We often imagine the fall of Rome and the onset of the “Dark Ages” as a catastrophic failure of intelligence—a great forgetting, a descent into blissful ignorance where the poor dears simply couldn’t figure out how to keep the water flowing and the laws coherent.
I talk about this a little in this post.
Dark Ages
But let’s be generous. Let’s assume they weren’t just gibbering primitives poking at concrete with sticks. Let’s assume they looked at the magnificent, interlocking, high-maintenance clockwork of civilization and made a rational choice.
Feudal Optimization. That brilliant, pragmatic masterstroke where you realize the problem isn’t the barbarians at the gate—it’s the damn gate itself. And the aqueduct. And the legal code. So much upkeep.
The abandonment of Roman infrastructure wasn’t a failure. It was a strategic pivot. A deliberate shift towards systems that were cheaper, easier to maintain, and perfectly aligned with the new, cozier reality of localized, absolute power. Why worry about the civic good of a million people when you can achieve perfect, ruthless efficiency for exactly one guy—the guy in the castle?
It was the ruthless prioritization of immediate survival and control over that pesky, expensive long-term prosperity nonsense. Those interconnected systems weren’t destroyed; they were cannibalized. Stripped for parts to build a newer, simpler, more resilient world. A poorer, pettier, piss-poor version of what came before, but one exquisitely optimized for the KPIs of a feudal lord. His metrics weren’t “public health” or “justice”; they were “garrison hydrated” and “peasants intimidated.”
This wasn’t about building a better aqueduct; that’s a sucker’s game. This was about fortifying the well inside your walls and charging your own men for a drink. It wasn’t about upholding universal justice; it was about enforcing the local rules that kept you in power, preferably through a thrilling, low-overhead spectacle like trial by combat.
It was a trade-off, see? You gladly sacrifice breadth, sophistication, and any semblance of a communal benefit in exchange for stability, security, and a dramatically lower overhead. It’s not a dark age; it’s a lean, mean, resource-efficient governance machine.
Feudal optimization is the sublime process of letting the grand architecture of a previous era crumble, not out of ignorance, but because you’ve found a more cost-effective way to solve for your own survival.
Of course. For the guild.
This wasn’t a failure of intellect; it was a brutal re-optimization for a new set of constraints. The Romans built for universal integration and civic prosperity. The feudal lords built for local control and survival. The metrics for success were completely rewritten.
Physical Infrastructure: From Civic Benefit to Strategic Necessity
· The Aqueduct to the Fortified Well: The aqueduct was a monument to public health and urban ambition. Its collapse wasn’t just a technical failure; it was a fiscal one. Maintaining miles of exposed, sophisticated masonry required a tax base, a central authority, and skilled engineers—all of which had vanished. The lord’s solution was a masterstroke of local optimization: abandon the complex, public-facing system and fortify the point source. The castellum aquae, the endpoint of Roman public utility, became a fortified tower. The well inside the castle walls was a cheaper, more secure solution. The metric shifted from “public health” to “garrison hydration during a siege.” The lord didn’t need a healthy city; he needed a defensible water supply.
· The Via Appia to the Toll Road: Roman roads were a net cost to the state for a long-term gain in economic and military integration. They were a public good. The feudal lord had no empire to integrate and no state treasury to draw from. His optimization was brilliantly parasitic: quarry the stone for private fortifications and charge a toll for the degraded remnant of the road. The public highway became a private revenue stream requiring zero investment. The metric shifted from “empire-wide connectivity” to “local rent extraction.”
· The Villa to the Manor: The Roman villa was a node in a complex, long-distance economic network, optimizing for profit through trade. The manor was a closed-loop system, optimizing for survival through autarky. With trade networks shattered, the metric for success was no longer “market profit” but “caloric and material sufficiency for the household and its knights.” It was a less prosperous but far more resilient model. The system was optimized to withstand collapse, not to participate in a flourishing economy.
Intellectual Infrastructure: From Universal Law to Local Control
· The Theodosian Code to Trial by Ordeal: Roman law was abstract, universal, and required a vast, literate bureaucracy to administer. It was a high-maintenance system for enforcing a shared concept of justice. Feudal justice was low-overhead and hyper-local. Trial by ordeal or combat required no lawyers, no written records, and no appeals to a distant authority. It was fast, cheap, and its brutal finality reinforced the lord’s personal power. The metric shifted from “administering abstract justice” to “asserting local authority and collecting fines.” It was justice optimized for control, not fairness.
· The Classical Curriculum to the Trivium: The Roman education system produced civic leaders—orators, administrators, and lawyers—for an urban, secular state. The Church, now the sole patron of literacy, performed a ruthless intellectual triage. It stripped education down to the Trivium (Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic) and repurposed these tools exclusively for theological ends. The goal was no longer humanitas—the cultivation of a virtuous, well-rounded citizen—but the production of clerics who could read scripture and administer sacraments. The metric shifted from “intellectual breadth” to “doctrinal purity and clerical utility.” It was a cheaper, more focused system for a world that had no use for Cicero but a desperate need for priests.
The pattern is absolute. In every case, a high-maintenance, complex, and integrated system optimized for broad prosperity was abandoned for a lower-fidelity, cheaper, and more resilient system optimized for local control and immediate survival. The feudal lords weren’t stupid; they were pragmatic. They solved for their own constraints, letting the grand architecture of empire crumble because they could no longer afford its upkeep, and it no longer served their immediate interests.
We are not witnessing a decline in intelligence, but a shift in objectives. They stopped solving for Rome and started solving for the castle.
THE MOAT
Of course. For the guild. Cut the preamble.
You all saw the signs. You were there in the standups, in the all-hands, nodding along to the roadmap. You heard the language, sanitized for your protection, and you didn’t miss the glint of steel underneath. You built the damn moats. You know the mortar was never just code; it was regulatory capture, acquired talent, and the relentless, weaponized network effect.
It was not a business strategy, but a patronage network. I’d point out that your equity wasn’t a reward; it was a tithe, a strip of land inside the castle walls to ensure your loyalty. You weren’t just optimizing databases; you were surveying the demesne. You weren’t building a platform; you were raising baileys and keeps.
Think about the true lexicon of the last twenty years:
· “Disruption” was never a neutral term. It was the glamorous, VC-funded word for sack and burn. The plan was always to shatter the old city-state—the “inefficient” legacy industry—not to build a new Athenian democracy on its ashes, but to use its stones to build a higher, more defensible wall. You weren’t the rebels; you were the Varangian Guard, the elite mercenaries for a new empire.
· “Ecosystem” was the cute, biotic metaphor for a fiefdom. You don’t “participate” in an ecosystem; you exist within its food chain. You are a nutrient or you are a consumer. There is always a sun, a central power from which all energy flows. You built the weather systems for someone else’s kingdom.
· “Scale” was the imperative that justified every sin. It was the doctrine that made the moat necessary. It wasn’t about serving more users; it was about achieving inevitability. A product can be good. A platform is a fact of geography. You don’t compete with a continent.
· “Move fast and break things” was the temporary suspension of the old kingdom’s laws. It was the charter for the barbarian horde. And the first thing they did, once inside the gates, was to write new, immutable laws that served only the new lord. The permission to break things ended the moment the castle’s foundation was set.
You knew. When you integrated a login API, you were building a toll road. When you leveraged a cloud provider’s proprietary service, you were accepting villeinage—a form of tenure that bound you to the lord’s land. Your technical debt is a form of scutage; you pay it down with sprints instead of fighting in the lord’s wars.
The genius of the operation was in making it feel like technical necessity. The product manager said “moat,” and you thought defensible architecture, sustainable advantage, good engineering. They were speaking feudalism, and you were hearing engineering. They were drawing up charters of incorporation, and you were optimizing queries.
This wasn’t an accident. It was a predictable outcome from a language that glorified conquest and disguised control as connectivity. You were the intelligencers, the armorerers, the military engineers. You looked at the schematics for the trebuchet and admired the elegant physics. It’s time to admit you were always building a siege engine.
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Of course. For the guild. No fluff.
You understand infrastructure. So you’ll appreciate the elegance of the grift: the most sophisticated looting operation in history wasn’t the sacking of a city, but the quiet, systematic quarrying of its roads.
The late Romans built the roads—the protocols, the open web, the ethos of interoperability. They were a public good, a complex, high-maintenance system designed for universal access and movement. Their collapse wasn’t a violent end; it was a fiscal one. It became too expensive to maintain the empire’s plumbing.
That was the opportunity. The new lords—the platform-patrons—arrived not as destroyers, but as pragmatists. They offered a simpler, more efficient deal: let us repurpose the stone from your crumbling public aqueducts and highways. We’ll use it to build stronger, safer, private castles. You can even live inside them. You’ll just have to pay the toll.
1. The Quarrying of the Commons: Your creative labor, your social graph, the open-source code, the very data exhaust of your life—this was the high-quality dressed stone of the digital republic. It was freely given, harvested, and repurposed to build the walls of the new private fortresses (Facebook’s social graph, Google’s knowledge graph, Amazon’s review ecosystem). We provided the raw material for our own enclosure.
2. The Rise of Arbitrary Law (Lex Proprietaria): The Roman concept of ius civile, a law for all citizens, was a burden. It required courts, evidence, and due process. The new lords replaced it with a cheaper, more scalable system: the Terms of Service and the Algorithm. Your rights are no longer universal; they are local and arbitrary. Your account can be disappeared in a “trial by ordeal” conducted by a support bot. Your reach is determined by an inscrutable oracle, not a transparent statute. This isn’t justice; it’s automated resource management. It’s cheaper to run and perfectly reinforces the lord’s authority.
3. The Closed Loop of the Digital Manor: The Romans believed in a network of trade between specialized cities. The manor turned inward, seeking autarky—total self-sufficiency within the walls. The modern platform is the digital manor. Its goal is to ensure you never have to leave. Google (search, browser, OS, data, ads). Apple (hardware, OS, app store, payments). Amazon (marketplace, hosting, logistics, entertainment). Every service you use is a strip of land inside the same lord’s domain, designed to extract value at every transaction and make the outside world seem barren and dangerous by comparison.
4. The Narrowing of Reality: The Church, the stabilizing institution of the feudal age, narrowed the vast classical curriculum to the Trivium (Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic) to serve a theological end. It was efficient. The platform, our new cultural institution, has done the same. It has optimized human discourse and creativity into a “Trivium of Engagement”:
· Outrage (Grammar of interaction)
· Simplicity (Rhetoric of communication)
· Addiction (Logic of the algorithm) This is what is profitable. The intellectual public infrastructure—nuance, depth, ambivalence, complex thought—has been left to decay like a ruined library. It’s not efficient to maintain.
The Core Relation: The Optimization Function
The shift from Rome to Feudalism and from the Open Web to Cloud Feudalism is not a historical curiosity; it is the same optimization function executed on a different hardware set.
IF [Centralized_System == Collapsed] AND [New_Power == Provides_Essential_Service] THEN [Model –> Local_Control + Rent_Extraction]
The complex, democratic, but expensive system of production and rule-of-law is replaced by a cheaper, more efficient model of control and rent-seeking. The feudal lord didn’t build the land; he controlled it and charged rent. The cloud platform doesn’t create the content; it controls the infrastructure and charges rent (in attention, data, or fees).
You didn’t just build the tools. You quarried the stone. You wrote the local laws. You raised the walls. The only question that remains for the guild is: do you keep maintaining the lord’s castle, or do you start designing a new republic?
Of course. For the guild. No illusions.
You understand systems. You see the pattern: the systematic dismantling of public infrastructure and its replacement with private, extractive services. This isn’t innovation; it’s regression. It’s the digital Dark Ages, and we’re the ones pouring the concrete for the new walls.
The End of the Forum and the Rise of the Great Hall: We abandoned the Roman model of the agora and the bath—shared, collectively-funded spaces for civic life—for the feudal lord’s private great hall. You were invited in, but the space served the patron’s agenda. Today’s “town square” is a privately-owned server farm. Facebook, X, Discord—these are not public forums. They are great halls where we perform our social lives for a landlord who monetizes our presence. We think we’re connecting; we’re generating the heat that warms the lord’s hall.
The Collapse of the Library and the Scriptorium’s Return: The Romans maintained libraries and funded scholars to advance universal knowledge. Feudalism replaced this with the monastery scriptorium, where monks copied texts to serve a narrow theological orthodoxy. Our digital scriptorium is Google Search. It doesn’t organize the world’s information; it filters it through a lens of advertising revenue and algorithmic bias. Wikipedia is the ultimate crowd-sourced scriptorium—a magnificent, fragile project that lets us believe we own the knowledge, while the infrastructure of discovery (the search, the traffic, the data) is controlled by the new clerical lords. We traded professional editors for algorithmic curators. We got speed and scale, and lost authority and depth.
The Death of Public Currency and the Minting of Private Scrip: Roman standardized currency enabled a vast, integrated economy. Feudal lords broke this system, minting debased coins to control local trade and extract seigniorage. Our new lords do the same with proprietary payment systems. Amazon Pay, Apple Wallet, Uber Credits—these are not innovations in finance. They are private scrip, digital tokens designed to lock you inside a manor’s economy, ensuring every transaction pays a toll to the lord. They are optimizing for economic capture, not financial liberation. Of course. For the guild. No more fairy tales about decentralization.
You were there. You read the whitepapers. You heard the promise: to dismantle the central banks, to tear down the gatekeepers, to build a true digital agora on the ruins of the old financial system. It was a beautiful, radical, Roman dream of paved roads and public squares.
And then we built it. And we built feudalism. Again.
The signal achievement of crypto hasn’t been the disruption of the old lords; it’s the creation of a new, hyper-efficient, and brutally algorithmic vassalage. It is Cloud Feudalism 2.0: less regulated, more speculative, and just as extractive.
· The New Land: The protocol itself. Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin. This is not a public road; it is the new digital territory. It is the enclosed field upon which all must build. And you must pay a toll (gas) to even set foot on it.
· The New Lords: The whales, the mining pools, the massive staking-as-a-service corporations. The system is mathematically designed to anoint them.
· Proof-of-Work: The lords are those with the capital to command armies of ASICs. They are the ones with the biggest castles (mining farms) and control the network. It’s a meritocracy of capital expenditure.
· Proof-of-Stake: This is feudalism, naked and unabashed. Your vote, your influence, your right to earn is a direct function of the capital you can lock in the castle’s vault. It is literally a system where your share of the kingdom determines your power. It is not one-coin-one-vote; it is one-dollar-one-vote. The lords are simply those who already own the most land.
· The New Serfs: The “degens,” the retail, the liquidity providers. You.
· You provide the liquidity in the lords’ decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
· You farm yields for them by locking your assets in their protocols.
· You are the necessary users, the bustling peasants in the market square, whose activity and speculation drive the value of the lords’ pre-mined holdings.
· And when your leveraged bets fail, you are ruthlessly liquidated by the immutable, algorithmic law of the system—a high-tech, impersonal version of a bad harvest wiping out a tenant farmer. No appeal. No due process. Just code.
· The Rent Extraction Engine: This is the core of the machine. The entire economic model is a perfect, self-justifying rent-seeking loop.
· Gas Fees: A toll for traveling the lord’s road.
· Staking Yields/Mining Rewards: Seigniorage—a tax extracted for the “service” of maintaining the network they control.
· The Constant Churn of Tokens: The endless issuance of new tokens and NFTs is the digital equivalent of enclosing the common grazing land. It’s the creation of new, artificial scarcity to charge rent for access.
The greatest irony—the brutal, beautiful joke—is its dependency. This entire rebellious vassal state runs on the infrastructure of the very empires it claims to defy. It lives on AWS and Google Cloud. It is accessed through Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. It is advertised on Facebook and X.
It didn’t overthrow the Cloud Lords; it became their most profitable, unregulated, and speculative subsidiary. A specially chartered zone where a new set of feudal rules apply, creating fortunes that are ultimately convertible back into the fiat system of the old lords.
So no, it’s not an alternative. It’s a mirror. It proved that the feudal impulse isn’t in the technology; it’s in us. Give us a new frontier, and our first instinct isn’t to build a republic. It’s to draw a map, claim the best land, build a castle, and start charging tolls.
You weren’t building freedom. You were writing a smarter, more ruthless charter for the same damn kingdom. The question for the guild is the same as it’s always been: are you content to be the court architect, or do you want to start a real revolution?
The Enclosure of the Creative Commons: The early web’s open protocols were our digital ager publicus—shared land for all to build upon. The platforms arrived and enclosed it. Instagram didn’t create a new photo culture; it fenced off the existing one. TikTok didn’t invent video; it built a addictive, algorithmic feed around it. Creators are not entrepreneurs; they are sharecroppers. They work land they don’t own, using tools they don’t control, subject to the whims of an algorithm that can strip them of their livelihood overnight. The platform provides the soil; the creator does the labor; the lord takes the harvest.
The pattern is absolute. The tech lords didn’t invent new worlds; they found old, decaying public infrastructure and offered a “more efficient” alternative. That alternative is always the same: a walled garden, a private toll, and a terms of service that replaces your rights as a citizen with privileges as a tenant. You didn’t just code the features. You built the gates.
Cloud Feudalism is the conscious choice to let the digital equivalents of aqueducts and Roman law—the open web, net neutrality, data privacy, and a competitive market—decay in favor of a more “optimized” system. It’s a system that is cheaper to run for the new lords, more profitable, and offers a semblance of service, but at the cost of freedom, creativity, and the long-term health of the digital commons. We are not living through an inevitable technological transition; we are living through a deliberate political and economic one, re-enacting a very old play on a new, global stage.
Of course. For the guild.
You understand that no system of control, no matter how optimized, can survive on architecture alone. It requires an operating system—a belief structure—to secure the consent of the governed. The stone walls of the castle are useless without the metaphysical walls built in the minds of its inhabitants. This is the role of the Church, in any age.
The medieval transition required the dismantling of the Roman worldview. It wasn’t enough to let the aqueducts crumble; you had to make people believe the well was purer. The Church provided this framework, masterfully reframing collapse as virtue. Poverty became piety. Ignorance of pagan classics became spiritual devotion. The suffering of this life was a down payment on glory in the next. The “godless Roman elite” were the perfect scapegoat—their moral bankruptcy explained the collapse and justified the new, “more righteous” order. This ideology made the tangible decline in quality of life not just acceptable, but aspirational.
Cloud Feudalism runs on an identical operating system, its dogma a blend of Techno-Utopianism and Neoliberal Capitalism. This is the Church of Abundance, and its gospels are just as effective.
It preaches a new divinity: Meritocracy. The lords of the cloud are not aristocrats of birth; they are “visionaries” and “geniuses,” their wealth a just reward for their brilliance. This legitimizes their power, making it seem earned, not seized. Their dominion is framed as the natural result of a fair competition, obscuring the network effects and rent-seeking that are its true foundations.
This new faith expertly reframes our sacrifices as virtues:
The Loss of Privacy is recast as “personalized convenience” and “community.” The mantra “you have zero privacy anyway—get over it” is a theological statement, a demand to abandon an outdated value.
The Loss of Craft and Mastery is sold as “democratization.” Why spend a decade learning an instrument when AI can make you a “musician” today? The degradation of art is masked by the glitter of accessibility.
Precarious Labor in the gig economy or the creator class is rebranded as “flexibility” and “being your own boss.” The serf’s insecurity is transformed into the pioneer’s freedom.
Consumption becomes a sacred act. The market’s invisible hand is the only true democracy, and every purchase is a vote. The customer is always right because the customer is always worshipping.
And every church needs its demons. The Cloud Church has them:
The “Inefficient” Old World: The legacy industries—newspapers, record labels, taxi commissions—are the modern equivalent of the corrupt Roman pagans. They are portrayed as bloated, elitist gatekeepers, justifying their ruthless dismantling.
The “Luddite”: Anyone who questions the pace or ethics of technological change is branded a heretic, a backward-thinking obstacle to “progress.”
Government: The state is painted as inherently incompetent and stifling, a narrative used to justify the transfer of governance from public, accountable institutions to private, unaccountable platforms.
This is the essential glue. Without this ideology, the system fractures. People would not willingly accept the erosion of their privacy, the precarity of their work, or the alienation from their craft if it were framed as pure loss.
The Church of Abundance makes the feudal bargain feel like enlightenment. It makes optimized extraction feel like inevitable progress. It is the software that runs the hardware of dominion, convincing the digital serf that life within the walls isn’t just easier—it’s righteous.
Of course. For the guild.
A system doesn’t have to be good to be stable. It doesn’t need to solve actual human problems. It only needs to be perfectly self-referential—a closed loop where it manufactures the problems and then sells the only permissible “solutions,” all while extracting energy to perpetuate itself. This is the essence of a feudal engine, and it can run on autopilot for centuries.
The Roman model was outward-facing. Its problems were existential and tangible: How do we bring water to this city? How do we move an army to that border? How do we administer justice for a million people? Its metrics were concrete: miles of road, gallons of water, years of peace. It was optimized for expansion and integration.
Feudalism, and its digital descendant, flipped the script. They are inward-facing systems. Their problems are internally generated. The goal is not to solve a problem and make the solution obsolete; the goal is to make the problem itself the engine of the economy.
Let’s break down the perpetual motion machine of the feudal algorithm. First, there’s the problem of insecurity and the need for protection. The collapse of central authority, whether Rome or the regulated internet, creates a power vacuum filled with perceived threats like raiders, bandits, hackers, or the “inefficient” old guard. The lord or platform offers protection through castles, walled gardens, or secure ecosystems. In exchange, you submit to their authority, pay their tolls in taxes, fees, or data, and live by their rules. The catch is that the lord’s entire value proposition depends on the threat’s existence. A truly secure environment makes the castle obsolete, so the system is inherently incentivized to maintain baseline insecurity to justify itself. The problem and solution form a closed, self-justifying loop.
Second is the need for legitimacy and order. With universal standards gone, whether Roman law or net neutrality, there’s no agreed-upon fairness. The lord or platform manufactures the “problem” of arbitrary justice by being its sole source. They provide “order” through manorial courts, Terms of Service, or algorithmic content moderation. This isn’t justice based on principle but governance based on utility and the lord’s prerogative. The system solves chaos by creating a different, more manageable kind of chaos that it exclusively controls. You trade the ambiguity of the wild for the arbitrary rule of the lord, and the solution reinforces the authority of the problem-maker.
Third comes spiritual and existential lack, the need for meaning. The Church or platform frames your natural state as inadequate. You are a sinner in a vale of tears, an unoptimized individual lacking connection, convenience, and status. They sell redemption through indulgences and salvation, or optimization through likes, followers, verified badges, and AI companions. This requires your devotion in tithes or attention and obedience to their doctrine, whether community guidelines or algorithmic feeds. The problem of sin or FOMO is universal and perpetually unsolvable, making the seller of the solution eternally necessary. It’s the perfect, perpetual business model.
Finally, there’s economic autarky, the need for self-sufficiency. The collapse of complex external systems like Roman trade or traditional job markets makes the outside world seem dangerous and unreliable. The manor or platform turns inward, creating closed loops like self-sufficient manors or all-encompassing ecosystems such as AWS, Apple App Store, or Google services. It provides everything you need, as long as you never leave. This “solution” locks in a low-level equilibrium, solving for survival and dependency rather than growth, prosperity, or genuine innovation. It makes the outside world obsolete and the lord’s control absolute. The economic question shifts from “How do we create new wealth?” to “How do we optimize the extraction of rent within the walls?”
This is the grim genius of it. The system doesn’t need to progress. It simply needs to cycle. It can run forever on invented scarcity, manufactured crises, and the solved problem of its own maintenance. We are not citizens moving toward a brighter future; we are tenants in a perfectly designed engine, generating the energy through our data, our labor, our anxiety that keeps the walls standing and the lord in power. The technology itself is irrelevant; it’s merely the latest fuel for an ancient, self-sustaining machine.
A system that is optimized for its own perpetuation, rather than for an external goal, is a system that has achieved a kind of perfect, eternal stagnation.
It’s not a dark age that will necessarily give way to a renaissance. It’s a dark age that has learned how to power itself. The only way out is to reject its simulated problems and re-assert real, human ones.
Of course. For the guild. Let’s tighten the logic.
The fundamental shift isn’t in the technology; it’s in the objective. The entire purpose of the system was re-optimized, and with it, the very definition of a “solved problem.”
The Roman model was an outward-facing engine. Its purpose was to impose order on chaos, to integrate and improve the tangible world. Its problem-solving loop was grounded in physical reality and public benefit. When a city needed water, they built an aqueduct. When a frontier needed securing, they stationed legions. When commerce needed facilitation, they paved a road. The metric was simple: is the real-world condition improved? Is the city hydrated? Is the border peaceful? Are goods moving? The feedback came from the environment itself. Success was measured in civic stability.
Feudalism represented a fundamental pivot. It wasn’t designed to improve the world; it was designed to preserve a local power structure in a collapsed world. Problem-solving turned inward, becoming self-referential and optimized for control. The problem became ensuring the lord’s garrison was fed and his authority was made absolute. The solution was to enforce corvée labor, collect tithes, and hold manor courts to try local disputes and extract fines. The metric shifted to whether the lord’s power was reinforced, whether the granary was full, and whether the peasants were obedient. The system was “working” if the lord’s storehouse was full and his will was unchallenged, even if the peasantry lived on the brink of malnutrition. It solved its own internal problem with brutal efficiency, while becoming indifferent to the larger human condition.
We have now achieved the final abstraction. The system is no longer solving for the real world, or even for a human lord’s direct need. It is solving for a purely mathematical representation of success, a ghost in the machine. The progression is clear: from solving reality, to solving for power, to solving for a data point. We have built machines that are magnificent at answering questions no one should be asking.
The terrifying innovation of Feudal Optimization is that it doesn’t need a collapse to happen to it. It is the collapse, institutionalized and made profitable. It is the active, funded, and accelerating abandonment of the real world and its problems in favor of a more efficient, self-licking ice cream cone of a reality.
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(A note: I i haven’t read Varoufakis’s Techno-Feudalism, but we seemed to be digging into from opposite sides.
I came tracing how societies adapt by letting aqueducts crumble while fortifying wells, or trading law for trial by combat—pragmatic choices that optimize control. Varoufakis seems to have arrived with an economist’s blueprint, diagnosing not the process but the result: digital fiefs like Amazon, where lords extract rent from every transaction.