Feudal lords owned the land; digital lords own the road you have to take to reach anyone at all.
A business selling through an app store, a creator publishing through an algorithmic feed, a company running its servers on someone else’s cloud: none of these are trading in an open market. Each is operating inside infrastructure it does not own and cannot leave without losing its customers, its audience, or its uptime. The owner of that infrastructure can change the fee, the ranking rules, or the terms of access at any time, and the tenant has no comparable alternative to move to. The relationship looks like a market from the outside, listings, fees, competition, but it functions more like a lease.
Digital feudalism is the name given to that structure: dependence on infrastructure owned by someone else, with rent extracted for continued access rather than value earned through open exchange. The strongest version of this argument comes from economist Yanis Varoufakis, whose 2023 book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism argues that “cloud capital” (the servers, algorithms, and platforms that mediate nearly all digital activity) has replaced traditional capital as the dominant economic asset. Ownership of cloud capital confers “cloud rent”: a toll charged simply for access, collected by what Varoufakis calls “cloudalists,” regardless of whether the platform produces anything itself. His central claim is structural, that rent has displaced profit as capitalism’s organizing mechanism, which is why he argues the system has stopped being capitalism at all and become something closer to feudalism, where extraction flows from ownership of access rather than from competing to sell a better product.
This is a different claim from Financial Feudalism, which describes a tiered hierarchy of credit running from central banks down through commercial banks to households. Digital feudalism has no credit tiers. Its hierarchy runs through infrastructure dependency: app stores, cloud compute, ad networks, and algorithmic distribution that users, creators, and small businesses cannot route around once their livelihood depends on them. The two metaphors share a feudal vocabulary and a rent-versus-profit logic, but they describe separate extraction mechanisms operating on separate populations.
Honesty about the term itself matters here too. Varoufakis popularized “technofeudalism” specifically; French theorist Cédric Durand made a related argument earlier, in Technoféodalisme: Critique de l’économie numérique (2020), and the phrase “digital feudalism” circulates more as a popular variant of that same argument than as a term either author uses. A related, more mechanism-level account comes from writer Cory Doctorow, whose concept of “enshittification” describes how platforms lock users and businesses in first and extract value from them second, the operational sequence that produces the rent Varoufakis describes at the level of theory.
Source: Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2023); Cédric Durand, Technoféodalisme: Critique de l’économie numérique (La Fabrique, 2020); Cory Doctorow, writing on “enshittification,” pluralistic.net.