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Techno-feudalist? OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on a mobile device screen, Warsaw, Poland, 21 November 2023
Jaap Arriens · Nurphoto · Getty
From Paris to Madrid, Rome to Berlin, a medieval spectre haunts the European left, and it’s wearing a Silicon Valley hoodie – ‘techno-feudalism’. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, de facto leader of French leftwing party La France Insoumise, has called for a tax on the profits of what he calls our new ‘digital lords’. Yet the same Mélenchon also tweets that ‘AI is not external to capitalist reality: it inscribes itself in a techno-feudalism where a few actors capture the rent.’
Profits or rent? Capitalism or feudalism? Like some stray Schrödinger’s Cat wandering the streets of Palo Alto, Mélenchon’s economy exists in two states simultaneously – dead and alive, capitalist and feudal, depending on which rhetorical convenience opens the box.
In Spain, deputy prime minister Yolanda Díaz rails against ‘the techno-feudalism of magnate Elon Musk’, warning that tech billionaires want to transform ‘democracies into corporate monarchies’. Italy’s Green leader Angelo Bonelli accuses that same billionaire of erecting ‘an autocratic neo-feudalism’, urging the country to choose ‘Musk or democracy’.
This outbreak of techno-feudal theatrics is hilariously mistimed, arriving in the middle of the most obscene, AI-fuelled capitalist orgy since the Gilded Age. During Trump’s Gulf tour in May 2025, he secured massive US-bound investments – Saudi Arabia committed $600bn, Qatar $1.2tn and the UAE $1.4tn, with much of it (if it ever materialises) earmarked for AI infrastructure. (This is on top of $1tn Japan promised back in February.) When OpenAI’s Sam Altman floated his $7tn fundraising fantasy last year, it felt like performance art. Now it looks more like a distinct lack of ambition.
Capital frenzy reaching its height
This AI spending tsunami has engulfed all of Big Tech: Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon alone are injecting $320bn into AI infrastructure in 2025, up from $246bn last year. Oracle signed $48bn in new contracts in a single quarter. (…)
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Evgeny Morozov
Evgeny Morozov is founder and editor of The Syllabus, a nonprofit knowledge curation service. His latest book (published in French) is Les Santiago Boys: Des ingénieurs utopistes face aux Big Tech et aux agences d’espionnage (The Santiago Boys: Utopian engineers versus Big Tech and the spy agencies), Divergences, Quimperlé, 2024, based on the eponymous podcast.
Pierre Daum is a journalist.
(1) These may be supplemented by other imported tomatoes: Moroccan in France, Dutch in Germany and the UK.
(2) He did not want to disclose his real name or place of work.
(3) A Fistful Of Dollars (1964), For A Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966).
(4) Nine thousand of Almería’s 40,000 hectares of polytunnels are used for growing tomatoes. In Murcia, to the north, there are another 3,000 hectares. The other vegetables grown are principally cucumbers, peppers and watermelons.
(5) According to the “Convenio colectivo de manipulado y envasado de frutas, hortalizas y flores de Almería,” Boletin Oficial de Almería, no 233, 3 December 2008.
(6) Its founder, Karl Kralowetz was sentenced in Luxembourg to six months in prison for employing illegal drivers. The drivers covered up to 30,000km per month.
(7) Thierry B now works for a wholesale market in Montpellier, but he still wanted to remain anonymous when talking about Carrefour.
(8) Six companies dominate: Carrefour (23.9%), Leclerc (16.9%), Intermarché (13.5%), Auchan (11.1%), Casino/Monoprix (10.3%) and Système U (9%). In 2009 they made $334bn between them.
(9) Moroccan tomato cultivation used to be confined to Souss, near Agadir, but it is now being rapidly developed in Dakhla, on the coast of Western Sahara.
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