Clouds on the Horizon

On Corporations, Feudalism and Sometimes Democracy

Abstract

In recent years, more and more authors have analyzed the role of digital media in politics by resorting to comparisons with feudalism. These authors come from different national contexts and from different disciplines such as anthropology, economics, political science, etc. This article attempts to initially systematize these comparisons with the feudal era by outlining two main approaches. The first approach introduces the concept of “platform feudalism” to describe the power relations between digital platforms (for communication or commerce) and their users. The second approach speaks of “technofeudalism” to describe the power relations between corporations, their users and the state. The first approach examines in depth the historical rise of new digital platforms, as well as the practices of their users and their consequences for the public sphere. The second approach examines the transition from platform power to infrastructure dominance of some platforms (AWS, Google and Microsoft) and follows the first chronologically because it analyzes precisely the more recent focus of these companies on the cloud as a service and as a key prerequisite for training Artificial Intelligence. After outlining these two fields of analysis, the article comments on how states respond to the power claims of technoplatforms in an attempt to protect (with greater or lesser success) their digital sovereignty. Attempts to find alternative solutions by states, however, are also not without problems, because the role of democratic participation in them is so far minimal. Thus, the digital transformations of our time and the new race to build a digital infrastructure on a global scale hang like a cloud over democracy.

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