Techno-Feudalism?

When the image becomes world, it shares the same infrastructure as the dominant actors, and its functioning, which pertains at once to the support and to the signal, echoes the mode of existence of power and the modalities of its exercise. These powers operate through a modulation of flows – economic, but also discursive and affective – which falls within the framework of the Deleuzian societies of control¹, certainly, with the small difference that these modulations do not replace, but are rather superimposed on, the molds of human behavior and of the physical expression of the human body, which are indebted to the Foucauldian disciplinary societies.

Within this framework, permanent disinformation campaigns conceal the degradation of the environment and blur the mechanisms of a system that accentuates inequalities as never before, while modulated algorithmic flows deepen social fractures² that spill over from cyberspace into the immediate physicality of the world. These fluidic modulations do not prevent the expression of a technology that, as it unfolds, fosters the physical isolation of individuals³, at the same time as surveillance networks with asymmetrical visibility are being implemented, in which the power that watches remains hidden, in a perfectly “panopticizing” dynamic.

The attention paid to a digital image that has become an image-world unveils contemporary power in its exercise, according to modalities that have not changed, but that have been broadened quantitatively and qualitatively, to the point where certain contemporary thinkers envisage the proximity of a major mutation that would already be under way, which would see an exhausted capitalism give way to a form of “techno-feudalism” structured by monopolies of unprecedented power⁴.

1. See in this regard Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers 1972-1990, op. cit., p. 242.↩︎

2. The work of Disnovation.org that we considered makes these mechanisms particularly sensible.↩︎

3. We have seen how Elisabeth Caravella’s Howto (2014) brings this aspect to light.↩︎

4. The vision of the Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis is the most radical in this regard, but the idea of a technologized revival of feudalism seems to be settling into media thought on a global scale. See in this regard: Yanis Varoufakis, Les nouveaux serfs de l’économie. [s. l.] : Les liens qui libèrent, 2024, and in France the reflection of Cédric Durand, in Cédric Durand, Techno-féodalisme: critique de l’économie numérique. Paris : Zones, 2020.↩︎