Transcription
Hello world. I'm an unemployed X big tech software engineer with over 25 years of experience in the industry. So nowadays I have a lot of time on my hands. And when you have time you start thinking about things like what society and civilization would look like in the near future.
Now one possible near future civilization is one called technofudalism. And I admit that it's actually a very plausible near-term future. Now I want to step back and give a little bit of context. Classic feudalism was this highly stable and enduring socioeconomic system that's persisted in Eurasia for thousands of years. At its core, it's a decentralized rentseeking type of economy. And the best documented case was in Western Europe.
So if we look at a feudal social system, what you'll find is at the bottom of the system you have the surfs. That's more than 90% of the population. There's this tiny middle layer of nonsurfs representing 5 to 10% of the population. And then at the very top, you have the lords that are 1% of the population or less.
Let's talk about the life of surfs. You can think of surfs as basically one step above chatt slavery, right? They were essentially property that could not be arbitrarily killed. They were tied to a plot of land via this kind of hereditary tenency agreement. Now, surfs in general owned nothing. They don't own their land. They don't own their house. They don't even own things like tools or livestock. All of these things are owned by their lord and essentially provided to them in exchange for a rent. Now their rent is usually in the form of labor whether it's directly in the form of mandates of labor or indirectly via the agricultural produce of that labor. Availability of basic resources for survival like water, wood, forage, these are all tightly controlled. Even things like the ability to move around and leave the plantation or to be able to marry someone was something that had to be approved by their lords.
Now let's talk about the non-serfs. The non-serfs were divided into several different specialist types. You had the knights, the enforcers of the military order. You had the clergy who controlled the spiritual and social life of the community. You have the ymen who are independent land owners that were self-sufficient. You then have the burgess which are like towns folk, merchants, craftsmen, members of the engineering guilds. And finally you have the freedman who are free laborers without any property.
Now both the knights and the clergy still paid rent. The knights paid in the form of military service to their lords while the clergymen paid rent in the form of religious service to their high clergy leadership. Now the last three types of nonsurfs I find to be very interesting because these people could essentially own their own property. They did not have to pay rent. They used money as the means of exchange and commerce amongst themselves and they were afforded in feudal society a degree of legal protection. And in many cases it was these people who were instrumental in the eventual overthrow of the feudal institution.
Now let's talk about the life of lords. So the lords own the vast majority of all property in feudal society, right? And their property consists of these manner plantations stocked with surfs. Now here's the thing. From time to time, plantations would become overpop populated with surfs and the land would reach their natural carrying capacity. At that point, the rent that the surfs pay would become increasingly devalued, right? Because the land can only produce so much agricultural goods regardless of how much surf labor was available. So, the lords had to do something to recoup the lost rent. Right? As a general rule, they did not emancipate their extra surfs. Instead, when there are just too many surfs and not enough rent extract, lords use these three common strategies.
The first one is property accumulation where lords would attempt to exchange their surfs for more productive property, more productive land. One way to do that is to send your surfs to go and cultivate ultra dangerous and hazardous environments, right? Get them to drain marshlands and swamps or go terrorist up some mountain sides and you turn these uninhabitable plots of land into useful agricultural land. Another way is to levy up your surfs, go and invade your neighbors property and seize some productive land from a rival lord. This strategy is very effective because on average it tends to increase the amount of productive property a lord has while decreasing the number of surplus surfs that he has.
The second strategy is monetization. The exchange of surf labor for money in the form of gold and silver. So a lord can typically lease out the labor of his surfs right to people like the yman, the burgesses or other lords and get paid. Sometimes a lord with just too many surfs around can allow some enterprising surfs to essentially buy their freedom. So the way that works is a surf would be allowed to save money while doing extra gigs and side hustles and then that money and it's a huge sum of money relatively speaking could then be used to pay a quit rent fee. Basically the llord gets this lumpsum fee and in exchange the lord will cancel the teny agreement making that surf a freman.
The third strategy is entertainment. Yes literally entertainment. Lords would use their surfs as entertainment. This of course meant that lords would commit all sorts of horrific crimes on their tenant surfs for their own amusement. Some of this stuff honestly was really disturbing to read about. There was this one guy, a noble in the 1300s. He abused his tenants surf so much that he ran out of people and had to go after other tenants, other surfs in other lord's properties. It got so out of hand that the local overlord had to intervene and basically make this guy pay a fee to his neighbors every time he abused one of their tenants. And this fee was like the equivalent of paying a parking ticket.
So yeah, feudalism 1.0 was this horrible dystopia, right? Where less than 1% of the population owned almost everything and human labor was worth almost nothing. But at the same time, it was a very boring and surprisingly resilient economic system. Feudalism is kind of like the crab of social economic systems where you have many different kinds of societies that over time all tend to sort of evolve into forms of feudalism. In Eurasia, for example, feudalism happened in all regions and really persisted into the late 20th century.
Ultimately for feudal Western Europe at least a combination of factors really shook things up, right? You had the great plague which depopulated huge numbers of people. You had these mass wars started by megalomaniacal leaders which killed vast numbers of people. You had the opening of new frontiers allowing surfs to run away from the plantations. All this depopulation allowed the remaining surfs to demand to be paid in money and they were then paid by these new emerging non-surf classes that we talked about earlier. All of these factors greatly increased the bargaining power of labor and that's really what allowed that civilization to shake off feudalism.
Now history doesn't repeat but it often rhymes. The idea of technofudalism is that you'll have a small elite of technol lords. There would be likewise a small middle layer of critical specialists and independent smallcale owners of capital. But most people in society would be trapped in a form of technosurfom where they will own nothing and be sad. Most people would be trapped into a kind of life where all of their necessities are provided to them via these technical platforms. Essentially, technosurfs would have to pay a subscription for everything needed to exist.
Now, I believe technofudalism is way closer to becoming reality than most people want to admit. Today, the top 10% of the US population owns something like 93% of all stocks, while the bottom 50 to 60% of the population effectively owns nothing. What do I mean by that? Well, if you're in that bottom 50%, you don't own your housing. You're most likely paying rent either directly or indirectly in the form of mortgage payments. You don't own your transportation either. You are likely paying rent for transportation, right? Via lease fees, via loan payments, or via services like Uber. All of your digital tools for work, for entertainment, for a living, they're all subscription services. Yet another form of rent. And over the last decade, the population of these technosurfs have only been increasing.
And here's a scary thing. Many people believe that we have a finite window of time left for people to accumulate capital and escape technosurfom. Some believe that this window of time may be less than 5 years. Why? Because the advancing capabilities of AI tools will likely displace huge numbers of people in the very near future. Now, I'm not talking about artificial general intelligence, right? like machines attaining human consciousness or anything like that. I personally think that that may be very far away. What I'm talking about is the current generation of AI tools that can perform economically valuable cognitive labor at a very cheap price, far cheaper than humans. This technology is not science fiction. This is here right now.
And so the thinking is we'll soon have massive numbers of people with lowincome side gigs or no income at all. And of course they wouldn't have the income to save and accumulate into capital. The technolords, oh sorry, I mean the government may at some point decide to implement a universal basic incomel like scheme, right? They have to give this disenfranchised population just enough resources to stave off revolts or revolutions. At that point, it's entirely possible for 90% of the population to become technosurfs. They become entirely reliant upon these platforms owned by the technolords for their essential survival. At that point, all that a technosurf can provide in exchange for their existence would be something like this. Increasingly commoditized human labor whose cost will approach zero over time, possibly their data for the training of additional machine intelligence and perhaps for their entertainment value to the lords.
Now, after some introspection, I believe that there is this narrow golden path that humanity must traverse in the immediate future. We have to walk this narrow path in order to reach a future of prosperity and abundance. Kind of like a Star Trek level civilization. But even small missteps off this path could send us into the trap of technofudalism. But I think mankind will do the right thing and figure this out. How we will do so exactly, that's a rant for another day.
Anyways, I hope you found this helpful. If you have a morbid curiosity to join me in this life journey, please feel free to subscribe to my channel. If you guys are interested, I have a monthly Substack newsletter. Feel free to subscribe to that as well. If you want to support my vlog making efforts, please join as a member to this channel or just buy me a coffee. Anyway, thanks so much for watching. Until next time. Bye.