technofeudalism and the death of serendipity
I’ve always been a stubborn holdout against food delivery apps.
Maybe it’s to satisfy some primal hunter-gatherer instinct, but I only like foraging for my food at the nearest bodega or grocery store.
My friends certainly look at me like I’m a caveman.
Uber Eats is literally so easy, I hear. You could’ve Instacarted those raspberries.
But I didn’t know I was going to get raspberries. I was going to the store to get cheese, and then happened upon some raspberries that reminded me of my great-grandmother’s backyard garden in northern Serbia. So I bought them.
If I had just ordered my cheese on Instacart, I never would’ve had that lovely moment of nostalgia. Come to think of it, I never would’ve walked past that cool art installation that made me stop and think about a video I was working on. Or heard that Bad Bunny song blasting from a nearby car radio, throwing me back to when I used to live in Puerto Rico.
Rather, while waiting for my Instacart cheese, I probably would’ve had some extra time to scroll through TikTok advertisements. Those beautiful, unscripted synchronicities would’ve been replaced with a transactional commodification of my free time, where I let a platform sell my attention in exchange for enough dopamine hits to make me forget that’s happening. Then my order is dropped off at my front door, generating more data about my consumption patterns for Instacart to sell.
On the other side of the platform, store owners are forced to lay off employees to afford the 30% fee charged by the very food delivery apps that poached their original customers. The TikTok advertisers that targeted me are also contending with higher prices, as the platform doubled the cost for my attention over the past three years.
The economist Yanis Varoufakis calls this “technofeudalism”—a system where tech companies extract “cloud rent” from digital fiefs, including both sellers and users. Rather than functioning as businesses, online platforms are now functioning as marketplaces that can unfairly set the rules so that the house always wins.
Unfortunately, technofeudalism is incompatible with serendipity.
Fun little coincidences, like stumbling across some raspberries or hearing Bad Bunny on the street, fundamentally emerge from the unstructured margins of society, and platforms benefit from structuring as much of our lived experience as possible. The more predictable we are, the more profitable we are, because it’s easier to guess what we’re going to buy and click on.
The same is true of engaging in public life. If I go for a walk, I can’t be monetized as easily, nor will my purchases be intercepted by an algorithmic middleman. Thus, the algorithms want me to stay indoors. But that also means I won’t bump into my friend on the street, or see the cool art installation.
The resulting lack of discovery can entrench us in limited worldviews. I actually hadn’t eaten any raspberries in a few years. I’m not usually big on fruits, but I’m glad I had these. They made me feel like a little kid plucking maline behind my great-grandma’s shed again. Without the unplanned accident, I’d be stuck thinking I didn’t like fruits that much.
I want to be surprised like that. Even if it doesn’t make a difference, there’s still so much magic in the meet-cute, in discovering the perfect book in a bookstore, in seeing my friend on the way to the bodega. It’s that magic that makes life worth it.
The end goal of technofeudalism even removes the little serendipity we’ve built within their planned, structured microcosm of reality. Meme researcher Aidan Walker and I have been going back and forth about how slop capitalism benefits platforms by pushing out creators. But it also kills coincidence, making our feeds more predictable. In his words,
If sixteen out of every twenty reels you see are AI slop… then that’s sixteen chances you’re missing to meet somebody, learn something, ask a question, and practice empathy.
The same profit incentive that would’ve prevented me from eating raspberries is also preventing us from accessing different thoughts and discussions outside of our personalized filter bubbles. Now that we’re consuming pre-programmed artificially generated spectacle, the “cloud rent” on our behavioral patterns is more valuable than ever. Perhaps “slop technofeudalism” is a more fitting term.
There are still bright spots shining through. I’ve come across random Partiful QR codes attached to telephone poles, inviting me to ridiculous events like eating challenges or look-alike contests. Hundreds of people leave fake Google Maps reviews on a ventilation shaft in my neighborhood. Modern “brainrot memes” reintroduce human chaos into our overly organized feeds. No matter how much the platforms try to pin us down, coincidences still find a way to coexist with technology. These are radical acts from other digital cavemen, reclaiming the online commons as our own.
Serendipity might be harder to discover, but it isn’t dead yet—and that means there’s still magic worth fighting for.
If you like my takes on algorithms and communication, please consider pre-ordering my book Algospeak. Ordering early is the best way to support authors!!
(talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.
Kurt Vonnegut
Eliminating serendipity is merely one aspect of technofeudalism.
Primarily you know technofeudalism when you no longer know the person you're doing business with. Who receives your money. Let alone having any physical contact with that person. That's the biggest indicator.
By patronizing local merchants, the regular, simple social exchanges of greetings -- even just acknowledgement of existence -- during Covid lockdowns were some of the highlights of my otherwise-indoor day. It truly is community.
Certainly much more community than sending jobs, profits, and taxes away from your neighborhood to an out of state profit center run by Amazon. I will gladly pay extra for that.