IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2020 - 8

Feudalism was the dominant
socio-political system in medieval
Europe, in which the aristocracy
held lands granted by a Monarch in
exchange for the provision of military service (funding or soldiery).
The peasantr y were obliged to
exist on an aristocrat's land, provide labor, and to cede ownership

In the aftermath of COVID-19,
weak governance could allow
BigTech to hoover up assets
and infrastructure.
of the production of that labor (and
themselves). In return they received
notional protection from roving banditry. By analogy, we could call techofeudalism a socio-political economic
system in which a Big Tech company
holds sway over a particular domain
of enterprise - search, ecommerce,
transportation, etc. - as granted by
an elected government, in exchange
for political and financial support,
and post-parliamentary career support. The rest of us, the info-peasantry, are obliged to exist within the
asymmetric terms and conditions of
the service: we provide the data in
return for the service, but the aggregator (the platform owner) is the primary beneficiary. A particular risk for
the info-peasants is the move towards
cashless societies, accelerated by the
specious post-COVID-19 argument
that cash is a disease vector, potentially giving centralized control over
what products a person is permitted
to buy with a fiat digital currency.
We have talked before about the
dangers of wealth extraction from
local economies [14], and how ownership of infrastructure matters [15],
if paying next-to-no taxation results

Imperial College London, U.K. Email:
j.pitt@imperial.ac.uk.

in technological innovation, along
with the graduates disappearing
behind corporate firewalls, because
they, rather than the universities, are
the institutions that can afford to do
blue-skies research. It is a salutary
lesson to visit the NASA Space
Center in Cape Canaveral: the monument to human technological
achievement is extraordinary. One learns that those
Saturn V rockets were big,
and those Apollo command
modules were tiny; one also
learns about how many spinoffs there were from the
space program that made a
substantial contribution to
improving everyday life and
well-being.
However, a trip round
the site is punctuated by signs for
the various private space companies, whose research can afford to
be privately funded because they do
not pay the tax that they should. This
view comes with the accompanying
realization that all of the spin-offs
from these private space programs,
built on a public infrastructure by
publicly-educated individuals, are
also going to be privately owned:
truly this is techno-feudalism.
In the aftermath of the plagues
in medieval Europe, the surviving
aristocracy invested much effort
in sweeping up the estates of their
deceased neighbors, creating "Big
Estates'' that were too strong for
central regulation and "too big to
fail.'' In the aftermath of COVID-19,
the same could happen with BigTech hoovering up assets, companies, and infrastructure. We need
stronger governance and professional organizations like the IEEE to
resist the rise of an analogous transnational techno-feudalism.

References

[1] G. Adams, The Iron Triangle: The Politics of Defense Contracting. New York, NY:
Council on Economic Priorities, 1981.
[2] O. Henry, Cabbages and Kings. New
York, NY: Doubleday, 1904.
[3] M. Lofgren, "The revolt of the rich," Amer.
Conservative, Aug. 27, 2012; http://www
.theamericanconservative.com/articles/
revolt-of-the-rich/.
[4] R. Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies
of Modern Democracy. Collier, 1962 [1911].
[5] P. Bolton, "Student Loan Statistics,"
Briefing paper no. 1079, House of Commons
Library, U.K., 2019; https://researchbriefings
.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01079/
SN01079.pdf.
[6] J. Pitt, "From trust and loyalty to lock-in
and digital dependence," IEEE Technology
and Society Mag., vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 5-8, 2020.
[7] S. Zuboff, "Big other: Surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information
civilization," J. Information Technology,
vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 75-89, 2015.
[8] J. Robbins, "If technology is a parasite
masquerading as a symbiont - Are we the
host?," IEEE Technology & Society Mag.,
vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 24-33, 2019.
[9] N. Eyal, Hooked: A Guide to Building
Habit-Forming Products. Portfolio/Penguin, 2014.
[10] C. Cadwalladr, "Electoral law has been
broken - This is a fight for the soul of
our democracy," The Observer, July 2018;
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/
2018/jul/08/electoral-law-broken-fight-for
-soul-of- democracy.
[11] BBC, "Facebook: Nick Clegg says 'no
evidence' of Russian interference in Brexit
vote," BBC News, Jun. 24, 2019; https://
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48740231.
[12] D. Sabbagh, "UK ministers will no longer claim 'no successful examples' of
Russian interference," The Observer, Mar.
15, 2020; https://www.theguardian.com/
technology/2020/mar/15/uk-ministers-will
-no-longer-claim-no-successful-examples-of
-russian-interference.
[13] K. Sheldon, "Do Financial Conflicts of
Interest Bias Research? An Inquiry into
the 'Funding Effect' Hypothesis," Science,
Technology & Human Values, vol. 38, no.
4, pp. 566-587, 2013.
[14] J. Pitt, J. Clippinger, and C. Sorensen,
"Values axial currencies and computational axiology: Digital currencies can do
more than buy stuff", IEEE Technology
and Society Mag., vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 56-63,
2018.
[15] J. Pitt, "From trust and loyalty to lock-in
and digital dependence," IEEE Technology
and Society Mag., vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 5-8,
2020.

Author Information
Jeremy Pitt is Professor of Intelligent
and Self-Organizing Systems at
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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SEPTEMBER 2020

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/ https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01079/SN01079.pdf https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01079/SN01079.pdf https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01079/SN01079.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/08/electoral-law-broken-fight-for-soul-of-democracy https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/08/electoral-law-broken-fight-for-soul-of-democracy https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/08/electoral-law-broken-fight-for-soul-of-democracy https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48740231 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48740231 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/15/uk-ministers-will-no-longer-claim-no-successful-examples-of-russian-interference https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/15/uk-ministers-will-no-longer-claim-no-successful-examples-of-russian-interference https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/15/uk-ministers-will-no-longer-claim-no-successful-examples-of-russian-interference https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/15/uk-ministers-will-no-longer-claim-no-successful-examples-of-russian-interference

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2020

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