Interestingly it's not the only growth out of Feudalism. Miskin argues, for instance, that France and England had very different post-feudal trajectories, but England's move into Capitalism was so successful in the short term it required France to engage in Capitalism to stay relevant.

England moved to a landlord-rent model for their agrarian society, whereas France moved to a tax on production model for their agrarian society. The distinction there is subtle, but the English model encourages improvidence to ensure you can make the rent, and that improvidence leads to increased output, pressure on workers to move to cities and away from their familial land. The French model didn't put as much pressure on maximizing productivity, and their post feudal agrarian society was perhaps a little slower to take off economically, but wasn't burdened with quite the same social upheaval that capitalism led to in England.

It's a very interesting history, and I do wish we'd been able to see more post-feudal societies develop. I think there's a number of different economic models out there that would be functional. They might not be as economically strong, but they might have different strengths w.r.t. population health, happiness, or sustainability.

> The text's theory of history requires a hidden variable that controls the feudalism->capitalism->feudalism process

During the industrial and chemical revolutions, the technology to feed a large population outpaced the technology to control large populations. Feudalism fell to capitalism because society became too large to be effectively ordered by feudal lords. But this is now changing thanks to the information technology revolution. With information technology, we are developing a new means of feudalism that scales to billions of people.

Same variable that controls the democrats_in_power->republicans_in_power->democrats_in_power cycle: the cyclic nature of complex systems created out of human society. Whats important is not what controls the cycle, but that the only two options - given to us by human nature - seem to be capitalism and feudalism. Humans need to evolve a bit more before any other options are unlocked.

I think it makes more sense to think of it as a two track process. It's not that digital feudalism emerged out of capitalism, the internet wasn't really capitalist to begin with and was more or less immediately captured by private rentiers. Note that almost every example in the article except for the car is a purely digital good, and I'd argue the automotive sector is not overall feudalistic, just the digital parts in it. It's still largely a market where customers pay for cars and manufacturers hire labour.

I don't think the entire economy is reverting back to feudalism, I think it makes more sense to think of the digital economy as its own thing that's speedrunning the exact process we already went through once. Next step is then what, digital commoners and land reform maybe, proper digital currencies and citizenship, actual privacy protection? Feudalism on the internet can only exist for the same reason it existed offline, people flock to fiefdoms because they perform functions in a modern economy provided by a proper state.

Here's one reader's attempt: the hidden factor seems to be "the ability of the collective consciousness to achieve a sufficient degree of internal coherence that it understands how the system works and can exercise agency to break the power of feudal lords". Reality changes -> comprehension has to catch up. New mediums of communication help a lot.

The resulting "agency" has historically been pretty violent, when the injustice and tension are too severe. So it's wise to constantly be course-correcting by recognizing the new skins of feudalism and wresting power away from its lords.

I think feudalism is a misnomer here. Feudalism is a historiographically messy concept to begin with and many Medievalists reject the term outright. But even if we were to distill it down to some simplistic yet workable definition I still don't think whatever we come up with would be applicable to the present situation without seriously torturing the analogy. 'Rentier capitalism' would be more apt.

I've been throwing around the term "neo-feudalism" and people seem to get the gist of what I mean intuitively (paying dues to the monopolistic ownership class, only now you're working digital land) but your suggestion of "rentier capitalism" does ultimately fit much better.

We already have a term for this. Digital Sharecropping.