Platform Feudalism

The Illusion of Ownership

That music library you've built over a decade? Not yours. Those ebooks filling your digital shelves? Borrowed. The photos you've uploaded, the documents you've stored, the social connections you've cultivated: all of it exists at the pleasure of entities who can revoke access whenever they please.

This isn't pessimism. It's contract law.

Read the terms of service for any major platform. Buried in the legalese is a simple truth: you own nothing. You license. You rent. You beg permission to access what feels like yours but legally isn't. And that permission can be withdrawn, sometimes with warning, sometimes without, always without meaningful recourse.

Peasants on Digital Land

The medieval peasant understood something modern digital citizens don't: he knew he didn't own the land. He worked the lord's fields, lived in the lord's village, and existed at the lord's sufferance. The arrangement was exploitative, but at least it was honest about the power dynamics involved.

Platform users don't even get that clarity.

The interfaces are designed to create feelings of ownership. "Your" library. "Your" drive. "Your" photos. The possessive language is deliberate; it encourages emotional investment in spaces you don't control. People pour years of their lives into building presences on platforms, never quite grasping that they're decorating rented rooms that can be demolished without notice.

And demolished they are. Regularly.

Accounts get suspended. Services shut down. APIs close. Features disappear. Entire ecosystems evaporate when corporate strategy shifts. The graveyard of dead platforms is vast, and each headstone marks millions of hours of user investment simply... gone.

The Structure of Digital Property

Here's where it gets structural.

In physical space, property rights evolved (imperfectly, violently, but evolved) toward some notion of individual ownership. You can own a house. You can own a car. The state might regulate your use of these things, but it can't simply decide you no longer possess them because a quarterly earnings report looks bad.

Digital space developed differently. The infrastructure is privately owned: the servers, the cables, the data centers. And through that ownership of infrastructure, platforms assert ownership over everything that flows through it. Your data lives on their machines. Therefore, in a very real sense, it's their data.

This isn't a bug in the system. It's the system.

The entire architecture of consumer technology is designed around centralization. Not because centralization is technically necessary (it often isn't) but because centralization concentrates control. And control is where the money is. Control over attention. Control over data. Control over the terms of engagement.

The Eviction Process

When someone loses access to a platform account, what actually happens?

First: confusion. The interface that was always there simply isn't. Years of accumulated content, connections, and context, vanished behind a login screen that no longer accepts your credentials.

Then: the appeals process. If one exists. Usually it involves submitting forms into a void, waiting days or weeks, receiving automated responses that don't address the actual situation. The asymmetry is total. The platform has infinite patience. You have bills to pay, contacts to reach, work to access.

Sometimes access returns. Sometimes it doesn't. The reasons are rarely clear. The platform isn't obligated to explain itself; that's not how the relationship works. You agreed to terms that grant them unilateral authority. Demanding accountability is like demanding it from the weather.

And here's the dark part: people accept this. They rebuild. They start over. They return to the same platforms that just demonstrated their powerlessness because the alternatives feel impossible. Where else would they go? The network effects are real. The lock-in is real. The dependency is real.

The Rent Extraction

Feudal lords extracted value from peasants through labor obligations and rents. Platform lords extract value through data harvesting and attention capture.

Every interaction is logged. Every preference is modeled. Every behavior pattern is analyzed and monetized. Users pay for "free" services not with money but with surveillance, their lives converted into targeting data sold to advertisers.

But it's worse than simple data extraction.

Platforms have discovered they can manipulate the information environment itself. They control what you see. They determine which posts get amplified and which get suppressed. They shape the very reality their users inhabit, optimizing not for truth or user benefit but for engagement metrics that serve advertising revenue.

This is power medieval lords could only dream of. They could control bodies. Platforms control minds, or try to, anyway, and get closer every year as the algorithms improve.

The Pretense of Choice

"If you don't like it, don't use it."

This response to platform criticism misunderstands how infrastructure works. When something becomes essential infrastructure (communication, commerce, professional networking) opting out isn't a meaningful choice. It's self-imposed exile.

Can someone function professionally today without email? Without some form of digital communication? Without access to the platforms where their industry operates? In theory, yes. In practice, the costs of refusal are enormous. And platforms know this. That's why they can treat users with contempt. Where else are they going to go?

The choice isn't "use platforms or don't." The choice is "participate in modern economic and social life or don't." That's not a choice. That's coercion dressed up as consumer preference.

Beyond Individual Solutions

Self-hosting helps. Running your own infrastructure helps. Supporting decentralized alternatives helps. But these are mitigations, not solutions. Most people aren't going to administer their own mail servers. Most people can't afford the time investment required to escape platform dependency.

The problem is structural, so the solutions must be structural too.

Platform feudalism persists because the legal framework allows it. Because property rights in digital spaces remain undefined or actively tilted toward platforms. Because antitrust enforcement has been toothless for decades. Because the political class barely understands the technology, let alone the power dynamics it creates.

Changing this requires treating platforms as what they are: essential infrastructure that shouldn't be under unaccountable private control. Whether that means public ownership, heavy regulation, mandatory interoperability, or something else, the specifics matter less than recognizing the problem.

The Stakes

Digital life isn't separate from life. It's where relationships happen, work happens, politics happens. Whoever controls that space controls an enormous amount of human existence.

Right now, that control belongs to a handful of private entities accountable to nobody but their shareholders. They set the rules. They enforce the rules. They change the rules whenever convenient. And users, billions of them, simply adapt to whatever conditions are imposed.

This is feudalism. Not as metaphor. As description.

The question isn't whether this arrangement is sustainable. Of course it is, for the lords. The question is whether it's acceptable. Whether people will continue surrendering sovereignty over their digital lives to entities that regard them as resources to be mined rather than citizens to be served.

History suggests power doesn't relinquish itself voluntarily. It gets relinquished when enough people decide the arrangement is intolerable and act accordingly. Whether that point arrives, and what happens when it does, remains to be seen.

But the first step is clarity. Understanding what the relationship actually is. Stripping away the friendly interfaces and the familiar possessive pronouns to see the power structure underneath.

You don't own your digital life.

And until that changes, you're a peasant on someone else's land.