Life Support as a Service

Welcome to the fief. Breathing is a premium feature.

Techno-Feudalism: the moment a private platform stops behaving like a supplier in a market and starts behaving like the owner of the ground beneath you. You do not buy the tool. You inhabit the estate, accept its laws, pay rent for continued existence and call the arrangement frictionless because the drawbridge has an app.

Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism describes cloud capital as a system of privately owned digital fiefs extracting rent and governing the people and businesses that depend upon them. The argument is disputed, as arguments involving the death of capitalism tend to be. The useful question remains: how free is a customer to leave when the landlord owns the identity, history, social graph, compatibility layer and road leading out? You may depart whenever you like. Kindly abandon your home, tools, contacts and accumulated life at the gate.

Life Support as a Service takes that relation literally. The body works. The machine works. There is no shortage of oxygen and no technical fault. Access has simply been revoked because the rent failed to arrive. The meter is not measuring consumption now. It is enforcing allegiance. PAYMENT DECLINED is the moment the cheerful language of convenience drops its mask and the peasant discovers that the lord has root access to respiration.

The cable climbs almost the entire shirt to a single socket above the person’s reach. One plug. One landlord. No appeal. Your pulse is excellent, your lungs are provisioned, BUT the payment has been declined. We apologise for the inconvenience, though we have checked the contract and apparently do not have to mean it.

Read it for yourself: Technofeudalism has just arrived, Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, sample, Penguin