting 'too smart' and that's dangerous, etc. The typical AI fears mongering drivel, without seemingly any criticism, at all, of the companies he quit supposedly because of these AI fears... and of course the mainstream media appearances prefix the interviews with this guy with 'this is not a marketing stunt'[1]... which, obviously, it is.
Feudalism is about the right to violence. Do any of these organizations have private armies? No private armies (I suppose in modern times, also private air forces, tank battalions, nuclear warheads and nuclear triads, drone divisions...), no feudalism. Brutal suppression of underclass folks can be done with or without the state.
Feudalism itself had strong variance in the amount of suppression of the underclass. The albigensian crusade, for example (the anti-cathar crusade) was to suppress the egalitarian anti-clerical sect which had been successfully renegotiating the relation between clerics, nobility and peasants in the favor of the peasants for 100 years by then. That was successful in mostly killing them all. But the dithsmarchen were able to successfully have a de facto peasant republic for 200, 300 years after successfully repelling an invasion in the late 12th century and they got back into the holy roman empire by a negotiated settlement, by dint of being way more armed and harder to invade.
History rarely repeats, but often rhymes.
Modern feudalism will be the right to control your access to "required services" needed to be considered a normal member of society.
Ex - who needs to get physically violent with you when locking you out of the banking system, removing your ability to speak in online spaces, and crippling your ability to use network based services is much more effective at disenfranchising you, without the bad publicity of direct violence.
You won't be harmed physically, you'll just be permanently disenfranchised and second class.
But how far can that really be pushed before the disenfranchised start the violence? At some point somebody is going to resort to physical force.
I think they'll push it pretty far.
The modern structure of society has effectively given government a complete monopoly on force and violence.
So the second a disenfranchised person responds with violence, it's easy to spin it as their fault, treat them as an instigator, and then respond with overwhelming force with police.
Regardless of your opinions on morality, the Luigi Mangione saga is literally this playbook.
And really, it only gets the attention it does because a majority of people literally despise their insurance providers in the US.
It's not about right to violence, it's about all kinds of rights in a pyramid form. Feudalism is about fiefdom, in that context even LG TV spyware is a form of digital feudalism.
Yeppp, I've been seeing this Jacob Coxon [0] guy popping up all over legacy media for the past couple days nonstop...he claims he quit OpenAI and Anthropic because the models are getting 'too smart' and that's dangerous, etc. The typical AI fears mongering drivel, without seemingly any criticism, at all, of the companies he quit supposedly because of these AI fears... and of course the mainstream media appearances prefix the interviews with this guy with 'this is not a marketing stunt'[1]... which, obviously, it is.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthropic-researcher-jacob-coxo...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/09/tech/ai-anthropic-safety