Techno-Feudalism and Digital Serfdom

How Contract Law's Presumption of Equality Sets the Stage for Neo-Feudal Inequality

Contemporary discussions of online commerce and media often analogize digital businesses to brick-and-mortar businesses. “Shopify is your virtual storefront.” “Web hosting is like renting a building for your business.” “Social media is the digital town square.” “Cloud storage is your digital filing cabinet.”

But the analogy is false - at least as regards to the system of law. The legal regime that applies to online commerce and media is utterly unlike the legal regime that we’ve applied to brick-and-mortar. Don’t believe me? Let’s consider what the real world would be like if the rules of the online world applied to it. It ain’t pretty.

Your Lease has Been Suspended for Violating Community Standards

Imagine that you run a successful women’s fashion boutique on Madison Avenue catering to an elite clientele. You’ve leased the space for years, invested heavily in advertising, and built a loyal customer base. Business is good.

Then, one morning, you arrive to find that the doors to your boutique have been bricked over. A printed notice taped to the façade reads:

Your lease has been permanently suspended for violating our community standards. If you believe this was a mistake, you may appeal this decision.

Confused, you check your lease agreement. It was a standard boilerplate contract—long, dense, and written in legalese, like every other lease in the city. But in the fine print, you find this clause:

“Landlord reserves the right to terminate this lease at any time, for any reason or no reason at all. Continued occupancy constitutes acceptance of these terms.”

That can’t be the case, you think. No warning? No explanation? No due process? You can’t even get to your merchandise?

You call your landlord’s office. The receptionist refuses to transfer you to an actual person but assures you that "your case is under review." Two weeks later, you receive an automated email:

“After further review, we have determined that your storefront violated our guidelines. Your inventory has been liquidated and your lease terminated. This decision is final. Have a nice day.”

You have no idea what rule you violated. Perhaps a competitor flagged you for misconduct? Perhaps an algorithm detected “suspicious activity” because your revenue was too high last month? Perhaps you violated “community standards” because you sold too many sexy club clothes when the landlord was a feminist who thinks that’s objectifying women with your male gaze? Perhaps the building owner simply decided that a luxury watch store would be more profitable in that space?

But it doesn’t matter. They can offer no reason at all and their decision is final. Your business is gone. Your inventory is gone. Your customers have nowhere to find you. You were just deplatformed from your own boutique, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Your Book Has Been Confiscated for Violating its Page-Through License

You walk into Barnes & Noble on a lazy Sunday afternoon, breathing in that comforting scent of fresh paper and overpriced lattes. After browsing for a while, you pick up The Michelangelo Manifesto, a 500-page historical thriller—something about spies, secret codes, renaissance art, and conspiracy theory. Exactly your kind of book.

You toss The Michelangelo Manifesto into your shopping basket. You browse a few more sections and decide to pick up a copy of Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged to give to your nephew so he develops the necessary sigma grindset.

Later that evening, you crack open your new thriller. On the first page, it reads:

By paging through this book, you agree to the terms and conditions of the Barnes & Noble Page-Through License Agreement (PPLA) found on pages 498 - 500 of this book. Continued reading constitutes acceptance of these terms.

Odd. You start skimming the terms.

"This book is licensed, not sold… Your right to read this book may be revoked at any time, for any reason or no reason at all…”

You shrug. No big deal, nobody pays attention to these licenses anyway.

You’re halfway through chapter three—the moment when the protagonist is about to decode the ancient cipher—when there’s a knock on the door. You open it to discover a Barnes & Noble security guard standing on your porch.

"Excuse me, sir, but your license to read The Michelangelo Manifesto has been revoked," he says, snatching the book from your stunned hands.

"What?!”

"Our Trust and Safety Council noticed that you were reading more than one page per minute. This is faster than the reading speed predicted by our algorithm, suggesting you may be using illegal speeding reading techniques.”

“Huh? I’m just a fast reader.”

“They’ve also flagged you as a problematic reader based on your recent purchase history. As a result we have terminated your license to your books."

He turns to leave, and you snatch at the book. "Gimme that! It’s mine. I bought the book!"

The guard shakes his head and tucks the book into his satchel. "No, sir. You licensed the book. And per the terms of the Page-Through License Agreement, that license can be terminated at any time."

He then pushes past you into your house, opens the door to your office, and begins using an ISBN scanner to identify other books you’ve purchased from Barnes & Noble. Each time he detects one, he throws it in the satchel, too.

“Get out of my office, you Stasi thug!” you cry.

“I’m sorry, sir, but as I said, the Trust and Safety Council has terminated your entire account with us.”

You Will Own Nothing and Have No Rights to Anything

These examples seem utterly hyperbolic when applied to the real world - but they are utterly routine when applied to the digital one.

I know from personal experience.

At one time I ran a small business selling home goods on Walmart.com as a digital seller. When I published my now-infamous article Trump at the Rubicon, I received an email from Walmart’s Trust and Safety Council telling me that my account was permanently suspended. The $40,000 in receivables I was owed were never paid; I lost everything I’d put into the business and all the money I ought to have earned. Their terms of service said they could do it, and they did.

I’m hardly alone. There are many similar reports of small businesses being destroyed by arbitrary decisions of Big Tech. But those are just raindrops in a storm. Most of the destruction goes unreported. No one really cares about the impact of deplatforming on Mom & Pop internet shops. And they really don’t care about the countless Instagram influencers that have had years of effort building their personal brand destroyed when an algorithm decided their cleavage was a bit too much in their latest post. They’re just grifters looking for simps, after all.

When the press does report on trends, they are are almost universally to the benefit of Big Tech and the detriment of Small User:

• April 6, 2022, Google changed its Play Store policies, removing thousands of apps deemed non-compliant. Users who had paid for these apps again lost access without refunds, as Google’s terms allow it to delist apps at its discretion.

• May 19, 2022, Apple began enforcing stricter rules on in-app subscriptions, requiring developers to use its payment system for renewals and limiting external payment links. Users lost the ability to manage subscriptions outside Apple’s 30% fee structure.

• October 11, 2022, Meta ramped up its automated content moderation across Facebook and Instagram, deleting posts and suspending accounts with no explanation or appeal recourse. Small businesses relying on these platforms for marketing reported lost years of content due to opaque algorithm triggers.

• April 4, 2023, Amazon implemented automatic updates to e-book editions of works by Roald Dahl, R.L. Stine, and Agatha Christie, changing the content that consumers had already purchased regardless of their preferences.

• August 31, 2023, Google changed its Play Store policies again, removing thousands more apps deemed non-compliant. Users who had paid for these apps again lost access without refunds, as Google’s terms allow it to delist apps at its discretion.

• June 18, 2024, Adobe updated its terms of service for products like Photoshop and Illustrator, granting itself broader rights to access and use customer content for “content moderation” and “machine learning” purposes.

• February 26, 2025, Amazon ended USB Kindle book downloads to PCs, forcing users to rely on cloud access or device-specific downloads. There is no longer any way to protect your books from Amazon’s updates or read them off Amazon’s ecosystem.

As the online ecosystem increasingly dominates our personal and professional lives, we are increasingly becoming dominated by Big Tech; we are becoming digital serfs.

And digital serfdom is worse than the analog version. Serfs had rights and privileges that aren’t extended to our digital lives. In our new digital serfdom, Big Tech can sell us products we don’t own and can’t keep and erase our business at will—without explanation, without recourse, and without acknowledging that we ever had a right to be there in the first place.

If trends continue, it won’t be long until Baron Mark Zuckerberg can show up on your honeymoon demanding the right to sleep with your bride because it was in the latest update to the Meta T&A.

How did this sorry state of affairs come to pass? And what can we do about it?

Contract Law Has Turned Us into Digital Serfs

Law, like all human institutions, evolves according to the dominant structures of power that shape society. In the pre-modern world, law reflected the rigid hierarchies of feudal and master-servant relationships, assuming an inherent inequality between parties. As modernity ushered in the ideals of individual freedom and equality, the law shifted accordingly—at least in some areas. Property law and labor law, which had long assumed inequality, came under scrutiny as political movements in Britain and America demanded safeguards for the weaker party.

But contract law, which had always presumed that parties were already equal, underwent no such transformation. As a result, contract law today has become a preferred tool for powerful actors—corporations, landlords, and digital platforms—to exploit the very inequalities it pretends do not exist.

Let’s break it down step by step.

Property and Labor Law: The Presumption of Inequality

Property and labor law evolved in a framework of assumed inequality. Their origins lay in the feudal structures of land tenure and the master-servant relationship, where power was explicitly hierarchical.

• Property Law: Under the feudal system, land was held by the Crown and granted downward in a strict hierarchy of obligations. Lords enfeoffed vassals, vassals granted land to tenants, and tenants worked the land under the authority of the landowner. Even after feudalism waned, these hierarchical assumptions persisted.

• Labor Law: The Master and Servant Acts that dominated early English and American labor relations explicitly placed the servant in a subordinate position to the master. Labor contracts were enforced by criminal penalties against workers who breached them, while masters were given wide latitude in setting terms.

Because these areas of law presumed inequality, they came under increasing scrutiny as political and moral values shifted toward equality of right. The 19th and 20th centuries saw waves of reforms aimed at protecting the weaker party:

• Tenant Rights: Britain’s Rent Acts (starting in 1915) and U.S. landlord-tenant laws imposed restrictions on evictions and rent hikes.

• Labor Protections: Laws like the National Labor Relations Act (1935) recognized that employees lacked equal bargaining power and guaranteed their right to unionize.

• Eminent Domain Safeguards: The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment required “just compensation” when the state seized private property, a protection against government overreach.

Property and labor law were restructured to protect weaker parties because their historical assumptions of inequality made reform seem necessary. Contract law, however, faced no such pressure—because it had always claimed the parties were equal in the first place.

Contract Law: The Presumption of Equality

Unlike property and labor law, contract law developed in an economic framework where transactions were seen as voluntary and mutually beneficial. The doctrine of freedom of contract emerged alongside the rise of commercial society in the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in Anglo-American jurisprudence. Its foundation rested on what legal scholars call will theory—the idea that contracts are valid as long as both parties enter them freely and knowingly.

This presumption of equality led to legal doctrines such as caveat emptor (buyer beware) and non-intervention by courts unless fraud or duress was present. As Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations (1776), market transactions are negotiated between rational individuals seeking their own best interest. This philosophical framework culminated in Lochner v. New York (1905), a U.S. Supreme Court case that struck down labor protections on the grounds that employers and employees were equally free to negotiate their own terms.

Contract law, then, assumed an idealized world where no party had significantly greater power than the other. This assumption became a loophole through which real-world inequalities could be manipulated. Using contract law, institutions with power can re-instantiate real-world inequality of a type not seen since the Middle Ages, all while hiding behind the fiction of equal bargaining power.

Software Companies Prefer Licenses Over Copyright

Under traditional copyright law, a user who purchased software would own a copy, just as someone who buys a book owns the physical copy and can resell it. But software companies found a loophole: instead of selling software as a product, they sell it as a licensed service under an End-User License Agreement (EULA).

Copyright law (which falls under property law) would have granted users rights, such as first-sale doctrine protections (allowing resale of legally purchased copies). But by structuring software transactions as contracts rather than property transfers, companies retained total control.

Courts upheld this approach in seminal cases like ProCD v. Zeidenberg (1996), ruling that shrink-wrap licenses were enforceable contracts—even though users had no meaningful opportunity to negotiate them. These decisions enabled companies to sidestep traditional property rights by structuring their relationships through contract law, where courts assume an equality that does not exist.

Gig Economy Firms Avoid Labor Law by Using Contracts

Labor law imposes mandatory protections for employees, such as minimum wage, overtime pay, and the right to unionize. But these protections only apply to employees—not independent contractors.

Companies like Uber, DoorDash, and Instacart classify workers as contractors, not employees, meaning they are not covered by labor law’s safeguards. Uber and Lyft have fought a number legal battles to maintain this classification, arguing that because drivers “agree” to work under contract terms, they are not employees (California v. Uber, 2020).

Here again, corporations exploit contract law’s presumption of equality to treat workers as if they were negotiating on equal footing—when in reality, they have little to no power to bargain for better wages, hours, or working conditions.

Social Media Companies Use Contracts to Deny Users Property Rights

In the physical world, if you rent an apartment, the landlord cannot evict you without due process. Tenant protection laws exist because property law presumes an inherent power imbalance.

But in the digital world, platforms avoid these restrictions by treating users as contracting parties rather than as digital tenants.

If users had property-like rights to their accounts, platforms would need due process to ban them. But because Terms of Service agreements are structured as contracts, companies claim the right to terminate access at will. Courts have consistently upheld the right of companies to deplatform users without due process (Davidson v. Facebook, 2018).

This maneuver lets digital landlords erase people from platforms without legal recourse, using contract law to strip them of protections that property law would have granted.

Is Digital Serfdom Inevitable?

Whatever one’s libertarian predilections (and mine are quite strong), contract law’s presumption of equality is just that: a mere presumption. It was never entirely true; not when Venetian merchant banks negotiated with kings, not when spice traders negotiated with caravanserai, not when robber barons negotiated with each other. Someone always has a bit more bargaining power.

But in the hands of today’s Big Tech monopolies, contract law enforced with clickthrough licenses and one-sided terms of service has become a tool of systemic exploitation. Powerful entities—corporations, digital landlords, and gig economy firms—structure relationships in ways that legally pretend the parties are equal, even when they clearly are not.

Property law and labor law were reformed when their unequal foundations became politically unacceptable. But contract law, shielded by its illusion of fairness, has escaped such scrutiny—allowing modern economic powers to game the system.

If we want to avoid a future of digital serfdom the system has to be reformed. But bad reform is worse than bad contracts. The Right-Libertarians aren’t Wrong when they talk about the ruinous effects of government overregulation. Whatever good the reforms to property law and labor law have done to address imbalances of power, they’ve also done a lot of bad, too. Consider two examples from the Bluest state in America:

• When California passed AB 1482 requiring “just cause” for eviction in 2019, Los Angeles landlords soon become victimized by squatters who exploited tenant protections to live rent free. One landlord lost a downtown LA condo for over a year, with the squatter going to far as to change the locks and sublease the rooms!

• When California Labor Code § 510 mandated 1.5x pay for any work over 8 hours per day with a presumption in favor of the worker’s claim, many employees took advantage of post-COVID remote work to begin clocking excessive hours. In one famous case, a small retailer had to pay out $20,000 to an employee who couldn’t even prove she’d done any work, simply because the presumption of the law favored the worker.

If we “reform” contract law in the fashion of California, we’ll just make things worse. Next week, I’ll present some physiocratic approaches and open it up to the razor-edged contemplators on the Tree of Woe to discuss.