Disclosure: The views expressed here belong to the author alone.
There’s a sovereign-like confidence in Big Tech today. Google shapes what people know. Meta shapes how people communicate. Amazon shapes what people buy. These companies are no longer mere platforms; they behave like empires that extract value at scale. Every click, message, search, location ping and biometric trace is raw material mined by corporate interests.
We live in Feudalism 2.0 — techno-feudalism — where CEOs are modern lords and users are platform-bound peasants. Our labor has shifted from fields to data production. We traded control for convenience: agency for speed, autonomy for “free” services. The result is dependency so deep that opting out of core platforms is practically impossible. Try living fully without search, email, maps, cloud services, or major communications apps. The default choices are engineered to keep us within their ecosystems; this is dependency engineering more than user retention.
Big Tech’s power transcends borders. Governments regulate by territory; platforms operate across them and often set terms that nations must negotiate around. They redraw borders in code — Google Maps renders boundaries differently by viewer; Meta decides which political narratives are amplified; Amazon’s logistics rival many national economies. These firms aren’t elected, yet they govern daily life: post-national, unaccountable, and structurally incentivized to extract ever more value. Our digital identities — preferences, behaviors, biometrics, histories — are the new mines.
The Web3 promise reframes this as an architectural problem. If the Industrial Revolution displaced feudal lords by changing production and property, Web3 could redistribute digital power by changing the architecture of identity, ownership and governance. This is not about speculation or NFTs but about rebuilding foundational systems so the internet serves people rather than the platforms that monetize them.
Decentralized technologies can offer:
– Ownership: Data under user control through self-custody.
– Identity: Sovereign digital identities rather than database profiles.
– Interoperability: Portability of history and reputation across apps.
– Transparency: Open algorithms instead of opaque black boxes.
– Incentives: Systems that reward participation rather than extract value from it.
For ordinary users, the revolution starts with reclaiming identity. Today, losing access to an email or social account can be more disruptive than losing physical keys. That’s a signal we don’t own our digital lives. Identity wallets, verifiable credentials, ownership-based logins and user-controlled data vaults let people hold and control what platforms now gatekeep. Retail adoption isn’t primarily about crypto speculation; it’s about restoring rights most people never realized they lost.
Institutions face the same dependency at national scale. Governments, banks, enterprises rely on centralized cloud, proprietary AI, ad networks and analytics. That concentration embeds national power inside corporate infrastructures that few countries can fully regulate. Decentralized infrastructure — distributed storage, open AI models, programmable networks — offers sovereign alternatives. Some states and central banks experiment with blockchain not for novelty but out of concern: they fear becoming vassals in private digital empires.
This is why the next revolution must be architectural. Political reforms alone can’t fully check platforms whose power is baked into how the internet works. Undoing Feudalism 2.0 requires deliberate system design, cultural shifts, and technologies that resist centralization. Web3 must replace platform kings with open protocols, rails that scale sovereignty, and governance models that return value to creators and users.
Feudalism 2.0 didn’t arise suddenly. It was built one consent box, default setting, and convenience trade-off at a time. Reversing it will be gradual and must be fought on multiple fronts: product design that prioritizes user agency, legal frameworks that enforce interoperability and data rights, and public adoption of tools that make decentralization practical and meaningful.
The revolution should be nonviolent and architectural: build systems that obviate the need for new kings. Create open, interoperable protocols so people control their identities, data and economic participation. Shift incentives so platforms are rewarded for enabling user prosperity rather than extracting it.
If the future is digital, the question is whose future it will be: the platform monarchs’ or the people’s? Web3 offers a path to tilt the balance back toward individuals and institutions that insist on sovereignty. The work ahead requires engineering, policy, and widespread cultural adoption — a reimagining of digital power where protocols, not princes, govern the commons.
