Airbnb, Uber, & Meetup wanted better exit options

athan Schneider is the author of Everything for Everyone and Governable Spaces. Here is our conversation about how we can create better internet platforms, available as a video (above) or edited transcript (below).

Elle Griffin: What is technofeudalism, and what can we create instead?

Nathan Schneider: There are two approaches to this metaphor. The first is that of Yanis Varoufakis, the economist and former finance minister of Greece, who wrote in his book Technofeudalism that capitalism is being undermined by platform economies that are intrinsic monopolies built around achieving dominance over a whole sector of the economy and eliminating competition.

Another approach to the feudalist metaphor is the one I take in my book Governable Spaces, which begins by asking: Do we experience democracy in a group chat, a Facebook group, an Instagram thread, or an open-source software project? And how did that compare to experiencing democracy before the internet existed? My mother’s garden club, for example, has far more democratic structuring, elections, bylaws, and procedures than virtually any online space I’ve ever been part of. I call this habit of everyday oligarchy in online spaces “implicit feudalism.”

I was interested in tracing the history of implicit feudalism and how it gave rise to a political ideology that craves a return to monarchism, which we now see very much alive in American politics and politics in many parts of the world today. I argue that turn is not just a rehashed authoritarianism, but is actually coming out of our experience with online life.

Elle: Are you saying online life should be more democratic if we want a more democratic society?