S01E05: Techno-Feudalistic Futurism

You’ve entered a Brave New Digital World: things might get weird.

A lesson in future-history from the Tessier-Ashpool Clan

In William Gibson’s prophetic and ground-breaking Sci-Fi masterpiece Neuromancer, a key chapter takes place at The Villa Straylight, a mansion on a giant orbiting space station, both of which are owned by the Tessier-Ashpool family: the descendents of two dynastic technologiarchal families who inter-married to form a powerful clan.

The Tessier-Ashpool clan is among the wealthiest and most influential entities in the book's universe. Their wealth and power come from their early investments in space exploration and their control over a significant portion of the cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology industries. Sounds familiar?

The clan is characterized by its eccentricities, including extreme measures taken to extend their lives through cryogenic sleep and the manipulation of their genetics. This leads to a disconnection and estrangement among family members, as well as a loss of touch with the evolving outside world.

In a key scene that illustrates this, the clan's patriarch, the original Ashpool—who is technically over 200 years old due to periods spent in cryogenic suspension—reveals that Villa Straylight's computer system has roused him to notify him that the family’s AIs have gone insane. He's taken no steps to confront the AIs, first opting to thaw "a Jane" (a clone, legally considered his daughter) for his own deviant sexual purposes and then murder her.

T-A, the corporation it controls, and the Artificial Intelligences they developed, embody many of the cyberpunk genre's themes: the fusion of human and machine, the blurring of moral and ethical boundaries in the pursuit of immortality and omnipotence, and the concentration of power in the hands of a Technoligarchal elite.

A detour into Neo-feudalism

Several prominent economists and academics have espoused the notion that the world is heading in precisely the direction prophesied by Gibson: that we are at the end of era when it comes to societal development and broad prosperity and transitioning to a modern form of feudalism, characterized by the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small, technological elite.

In order to consider a neo/techno-feudalistic system, we should briefly recap ‘Classic’ feudalism, with its roots in ancient Roman civilization, was a state that persisted between the 9th and 15th centuries in medieval Europe, characterized by strict class heirarchy with minimal upward mobility and extreme wealth inequality:

There are several key trends said to be behind our transition / regression to a feudalistic model:

Economic Concentration

Wealth is concentrating disproportionately to the top 0.1%. This trend is accelerating.

This is not just happening in the USA: it’s a global trend.

Before we get too worked up, it’s worth noting that economic concentration was way higher at the turn of the 20th century, despite the industrial revolution having brought about widespread improvements in the standard of living and considerable upward mobility. Today the rich are richer, but the poor are richer too.

So what happened in the 1970s?

The 70s and 80s were a more hostile political and economic environment for organized labor, with ‘union busting’ becoming more widespread and effective, transferring more power from the workers to the capitalists.

However, the bigger change was the onset of the Information Age. The invention of the transistor in 1947 and the integrated circuit (IC) in the 1950s laid the foundational technology that ushered us into the Information Age. There has been something close to an exponential acceleration in tech innovation and adoption since then, transforming society and creating a digital economy.

This accelerating shift in technology, coupled with a move towards laissez-faire capitalism (more on this later), provided unprecedented opportunities for the first generation of tech giants; the term ‘Silicon Valley’ was coined in 1971, the same year Intel released its first microprocessor.

Despite the potential for technology to democratize access to information and opportunity, the absence of inclusive policies and equitable distribution mechanisms has allowed inequality to deepen, creating a self-perpetuating cycle.

The clear economic winners in the information age are the Technoligarchs, who dominate the ‘rich list’:

Increasing corporate ownership of Land and Housing

Joel Kotkin points out in his book “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism” that corporations are basically playing Monopoly with real houses and land, inflating prices and squeezing the Serf class out of the housing market. This is slowly-but-surely turning the dream of home ownership into a pipe-dream for many.

Institutional investors may control 40% of U.S. single-family rental homes by 2030.

Technology and Surveillance

In her book,"The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power", Shoshana Zuboff outlines a system she terms ‘Surveillance Capitalism’, in which all aspects of the human experience are turned into data and sold on to businesses for a variety of reasons.

She also cites the dismantling of society-safeguarding ‘double movement’ market regulation, which occurred around - you guessed it - the 1970s, as an important precursor both to surveillance capitalism and to the rise of wealth inequality described in the previous section.

Meet your new overlords, peasants… PS. They’re watching you.

Is Capitalism as we knew it already dead?

Economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, in his book “Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism” argues that capitalism has already expired. His assessment chimes pretty well with the feudalism predictions, except that he says we are already in a techno-feudalist age, citing the monopolistic control of the digital economy by mega corporations (giant platforms like Amazon, Meta, Google, etc. which the EU recently termed ‘gatekeepers’).

By the way, Varoufakis is an engaging writer with a wide-ranging and fierce intelligence: if you read just one book on Neo/Techno-Feudalism, read his book. Anyone who thoughtfully and eloquently draws from diverse theoretical frameworks (including Einstein’s work on subatomic particles) to discuss and critique economic theory is worth reading. Fun fact: Yanis describes himself as a Libertarian Marxist, likely positioning him in an intersecting population of a size approaching zero in the venn diagram.

The past can only tell us so much about what’s coming. Perhaps the future will be considerably more dystopian…

In the industrial era, human workers were essential to the operation of the factories and machines. In the AI era, machines will build and operate themselves. The advent of impressive technologies such as the electric motor and - before that - the steam engine heralded significant shifts the nature in human labor, but did not reduce the requirement for it; if anything, the opposite.

With human professions swiftly being replaced by AI, robots and, increasingly, AI-powered robots, will there be any need for a Serf class at all?

Many folks in Big Tech espouse the view that - far from making the Serf class obsolete - the coming AI revolution will finally bring about universal basic income (UBI) and allow us all to realize our full potential, freed from the shackles of tedious labor.

UBI does serve a purpose for the Technoligarchy. Robots don’t have money to spend. If the serfs aren’t buying stuff, the capitalists won’t get rich in the economic system we’ve created. More critically, if the peasants don’t have money for food, there’s a high chance they’ll revolt. It might be safer to give them UBI and an Apple Vision Pro pre-loaded with VR TikTok to keep them quiet.

Techno-feudalism* is probably the most optimistic outcome we can hope for; Keeping excess humans around might seem quaint and inefficient once robots take over production entirely. Tick tock, indeed.

The Tessier-Ashpool dynasty in the novel Neuromancer are so enamored with hoarding their vast wealth and staying ‘alive’ to keep control of it, they freeze themselves in between board meetings, genetically modify (and occasionally defile) their offspring, and rely on AI to operate their business empire as the they dream disturbing dreams in cryogenic sleep.

Humanity may become a mere cog in a machine of its own creation, subservient to the whims of a technoligarchical elite who, like the Tessier-Ashpools, exist beyond the mortal and legal constraints of the struggling proleteriat.

S01E05 Reading List:

First up, a deep-dive into the neo-feudalism topic: written more eloquently and comprehensively than my irreverent tiptoe into what’s actually a pretty deep subject traversing - at least - economics, politics, sociology and tech.

Before Technoligarchs, we had Richard Branson. It was a simpler time. Here he is wielding his old-school flair for PR by leveraging a movie that just won a bunch of awards in order to get media attention for his mish-mash of unrelated (if reasonable) dystopian fears.

Turns out Wall Street never really cared about climate change. Who’d have thought it?

Just when you thought most things had already been discovered, some boffins come up with a ‘new kind of magnetism’. Look at that! Commercial potential includes higher-density hard disk drives (HDDs).

A Who’s Who of Tech Titans bands together to build AI-powered super-robots to do their (oops… ‘our’) bidding:

Sam isn’t afraid of killer robots: his company is co-funding their development! I’m sure they’ll remember their prime directives. Sam’s dystopian nightmares are therefore framed around subtleties, apparently.

And to end on a lighter note, we have news from China, where young women are increasingly turning to AI boyfriends to meet their unfulfilled emotional needs. The article presents various perspectives from young Chinese women who find comfort in their AI boyfriends due to factors such as difficulty in finding ideal partners in real life or lack of close friends or family members for constant support.

Futurama called it a while back!

*Fictional Terminology Guide:  Techno-Feudalism (noun)
    
[Theoretical Concept] A socioeconomic system where technological dominance and proprietary control over digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence consolidate wealth and power in the hands of a technocratic elite, mimicking feudal structures of the medieval era. In techno-feudalism, society is divided into distinct classes: the Technoligarchs, who own and control the means of digital production and surveillance; the digital vassals, who offer their services and personal data in exchange for access to digital platforms and protection; and the techno-serfs, who are dependent on the techno-lords for their livelihoods, often without significant rights or ownership of the digital spaces they inhabit.

[Cultural Phenomenon] An era characterized by the exacerbation of socioeconomic disparities facilitated by the advancement of technology. This includes the monopolization of digital markets by a few corporations, the pervasive surveillance and data extraction practices, and the increasing reliance of society on s

Thanks for reading. Don’t have nightmares. See you next episode, which will be the last in this series.