Techno-feudalism

Durand argues that Big Tech - Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft - recreates the political and economic logic of feudal times. The big platforms and digital environments have become like "medieval" fortresses that colonise cyberspace and prey on it: they gain all the land of their business and acquire the competition and complementary companies. In feudalism, the peasant serf was attached to the land: he did not belong to the feudal lord, but to the land, which belonged to that lord. When we use Facebook or Google, we become inseparable from the data we generate on the digital earth. From these traces, a relationship of extreme dependence is created, from which it is difficult to escape because they make our lives easier.

– Digital Capitalism online course