Technofeudalism

HTTP – the protocol by which we visit websites. We pay not one penny to use these protocols, nor do we suffer advertisements as the indirect price for using them. Like Britain’s common lands before the enclosures, they remain free for anyone to use; not unlike Wikipedia, one of the few surviving examples of a commons-based service that takes huge quantities of work to produce and maintain, but which no owner ‘monetises’.

When the US Pentagon chose to make GPS available to everyone, to turn it over to the digital commons, they granted each of us the right to know our location in real time. For free. No questions asked. It was a political decision to do so.

‘If it ain’t a capitalist market, what in the sweet Lord’s name are we stepping into when we enter amazon.com?’ a student at the University of Texas asked me a few years ago. ‘A type of digital fief,’ I replied instinctively. ‘A post-capitalist one, whose historical roots remain in feudal Europe but whose integrity is maintained today by a futuristic, dystopian type of cloud-based capital.’ Since then, I have come to believe that it was a reasonably accurate answer to a hard question.

Arithmetically, there is no difference: both rent and profit amount to money left over once costs are paid for. The difference is subtler, qualitative, almost abstract: profit is vulnerable to market competition, rent is not. The reason is their different origins. Rent flows from privileged access to things in fixed supply, like fertile soil or land containing fossil fuels; you cannot produce more of these resources, however much money you might invest in them. Profit, in contrast, flows into the pockets of entrepreneurial people who have invested in things that would not have otherwise existed – things like Edison’s light bulb or Jobs’s iPhone. It is this fact – that these commodities were invented and created and so can be invented and created again but better by someone else – that renders profit vulnerable to competition.