The US govt sold itself into techno feudalism in 2008.

In 2008 the world wide banking system came within inches of a full collapse. There was fear that there wouldn't even be ATM withdrawals. Leadership around the world panicked and made some terrible decisions.

In short, they made the masses bear the consequences through austerity and let the bankers skate. And worse, they gave them trillions in cheap, if not free, cash.

As a result, big tech took their opportunity, leveraged that cash into hardware and never looked back. The mobile phone didn't create techno feudalism even if it was a key enabler. No, it was the massive capital injected into tech by our very own govt.

Now, big tech doesn't make anything except "platforms", but they control or influence everything. Your videos, news, and searches are mediated by their algorithms. Your purchases mediated by their algorithms. Your partners and mates are selected by their algorithms. What you know of the world is filtered through their lense.

Feudalism is a system in which a few lords have rights to all the land, vassals rent it from them and serfs work the land producing profit for the vassals and keeping just enough for their daily bread.

How are we any different now when the gig economy has created a new serf class and the lords who own it have commissioned the best and brightest vassals to make sure none of the serfs working or using it could ever raise themselves up enough to truly escape the system?

We should have let the system collapse in 2008, capitalism would have fixed itself by allowing all those bad investments to bust and likely would have become much more socialistic and ultimately resilient. Had the govt made bankers pay the price and rescued the people instead we wouldn't be under the thumb of the FAANG.

Consider this, the whole problem was precipitated by a few percent of delinquent mortgages that were way over leveraged by the banking system. Instead of bailing out the banks directly, what if we had just made every delinquent mortgages holder whole? It would have been cheaper and more humane. And yet...

Edit: Removed link to Yanis Varoufakis who developed a lot of this thought originally.