Over the past years, some commentators have argued that global capitalism has evolved to take new forms. Probably the loudest of these voices, Yanis Varoufakis, wants to press the point in ‘Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism’ that digital platforms now exercise a kind of power closer to feudal lords than to market actors. In his account, corporations like Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Apple have stepped beyond the logic of competition and profit maximization. Instead, they rule over immense digital territories where access is tightly controlled and where users and workers alike find themselves paying rents simply to participate. These firms and the “cloudalists” said to preside over them are thus cast as the aristocracy of a new digital order.

The technofeudalism thesis and its limits

This argument, and its variants, have gained currency amongst commentators in Europe and the United States. But from the perspective of the Global South, this supposedly dramatic rupture looks far less convincing. To describe the present moment as a departure from capitalism misses how deeply the digital economy remains rooted in its familiar patterns. Far from heralding a new feudal age, today’s platform giants have entrenched an already unequal global system. What may appear “feudal” when seen from the metropolitan center reads quite differently when approached from the periphery: it is capitalism, sharpened and extended, rather than superseded. This misdiagnosis is not merely conceptual. It risks obscuring the imperial, racialized, and classed dynamics that structure the digital economy, and in doing so, misdirects political strategies aimed at contesting platform power.

Fernand Braudel long ago noted that the genius of capitalism lies in its ability to insert itself into new areas of social life and reorganize those spaces for the purposes of accumulation. Digital platforms merely continue this process.

Recognizing this demands an understanding of how capitalism can change without deserting its foundational logic. Fernand Braudel long ago noted that the genius of capitalism lies in its ability to insert itself into new areas of social life and reorganize those spaces for the purposes of accumulation. Digital platforms merely continue this process. They generate value through the reconfiguration of markets, data-harvesting, commodification of everyday practices, and algorithmic administration of work. None of these is at odds with the operations of capitalism. Rather, it demonstrates the system’s vitality in rewiring itself around new infrastructures while preserving its substructure.

This is further underlined by the intervention of Evgeny Morozov in this discourse. Morozov claims that the notion of the dawn of technofeudalism is both conceptually confused and politically unhelpful because it fails to correctly identify the nature of contemporary capitalist power. According to him, Big Tech dominance is not a return to feudalism but an unprecedented deepening of capitalism through the privatization of digital infrastructures, enclosure of online spaces, and financialization of data flows. His critique chimes closely with the perspective from the Global South: what is being described as “feudal” is better understood as the continuing search of capitalism for new frontiers of accumulation.

Platform power as an extension of global capitalist hierarchies

Observers in the Global North tend to characterize platform dominance as something new. Amazon’s marketplace rules seem to exercise a kind of sovereignty; Google’s control over search visibility is akin to a private legislative power; and Meta’s management of social networks takes on a sort of informational lordship. Yet from the South, these dynamics are not entirely new. Capitalism has always depended on global asymmetries in technology, finance, and state power in order to structure dependency. As both the work of Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein makes clear, monopolies in the core set the terms for production and consumption across the periphery, creating a structural hierarchy in which peripheral regions supply labour, raw materials, and, now, data, while value is extracted upward toward the core. The digital architectures that now mediate economic and social life have only intensified this extraction.

Today’s Big Tech monopolies perform this function precisely. They extract value from global data flows, dominate cloud infrastructures, and shape digital markets in ways that reinforce unequal exchange.

Today’s Big Tech monopolies perform this function precisely. They extract value from global data flows, dominate cloud infrastructures, and shape digital markets in ways that reinforce unequal exchange. Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejías describe this as “data colonialism“: the appropriation of human life through digital means in ways which mimic earlier forms of colonial extraction. Platforms do not require feudal rights to govern these infrastructures; ownership and market dominance are enough. The enclosures they erect around digital activity create spaces in which participation is conditioned by the terms of capital, not by any form of inherited authority.

The comparison with feudalism therefore collapses under scrutiny. Feudal systems were characterized by direct personal dependency, hereditary hierarchy, and extra-economic coercion. Digital platforms, by contrast, operate through economic coercion: market dependence, intellectual property regimes, and competitive pressures. Their power is rooted in capitalist property relations and state-backed monopolies. They extract surplus from workers and users through commodification, while simultaneously competing with one another for market dominance. In short, platform power does not mark a break with capitalism but its continuation in more technologically sophisticated forms.

Take ride-hailing, for instance. Drivers are formally independent contractors, entrepreneurs selling their labor power on the market, but they are subordinated to algorithmic management systems that determine their pay, monitor their performance, and discipline them through automated penalties.

The Global South is also the laboratory in which the most advanced forms of “platform capitalism” are emerging. In cities like Lagos, Dhaka, Johannesburg, and Manila, millions of workers labor under the authority of algorithmic management. Their wages fluctuate according to opaque formulas. Their performance is tracked, ranked, and scored. Their labor is commodified, fragmented, and continuously surveilled. Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns conceptualize how “algorithmic governmentality” disciplines labor in ways entirely consonant with capitalism. Take ride-hailing, for instance. Drivers are formally independent contractors, entrepreneurs selling their labor power on the market, but they are subordinated to algorithmic management systems that determine their pay, monitor their performance, and discipline them through automated penalties. Their dependence is economic. Gig workers are not legally bound to platforms; they are entrapped by structural economic dependence and the absence of viable alternatives-a form of coercion rooted in capitalist labor markets, not feudal bondage. That same logic applies to content moderators in the Philippines, call centre workers in South Africa and delivery riders in India: each is embedded in global supply chains defined not by fealty but by wage dependence.

Technofeudalism theorists often emphasize rents: the platforms charge commissions, gatekeeping fees, and advertising tolls. But rent extraction has always been at the center of capitalism. Rent, in Marx’s sense, means surplus profit derived from monopoly control over scarce resources. Today, these would include platforms, data infrastructures, patents, and algorithmic systems. As Brett Christophers argues, contemporary capitalism is increasingly organized around monopoly rents and intellectual property extraction. Rentier capitalism is the most advanced and internally contradictory form of capitalism. Nothing in this structure looks like feudalism; everything in it expresses capitalism’s historical tendency toward concentration.

Why mislabeling digital capitalism as “feudal” obscures the real stakes

From the perspective of the Global South, the imperial dimensions of capitalism are even more apparent. Long before digital technologies emerged, multinational corporations were already extracting rents from sectors such as pharmaceuticals, seeds, software, finance, and mineral resources. Digital capitalism merely adds data and platform access to the list. Intellectual property law, enforced through global trade agreements, ensures that the Global South remains dependent on core-country technology firms. That dependence is capitalist, not feudal. Theorists of technofeudalism often argue that platforms wield sovereign power, but such claims miss how much these corporations depend on modern states to enforce contracts, protect proprietary rights, and regulate markets in ways that preserve their dominance. Unlike the feudal lords, whose powers functioned autonomously from overarching legal orders, platforms operate within and benefit from the international legal order of the present day. The rulemaking of platforms is thus conditional, mediated by political institutions, and open to contestation.

By mischaracterizing contemporary capitalism as a form of feudalism, there are high analytical and political costs: it obscures the underlying dynamics of global value extraction; it reinforces technological dependencies between core and peripheral regions; it masks the racialized hierarchies of labor that structure digital economies; and it distracts from the central role of multinational corporations and powerful states in sustaining these inequalities. The emergence of the digital order, as argued above through Marxist and postcolonial lenses, does not mark a historical rupture. Instead, it realizes longstanding patterns of imperial domination, unequal exchange, and technologically mediated dependence within capitalism. Capitalism has not disappeared but rather has become globalized, digitized, and deeply embedded within the social and economic fabric of everyday life. Recognizing this continuity is important for the formulation of strategies capable of challenging and transforming the global system. Recognising this continuity is essential for developing political strategies that confront platform power not as feudal residue, but as capitalist domination, and for imagining forms of resistance capable of transforming the global digital economy itself.