Digital Feudalism: Sharecropping, Ground Rent, and Tribute

Abstract

With the privatization of the internet in 1995, capital managed to contain the digital common, to classify it as private property, and to generalize and extend the digital common of the private internet to the world community as universal private property. Since that time, individual capitals with a share in the ownership of the digital common as universal private property have taken on the mantle of digital landowners. Pursuant to their becoming digital landowners, capitals like Facebook and internet service providers have drawn account holders onto the universal private property of today’s global internet, casting them in the role of digital peasant tenant-cultivators. This tenantry has promoted conditions ripe for the establishment of a feudal mode of agrarian exploitation that expresses itself through the establishment of digital sharecropping, the taking of digital ground rent, and the extraction of tribute.

Key Words:

• Exploitation
• Feudalism
• Ground Rent
• Sharecropping
• Surplus Labor

Notes

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