Disclosure: The views and opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not represent the views and opinions of the crypto.news editorial.
There is a certain confidence with which large technology companies operate today, a confidence that does not belong to private companies but to sovereign powers. Google decides what the world knows. Meta decides how the world communicates. Amazon decides what the world buys. These are no longer platforms; They are empires. And like all empires before them, they extract.
Summary
- Big tech has created “feudalism 2.0,” where global platforms extract data from users like feudal lords, operate above nation-states, and exercise sovereign-level power without democratic accountability.
- Web3 offers a path to breaking this digital feudalism by enabling user-owned identity, data sovereignty, transparency, and decentralized infrastructure that redistributes power away from corporate monopolies.
- The next revolution must be architectural, not political: to regain digital autonomy, both individuals and institutions must adopt decentralized technologies that replace platform kings with open, interoperable, user-controlled systems.
we are living in Feudalism 2.0either technofeudalismwhere lords are not monarchs in castles but CEOs in boardrooms, and peasants are not tied to the land but to platforms. Our job is not to grow wheat, but to produce data. Every click, scroll, message, search query, location ping, and fingerprint becomes the raw material for a globalized mining machine.
And just as in traditional feudalism, big tech operates beyond nation-states. Governments regulate within territories; the platforms operate through them. Your citizenship matters less to your digital life than your Internet connection.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: we built this system. We trade control for convenience. We trade agency for speed. We exchange digital autonomy for the illusion of free services. We now face a question older than the nation-state itself: who really governs? And if the answer is “platforms,” then we need a revolution. Not political. Technological.
The new feudal order
In medieval Europe, peasants had no legal right to the fruits of their labor. Everything that grew on the earth ultimately belonged to the lord. Feudalism was not just an economic model; It was an ideology of dependency.
Big Tech has recreated this model with terrifying elegance. We do not own our data; we simply produce it. We do not control our digital identities; We rent access to them. We do not consent to the extraction; they push us toward it with dark patterns and default settings.
The modern argument is that “if you don’t like it, use something else.” But this is a false choice. Technically, feudal peasants could also leave the manor: they simply had nowhere else to go. Today, try to live meaningfully without search engines, email, communication platforms or cloud services. Try applying for a job, accessing medical records, or even navigating a city. Unsubscribing is practically impossible.
This is not user retention. This is dependency engineering. And when a technology becomes essential to exist in society, it crosses territory that was once reserved for sovereign power.
The most striking part of feudalism 2.0 is its geopolitical structure. Big Tech does not ask for permission; Governments ask for meetings. Big tech doesn’t negotiate; establishes the terms of service. Big Tech does not obey borders; redraws them in code.
Google Maps has redefined international borders, showing different boundaries depending on the viewer’s location. Meta decides which political parties gain visibility and which narratives are amplified or suppressed. Amazon’s logistics network operates on a scale larger than the GDP of many countries.
We didn’t vote for any of them. We don’t choose them. But they govern us every day. This is post-national power: unregulated, unaccountable, and structurally incentivized to continue extracting at scale. And our digital identities (made of preferences, behaviors, biometrics and stories) are the mines.
The promise of web3: a new industrial revolution
The Industrial Revolution broke the old feudal order by giving common people new tools, new rights, and new influence. Web3, if built correctly, could do the same. Not like a buzzword. Not like a speculative casino. But how Industrial Revolution 2.0 — a fundamental restructuring of power.
Decentralized technologies can redistribute control in the same way that industrial machinery redistributed labor:
- Property: Users control their data through self-custody.
- Identity: You are not a profile in a database but a sovereign digital entity.
- Interoperability: You can migrate between applications without losing history or reputation.
- Transparency: Algorithms operate in the open, not in black boxes.
- Incentives: Platforms reward participation rather than extract from it.
The point is not to destroy technology but to rebuild its power structure. Because if the future must be digital (and it will be), then the question is: Digital for whom? The kings of feudalism 2.0? Or the people who actually generate the value?
Retail Adoption: Reclaiming Everyday Agency
For everyday users, the revolution begins with something deceptively simple: ownership of a digital identity.
Nowadays, losing access to your email or social media account is more catastrophic than losing your house keys. This is not just a bad user experience. It’s a sign that we don’t own anything about our digital lives. Web3 enables identity wallets, verifiable credentials, ownership-based logins, and user-controlled data vaults. Retail adoption is not about NFT or DeFi; These are ordinary people demanding rights they never realized they had lost.
A digital world where your data follows you, not the platform. Where you choose who sees what. Where your participation generates value for you, not for a monopoly that sells you your own habits in the form of ads.
Institutional adoption: breaking monopolies
Institutions face the same problem, but on a larger scale. They depend on Big Tech infrastructure: cloud storage, artificial intelligence models, advertising networks and data analysis. This dependency concentrates power at the national level within a handful of corporations that no single country can meaningfully regulate.
Web3 infrastructure (decentralized storage, open AI models, programmable networks) offers institutions a way out. Not because it is cheaper or more fashionable, but because it is sovereign. It moves power away from corporate monarchies and toward open ecosystems. That’s why some governments, central banks and companies are experimenting with blockchain: not out of curiosity, but out of fear.
The fear of being vassals of someone else’s digital empire.
The revolution will be decentralized… or it will not happen
Every revolution begins before people recognize it as such. The Web3 revolution is not about currencies or speculation. It’s about the political structure of the digital world. Rights. Force. Agency. Property. Governance. This is what is at stake.
Feudalism 2.0 was built slowly and invisibly, one consent box at a time. Undoing it will require deliberate design, cultural changes, and technologies that refuse to centralize control.
And that is the irony of our moment: Web3 must destroy feudalism 2.0, not through violence, but through architecture, because the world does not need new kings. You need protocols. You need open rails. It needs a sovereignty that grows. It needs a revolution in which people finally take back what was quietly taken from them: their (digital) autonomy.
