The new feudal age
When we think of feudalism, we think of a tiny ruling class which owned all the land and had people work the land in exchange for “protection”. We also think modern day developed societies are about as far removed from feudalism as they can be. We are, after all, free and we elect our own governments. We bow to no lord. Technically this is true and our lives aren’t like those under feudalism. But I want to argue that our lives have a lot in common with those under feudalism.
In feudalism, a minority holds all the property and then lease/license it out to the peasants to make a living. The peasants own nothing. At any point a lord fancies, the peasant’s land can be taken away.
Now consider the things that we supposedly “own” - our phones, laptops, TVs, household appliances, and cars. They all increasingly rely on software that is not free. All these devices work at the mercy of some corporation.
To illustrate, let’s take phones - they are powerful enough computing devices which can easily serve our needs for a decade or more. But we are forced to replace them every few years because the software gets deliberately obsoleted. Continuing to use a phone with such software is opening yourself up to get hacked.
Also consider what kind of apps you can run on your phone. The apps have be to approved by an app store. Sure, you can sideload apps on certain types of phones, but you have to jump through a lot of hoops to do so. Here again, you are at the mercy of a corporation.
So do we really “own” our phones? It is more like we lease/license them from some corporation. Even software applications that we used to outright own are moving to a subscription model. We have to keep paying in order to use the software. And there regularly are cases of people getting locked out of their accounts with no recourse because they were falsely flagged as malicious actors.
When you consider all that, we are not so different from the peasants who leased property from feudal lords. Our human brains haven’t changed all that much in the last several thousand years and as such we keep reinventing the same social systems. On a surface level, modern and feudal social systems seem nothing alike, but when you factor in power disparity between elites and non-elites in both societies, they do start showing similarities.