Fact Check: 'Society Isn't Collapsing, It's Returning' – Feudalism Claims Analyzed

Today, it truly feels like we are all chaotically moving away from a more sane past toward this horrifying future, but

the truth is that future isn't really a future at all. It's more like a return to the past.

You will own nothing and be happy. That controversial phrase from 2016 feels truer than ever because in [music] 2026,

most can't even afford their rent, let alone buy any type of house, and it increasingly feels like ownership itself

is disappearing as everything becomes a subscription leading some to claim our economy is now resembling feudalism.

[music] I mean, the current vice president was completely funded by Peter Thiel,

someone who literally believes that the network state is the future or that medieval-like techno-fiefdoms [music]

ruled by CEO dictators are better than democracy. Social media platforms also resemble the feudal systems of the past

where profit isn't derived from a product or service anymore, but from pure ownership, and where we are digital

serfs creating all the value through our data, but getting nothing in return. But this neo-feudalist trend isn't just

limited to the obvious. We can also see it with seemingly unrelated things, too, like how horror and trauma dominate

media now to why our music is so [music] sad to the takeover of nepo babies and the rich romanticizing the poor, even to

Hollywood's strange [music] skeletal-like beauty standards. In this video, I want to explain how

society isn't collapsing, it's returning. And once you understand just how much our world now mirrors the

Middle Ages, you will literally look at society and all the problems that keep you up at night in a completely

different way. >> But over 1 billion [music] animals have been lost in wildfires. Elon Musk has

become the world's first trillionaire. >> Pop music is getting sadder and darker. >> I think it's just going to get weirder

and weirder and weirder [music] and finally it's going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about

how weird it is. A couple of days ago, I was scrolling on Instagram and saw something that was

just as [ __ ] up as it was kind of true. Someone posted all these images of skeletal looking figures from the Middle

Ages and compared them to the Ozempic celebrities we see everywhere today. And while this post was just obviously

trying to be an unserious meme, while reading the comments, I did see something interesting. Someone said,

"It's like cos playing the middle class isn't enough for them anymore. Now they're going full circle and trying to

copy the bodies of the impoverished." Now while I personally don't think these people are literally trying to mimic

anything at all and are probably just suffering from the extreme beauty standards of Hollywood, I still thought

this comment was interesting because I think there is a tiny kernel of popular sentiment expressed in it that the rich

increasingly seem so out of touch and detached from reality that it's become surreal, uncanny, and even paradoxically

medieval. The extreme plastic surgery, the out of touch interviews, even their cos play of the relatable middle class

person show us the intense disconnect that the wealthy have as inequality just continues to explode. I mean, do you

notice how it seems like everyone is a nepo baby now? It is honestly depressing how it seems like the working class

isn't really represented in pop culture anymore. And when we look at the Middle Ages, we can find a direct comparison in

the form of something called patronage. The medieval patronage system was a system in which the monarchy, church, or

aristocrats were the great [music] patrons of art. In other words, they not only commissioned great works, but they

completely funded most of these artists' entire careers. What this meant was that while these funds gave them incredible

resources to create some of the most beautiful art in all of human history, it was also only possible because of the

rich, and that meant that most of the art in these societies was a direct reflection of an elite minority and no

one else. It would be like artists today having to get funds from someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to make art, and

once they did, they would have all these new resources, but that art wouldn't be whatever they wanted, it would be what

the billionaires wanted. Like, imagine instead of the Catholic Church commissioning giant biblical frescoes,

it was Elon Musk wanting statues of himself or maybe Bezos requesting phallic sculptures of rockets.

>> But it looks like a giant dick. >> Yeah. >> Take a look at a starboard.

>> Oh my god, it looks like a huge >> pecker. >> Now, obviously this exact example

doesn't exist today. >> Yet. >> But when we look at the entertainment

industry, we do see something similar with the continuing consolidation of corporate power in the gatekeepers of

culture. You could honestly even argue that what we have today is worse than the patronage system because back then

the artists themselves often came from non-aristocratic backgrounds. Like, they didn't just inherit their professions

from their parents, and everyone knew the art they made was funded by and reflective of wealthy elites. While

today we are constantly lied to as the rich cosplay as poor or indie to be relatable instead of just being honest.

I think of that weird photo shoot Justin Bieber did last year, Tyra Banks' unhinged immersion in homeless culture.

>> I I just want to try to immerse myself as much as possible into the homeless culture.

>> Even the luxury brands that are going full circle to try and turn tattered clothing into status symbols. It

honestly all reminds me of Marie Antoinette's French Hamlet where she liked to cosplay as a simple peasant

farm girl walking around her rustic theme park-like recreation of a village. Now, to be fair, Marie Antoinette didn't

live in the Middle Ages and this cosplay had more to do with enlightenment ideas that nature and farm life were the way

humans were meant to live in response to rapid urbanization. But wait a minute, does that not sound familiar? With the

rise of the tradwife aesthetic and influencers like Nara Smith, we see a similar thing happening. In response to

processed foods and the often dystopian nature of the modern technological world, the rich turn to a life that

seems simpler, romanticizing not just a working-class existence but the most labor-intensive version of it in the

form of farm life. The irony here is that we now live in a world where it seems like only the rich can afford to

be poor. Only the wealthy can choose to live this laborious farm life where they spend hours making sprinkles from

scratch and consuming all-natural ingredients while the rest of us are far too overworked to often even cook our

own food, let alone tend to farm animals for natural ingredients. For most of human history, having others cook for

you was the status symbol, but now with the lack of time the average person has to cook and with things like fast food

and DoorDash, we see an inversion where being able to prepare your own meals and use all-natural ingredients has become

the status symbol. And when we again look at how skinny so many people are in Hollywood, I'm reminded that heroin chic

isn't just back, it's nearly instantaneously achievable with Ozempic giving you noticeable results in as

little as a week. The extreme changes in the wealthy's physical appearances kind of remind me of medieval sumptuary laws

except they've been inverted in really weird ways. In the Middle Ages, the ruling class passed what they called

sumptuary laws, laws that dictated not just what you could wear, but what colors you could own, what fabrics

literally touched your skin, or how many jewels you could display. These were intended to prevent what they viewed as

immoral societal decay and to enforce a class [music] hierarchy. For example, peasants were restricted to coarse wool,

merchants to linen, nobles to silk and velvet, and gold and silver threads were forbidden to anyone below a certain

rank. Now, obviously, the biggest difference compared to today is that back then plumpness meant power. A full

figure signaled that you could afford to eat constantly, that you were fed while others starved. What's happening now is

the inverse of this, but equally controlling in arguably a more sinister way. The sumptuary law isn't written in

legal statute anymore. It's enforced through abstract wealth disparities that limit what most have access to. Today,

being thin is now expensive, not because food is scarce. We obviously have food abundance, but because access to healthy

foods and even just the luxury of extra time to work out is scarce. Thin in a culture that produces cheap calories

[music] requires extra resources and energy. Ozempic costs over $800 a month without insurance and the waiting lists

are often years long. Personal trainers cost hundreds per session. Cosmetic procedures like buccal fat removal to

maintain this new skeletal look costs tens of thousands. Even just the access to quality health care are luxury goods

restricted to only a certain social group, no different than silk was in 1400. Meanwhile, lower-income Americans

are disproportionately overweight, not because they lack discipline, but because cheap food is calorie dense and

nutrient poor. And what are we all told in response to this? To be body positive. Now, I obviously have nothing

against body positivity. I just think it's interesting that it's kind of sold to us as like liberation, while the ones

pushing it are using every tool they have to alter their appearance at the slightest change of trends. It's just

kind of hypocritical that we are often told to radically accept our flaws by those who treat physical features and

even body types like they're disposable. To me, this all just feels like the medieval noble, but in reverse. Instead

of proving wealth through abundance, they're proving it through the illusion of scarcity, but with it being

voluntary, controlled, and perfectly managed. Only the rich can now afford to look starved. The parallel honestly gets

even darker when you look at what comes next. >> [music]

>> In the Middle Ages, sumptuary laws became increasingly baroque as the merchant class gained wealth and tried

to display it. Authorities kept raising the restrictions because the rules kept getting broken because these people had

more money and they wanted to show it off. The gap between legal status and actual wealth kept widening until the

system collapsed under its own contradictions, and we're kind of heading toward that same moment now.

Thinness is becoming the status marker, but thinness requires Ozempic, which is becoming more accessible. If weight loss

drugs become cheaper, if insurance starts covering them more easily, if they get democratized in the same way so

many pharmaceutical drugs eventually do, then what? They'll probably go back to curves, or they'll move toward something

biological that money can still buy. Literal age reversal through stem cell treatments, organ rejuvenation,

biological markers of youth that poor people can't access. This is why I kind of think that soon beauty standards will

go full circle, and being ugly will eventually become the new status symbol. Like the rich will be the only ones

allowed to have natural, unconventional beauty, or have unaltered appearances, while literally using bioengineering to

halt aging. It all comes down to this strange simulator performance the rich are constantly engaged in to mimic

things like working class struggle, authenticity, or even just like what we see today with makeup trends that make

you look completely natural while still wearing makeup. Now, I know what you're all thinking right now. Hasn't all this

stuff always existed? Like haven't there always been the haves and have nots, and haven't the rich always used things to

signal their status? And the answer to that is yes. Like fundamentally, yeah, wealth has always been about

opportunity. Forget happiness or big houses or nice cars. Wealth gives people the ability to choose things that others

just don't get to choose. Like choosing to wear nice things or spend your time on a farm or working out and eating all

natural. But there was a short period of time when that divide wasn't as great as it is today. When the middle class

dominated most aspects of society and politics, and we kind of took it for granted as the rule, not the exception

that has to be fought for. Like the exact reason people point to most of human history and say, "Well, look, the

rich have always had all these benefits while the majority didn't. So, our current world isn't all that different

after all." is the exact evidence that we are returning to the feudal-like way things had operated for millennia.

But let's go back to the economic miracle America experienced not that long ago to really see what I mean here.

In the century, we truly saw something that had never happened before in human history. The formation and domination of

an insanely wealthy middle class. During the peak of the New Deal liberal consensus,

>> [music] >> the working class had more power in society than ever before, and something

called the Great Compression occurred. The wealthy were taxed at rates as [music] high as 90%, and all that extra

wealth was redistributed in the form of public services like social security, Medicaid, [music]

new roads, better schools, and other public works projects. Record high union rates, as well as strong market

regulations, meant the average person's wages were higher and stronger than ever before, while healthy manufacturing

sectors meant goods and services were extremely cheap. I mean, this was the time when an entire family could survive

on a single income, and homes could be bought from a Sears catalog. Like, imagine being able to order an

affordable home from Amazon today. Popular culture was also invented in this time, and most of the musicians and

bands we saw came from a working-class background, meaning the average person was represented in culture more than

literally any other time in human history. Today, we live in a world where this weird celebrity status billionaires

have, and their unapologetic flaunting of wealth, seems like it has always existed. But, in the 20th century, that

kind of became taboo. Not only were there just fewer ultra-wealthy people in general because of taxes, but there was

also this cultural aversion the super-rich had to flaunting wealth or publicly influencing society like we see

today, and these people tended to live private lives mostly out of the public eye. So, yes, the wealthy have always

existed, but there was a brief time, not that long ago, when not only was inequality just not as bad as it is

today, but there was also a belief that flaunting wealth was a bad look, and the middle class dominated most aspects of

culture. Now, we seem to be seeing a regression to a world before that. But, all those things are easy. Like, they're

all issues we all know society has, and they're conversations we've been having for a while now. I think what is really

fascinating about this all is what happens when we understand that none of these things are really happening in

isolation. They're all connected to much bigger, darker trends that are literally going to shock you with just how much

they resemble the Middle Ages. Like this next part of the video is going to blow your mind.

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time when the United States is a service and

information economy, when nearly all of the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries, when

awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, >> Elon Musk has bought Twitter.

>> and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues, >> Fake news. You're fake news.

>> when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority,

>> Sir, no, I'm Singaporean. No. >> when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our

critical faculties in decline, >> Gen Z is the first generation of modern history to underperform us on basically

every cognitive measure we have from basic attention, >> unable to distinguish between what feels

good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

That was Carl Sagan from his now prophetic 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.

This quote has been used time and time again, usually as a visionary example of the rise of anti-intellectualism in

America, but I actually think it's much bigger than just that. I think what Carl Sagan is really predicting here is the

slow destruction of the modern era itself and the values that built our advanced civilization. Science,

empiricism, critical thinking, democracy, rule of law, the idea of a collective good at all are rapidly being

dismantled thanks to unimaginable wealth inequality and destabilizing communication technologies that

prioritize engagement over truth. Now, it's important to note that history isn't as linear as we like to believe,

but I think we really do take the 20th century for granted. It's like we did see a pretty substantial period, at

least in the West, where civil rights, technology, science, wealth, even cultural trends seem to progress

linearly. I mean, for a good chunk of time, politicians kept religion mostly out of politics, and there was a real

move away from magical thinking, at least in the way policies were made around expertise in empiricism instead

of misinformation, corporate interference, or religion. It really seemed like progress was linear, that

logic and reason had won, that the world was no longer seen as magical or mysterious, and that everything was

explainable by science. It's like, you ever hear people complain that they were born too late to experience the age of

exploration, or born too early for the space age, or just that they feel science has so sufficiently exposed our

natural world that wonder and enchantment seem completely lost. It's this idea that we are now completely and

forever removed from the past thanks to technology and science, that our modern world is currently challenging.

>> Uh I think it's just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder, and finally, it's going to be so weird that

people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. I look for the invention [music] of artificial life,

the cloning of human beings, possible contact with extraterrestrials, possible human immortality, and at the same time,

[music] appalling acts of brutality, genocide, race baiting, uh homophobia,

famine, starvation. Eventually, people are going to say, "What the hell is going on?"

>> Contemporary public life increasingly feels claustrophobic, faintly hallucinatory, where what we know as

real feels like sand shifting under our feet. The First Lady, Melania Trump, walks a humanoid robot down a White

House red carpet and later tells the audience to imagine a future humanoid educator named Plato. A former

intelligence official testifies under oath that the United States has been secretly retrieving and reverse

engineering crashed UFOs for decades and that non-human biologics have been recovered. Demonic vexation, [music]

teleportation, increased interest in religious practice, those phenomenon are all signs that life feels to many

increasingly charged with unseen forces. You might say it has been re-enchanted. There's a widespread feeling that the

material explanation is no longer sufficient, that something uncanny, maybe even numinous, is diffuse into the

texture of ordinary American life. In 1917, the sociologist Max Weber argued that a long process of rationalization

culminating in modernity was eliminating, quote, "mysterious incalculable forces from the world."

Science would explain, technology would master, and magic would disappear. For a brief stretch of modern history, he

seemed right. The enduring human instinct to believe in the otherworldly declined as empiricism, common

evidentiary standards, and for the shortest period of all, mass media produced a rough consensus about what

was real. Now, we seem to be sliding back. That was a quote from a New York Times

article by Katia Ungerbuehler where she argues things like anti-intellectualism, social media's mass information, and the

resurgence of religion and superstition mirror a return to the Middle Ages in the form of the re-enchantment of

society where so many things now seem possible again and material explanations increasingly feel suspect. Ever since I

read that article, I couldn't stop thinking about it, not because I never really thought about the things she

talks about in it, but because it helped me complete this idea I've had for a while now, it's a bit complex, but stay

with me here because you're going to need all the context to grasp what I am trying to say. And once you do,

everything from why artists like Ariana Grande and Doja Cat are suddenly obsessed with horror to the rise of

mental illness and the feeling that the world is ending will make sense. So, if any of you have been following my

channel for a while now, you might know that in the beginning I talked a lot about artists like Lana Del Rey or Ethel

Cain or even Grimes. When I first started this channel, I was making all kinds of videos and one day I just

happened to make one about Lana Del Rey which exploded and so I started a series about her where I talked about Tumblr

sad girl culture, romanticism and philosophy, and just the trends of the 90s throughout the 2010s.

What was so interesting was that over time, completely by accident, I began to notice something about society and art.

It seems like ever since the 2000s, there has been this trend where angst, despair, and sadness have become the

dominant forces shaping culture. Music has increasingly become centered around loss and angst, and mental health

disorders have never been higher. As time went on, I began to connect this to the fact that horror adjacent imagery

seems weirdly everywhere in music now. There was Lil Nas X, Billie Eilish, Doja Cat, Lady Gaga, and now even Ariana

Grande in her newest album Petal. As I made more and more videos on these topics, I would find myself always

coming back to these three causes: postmodernism, neoliberalism, and social media. Postmodernism is basically the

philosophical era we are currently in, even though some now argue we are in metamodernism, but that's a topic for

another video. And it helps to explain everything from media, humor, politics, literature, and even the way you view

yourself and the world. It helps explain why everything in our society is so influenced by irony, skepticism,

intertextuality, subjectivism, and above all, a rejection of grand narratives. It's basically why everything is a

reference of a reference now, why everyone seems so performative, it's why simulation seems more important than

what's actually real, and most of all, it's why so many people feel like nothing matters anymore, or that they

don't even know what's real because media has become so infinite. In the previous modern era, the grand narrative

was inevitable progress toward an eventual utopia. In other words, with the Renaissance and humanism, democracy,

capitalism, scientific and industrial revolutions, human society would continually be improved and progress is

linear. Optimism dominated and the future [music] was seen as exciting. With postmodernism, all that basically

collapsed and optimism, cynicism, and nihilism begin to coexist all at the same time. Some people believed the

future was bright, others felt we were doomed, some just gave up paying attention altogether because nothing

mattered anymore. In other words, there wasn't this grand agreed upon idea that dominated society and constant

contradiction born from an endless stream of media took over. I know that might seem kind of abstract

to those who don't really pay attention or care about philosophy, but the simple thing here is that we now live in a

society [music] where there isn't one guiding belief that dominates everything anymore. Postmodernism is simply the

decentralization and deconstruction of ideas, beliefs, and the truths of the past. [music] So, you combine that with

neoliberalism decimating the economic conditions of those in the West leading to incredible wealth inequality, and

then social media, which is just built on throwing every problem imaginable in our face while also flooding us with so

much information, and then the unprecedented destruction American politicians are inflicting on the world,

and it all leads us to not only feel like we are in a constant state of grief, but also that there is now

something we can all agree on. Collapse is the only thing that feels certain. Bro-ligarchs hell-bent on turning the

most powerful country in the world into a corporate dictatorship, social media turning us all against each other and

truth itself, capitalism burning our planet to the ground, it truly feels like no matter what political sides you

are on, no matter where you live, no matter what language you speak, the [music] end feels near and the future

couldn't seem more dark. In this way, what we find in the popularity of all these horror films, constant exposé

culture, rise in anti-intellectualism, extreme institutional distrust, and the popularity of art that reflects our

collective despair and trauma, is a sense that collapse has become the new grand narrative. It's even starting to

feel like we've entered a new era, the era of end-modernism, where all the beliefs, institutions, and ideologies of

the modern era are systemically being dismantled as social media strips our civilization of liberal values in favor

of unrelenting negativity, division, misinformation, magical thinking, and authoritarianism.

Postmodernism allowed dissent and constant contradiction to flourish, but today it is starting to feel like our

problems are so numerous and existential [music] and our disconnection from each other and even a shared reality is

atomizing us into these algorithmic village-like tribes that it truly does feel like hopeless. Right now, this idea

I have is obviously in its infancy and I'm sure a bunch of people who know way more about everything can find ways to

argue it's wrong, but when I do think about like what the most likely future is, I see a time when it's obvious. I

see a future where the extremely wealthy live in luxury space stations or maybe even in utopian planetary colonies while

Earth has become one giant impoverished ghetto as we see the concept of white flight but on a global scale. I see a

climate crisis where entire cities are abandoned due to sea level rise as billions migrate inland and crops fail

as climatic patterns shift. I see our modern standard of living that we've all grown so accustomed to as well as the

institutions and democracies that built it continuing to decay, devolving into incapable monarchy-like walled kingdoms

in the same way the fall of the Roman Empire led to nearly 8,000 years of regression before the Renaissance. So,

when I read that New York Times article, I felt that someone had finally put words this idea I've had for a while now

but also that instead of everything just collapsing in this linear way toward a state of nothing, it was more like

everything was instead regressing to a period before modernism that increasingly resembles the Middle Ages.

We all see how much upheaval and damage social media is doing to society and it leads many of us to feel untethered and

worried about where this is all headed. But we've actually seen this happen before about 600 years ago with the

printing press. Before the printing press, the church held a monopoly on information. They controlled what got

written, what got read, and what people knew about the world. Knowledge was scarce, gatekept, and that scarcity gave

them power. When Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, it didn't just make books cheaper, it shattered the

entire information hierarchy. Suddenly, anyone with some money could access text that were previously forbidden. The

Bible got printed in vernacular languages instead of Latin. Heretical ideas started circulating and scientific

papers spread without church approval. The monopoly on consensus broke. This led to informational chaos and an

explosion of decentralization, the Reformation, wars over ideology, complete social destabilization as

people suddenly had access to all these competing versions of truth and [music] no central authority to tell them which

one was right. Social media did the exact same thing, just faster and weirder. For most of human history,

information was controlled by gatekeepers. Newspapers, TV stations, publishing houses, and journalists and

editors decided what stories mattered, what got amplified, and also what stayed hidden. And yes, while this centralized

gatekeeping led to the ability to abuse that power, it also led to the institutionalization of fact-checking

and research. Television stations and journalists couldn't just say whatever they wanted. They had rules and

regulations. Then, social media gave everyone their own printing press in their pocket. Suddenly, a random person

could reach millions of views, and misinformation spread faster than truth because the truth was expensive and lies

were cheap. This is because the truth takes a lot of resources and energy to discover, and it's often so complex and

layered that it's boring compared to a simple, inflammatory lie. Television did what social media has made exponential,

and competing narratives are so abundant now that it can be hard to really believe what's real at times, and this

isn't even factoring in AI. The printing press took 200 years to stabilize into new power structures, and social media

has only been destabilizing us for 15 years. So, when you understand what the printing press did to Europe with

hundreds of years of religious wars, that doesn't make our future look all that great with social media. And I

mean, when we do look at AI, social media actually doesn't look that bad in comparison. Social media steals data and

personal information, but AI is attempting to steal the entirety of human knowledge, culture, talent, art,

jobs, and then sell it all back to us in the form of, you guessed it, subscriptions.

>> Data is the last frontier of colonization. They took our land [music] and then tried to sell it back to us.

Now they're taking our data and trying to sell it back to us as a service. >> While social media resembles feudalism,

AI resembles colonialism from the digital to the physical. Unfathomable amounts of human data and labor in the

form of model training are being stolen without permission or payment around the planet and data centers are like mini

colonies springing up in the most vulnerable small towns around America to take advantage of public services like

cheap water and electricity. I'm reminded of early American settlements or the modern Israeli ones which take

over indigenous lands for their abundant resources while decimating the environment and local populations in the

process. It's honestly insane that the modern fascist right complains so much about the threat of socialism today when

socialism has actually always existed in America. It's just that it's only for the rich instead of everyone else. The

lower 99% consistently have their wealth redistributed to the top 0.001% in the form of tax cuts, government bailouts,

and subsidies. But hey, capitalism might have its downsides, but at least we all get the chance to participate and

potentially even own our own property and businesses, right? Well, if you have spent any time online lately, you might

have seen the rise in something called subscription memes. These are those memes about how everyday items like your

car or fridge or even bed will eventually need a subscription to use. And obviously these memes are funny as

[ __ ] but I think there is also some truth in them. I remember when subscriptions first came

out and they were an option sold alongside physical media. Like they were seen as these innovative alternatives

that just made everything more convenient. I mean, why drive all the way to a store to buy a physical DVD of

something when you could just pay a fee and download it instantly to your computer. And the best part was that you

could also get updates installed instantly instead of having to go to the store again and buy the newer product.

But, the thing is, this only really works when there are other options and competition. Competition encourages

lowering prices and offering the consumer with more features, but once a monopoly forms or once the majority of

things become subscriptions, now there are no more options for us to choose from and prices skyrocket while quality

plummets. And because updates are now instant and these apps function on an algorithmic black box, companies can

force us to pay for an upgrade while the service we originally bought, which had no problems, suddenly starts glitching

and doesn't work anymore until we upgrade. I mean, it's one thing if we at least owned these services and they just

naturally stopped working over time because, you know, newer computers inevitably advance so much that older

software eventually might not be compatible, but we don't even own these things anymore. And so, we are trapped

in this predatory cycle of forced upgrades while quality declines and there's nothing we can do about it.

Another way to think about all this is the concept of enshittification. Enshittification is a term coined by

writer Cory Doctorow to describe how digital platforms decay. First, platforms are good to users to lock us

in, then they abuse users to benefit business customers like advertisers, and finally, they then abuse those

advertisers to claw back all value for themselves leaving a useless shell of a service.

Think about how early Instagram or TikTok were so peak, but now are so dominated by ads and subscriptions and

influencers trying to sell you something that it feels like they are completely ruined, but [music] so many people are

now so addicted that they can't really stop using them. Enshittification perfectly helps explain the modern

subscription apocalypse where consumers own nothing and pay endlessly. But, perhaps nothing explains our modern

society more than Yanis Varoufakis' concept of techno-feudalism. You've probably noticed the modern

internet now feels less like an open source of free knowledge and more like a collection of massive walled kingdoms.

That is the core idea behind techno feudalism, the theory that big tech companies have essentially turned the

global economy back into the Middle Ages. Instead of traditional capitalism where companies compete by making and

selling actual products, tech giants now make their billions simply by owning the digital territory. They are the new

lords and the digital platforms they own, like Amazon, Apple, or Google, are their fiefdoms. But if tech giants are

the lords, then what does that make us? Well, in this sort of system, we are essentially the digital peasants. In the

medieval days, serfs didn't own the land, they toiled on it, gave a massive cut of their harvest to the lord, and

received basic protection in return. Today, every time you post a video, write a tweet, upload a photo, or leave

a comment, you are generating free data that makes these platforms vastly wealthier. We don't get paid for the

value we create, instead we pay a digital rent just to exist online while algorithmic lords dictate the rules of

our labor and survival. This shift shows us that our modern world is moving away from free market capitalism and backward

toward a system of rent and monopolies. In the 19th and 20th centuries, capitalism was about factories, [music]

profits, and wages. Today, techno feudalism is about cloud capital, rent seeking, and behavioral control. We live

under the illusion of infinite choice, but we are ultimately trapped within a handful of massive digital estates. It's

really insane when you think about it because it's like we have all been led to believe that the internet made so

many things free through all this unlimited access because we are just unable to truly perceive how much our

data is being used and harvested, and just how valuable it is. That is the real price of using these services and

it's ironic because it is our data. So, not only should we not have to pay for anything on these apps, but they should

be paying us to use them since they are getting so much out of us. But, I honestly think the scariest part about

everything we are talking about is how hell-bent so many billionaires are on literally bringing back the age of

fiefdoms in the form of network states. The network state is basically this concept developed by Silicon Valley

billionaires who believe that democracy is ill-equipped for the challenges and technologies of the future. So, they

advocate for this idea of forming small states from scratch that are often ruled by CEO dictators which run on

cryptocurrency and which eventually gain full sovereignty and recognition by other nation states around the world.

>> They have this idea largely stemming from the sovereign individual book that technology [music] means democracy is an

obsolete software system. That the United States is an obsolete country. That it won't survive the 21st century.

Some call it the network state. Curtis Yarvin called it Patchworks. Part of their apocalyptic vision for the future

is that the country will be broken up. It will no longer be one country. It'll be broken up into these sort of

corporate zones or fiefdoms called Patchworks or network states. And the [music] new governing structure will be

these autocratic dictator-like corporations that will have total power over their citizens. Yarvin wrote that

they could even turn unproductive people into biodiesel to fuel city buses. But, he said he was just kidding about that

but that we what we really need for the poor is an alternate humane alternative to genocide.

>> So, in other words, billionaires are so brilliant that they reinvented the medieval fiefdom but think it's some

novel idea. What I find so scary about this is that we can actually see this ideology being

represented in mainstream politics today. It's why someone like Elon Musk was allowed to act as a CEO dictator on

day one and illegally dismantle government programs without congressional approval. It's why someone

like J.D. Vance, who was completely funded by Peter Thiel, was chosen as the vice president. When you understand this

authoritarian feudal-like fervor that is coming out of Silicon Valley, what we see in American politics today then

makes a lot more sense. Like these people aren't just incompetent and that's why they're destroying

everything. The destruction is the whole point to accelerate a sort of CEO king to be installed so he can run the

country like a business instead of a democracy. Curtis Yarvin is another influential person in the idea of the

nation-state and he literally actively, openly advocates for the return of monarchy and authoritarianism and points

to corporations in China as examples of why democracy doesn't work. >> Let's debunk this concept of liberal

democracy. There's actually no such thing. Democracy in today's world just means a

good or legitimate government. It means a claim to a legitimate government. Just because you call yourself a democracy

doesn't mean anything. North Korea calls itself the DPRK, Democratic People's Republic of Korea. That is three

euphemisms for democracy, one place name, and it's a monarchy. Anything that works is a monarchy.

>> He calls his ideas the Dark Enlightenment or the belief that things like democracy, rule of law, separation

of powers, critical thinking, and liberalism should be replaced with authoritarianism and anti-egalitarian

values. Some other concepts of the Dark Enlightenment include a rejection of the idea that history naturally moves

towards more freedom and fairness and they argue that democracy leads to social decay, inefficiency, and

political corruption. They believe that only business leaders are smart or worthy enough to lead everybody else and

it is literally just the reintroduction of divine right but with wealth being that divine justification. So, when you

take all the things we've talked about in this video from the appearances of the rich and the romanticization of

peasant life to technofeudalism and CEO monarchs, we find that our society isn't just accidentally mirroring a past

feudal Europe, but that there are incredibly powerful people who are actively working every single day to

bring us closer to a world like it before the ideas of democracy and individual rights dominated society.

It's all connected and it's a lot more literal than you probably thought before clicking on this video. Now, I know all

this information probably makes you feel so incredibly worried and even overwhelmed and that's because it

should. To really help you all understand the gravity of what we are dealing with here, I can't just ignore

our reality and simply offer some feel-good quick solution. It is really bad and these people have already done

so much damage to society. Like you should be extremely worried and concerned.

But, guess what? Just like we've seen feudal Europe before, we've also been in a time when the world literally felt

like it was ending. When you look at the art and culture from the World Wars, I mean, it was bad. These events broke

people's minds and fates and not just in society or progress, but even just in the goodness of humanity itself for

decades. And yet, things not only got better, but about 20 years later, we saw the golden age of capitalism and the

second American founding with the expansion of civil rights. It's never over until it's over and if nothing

else, at least we're far more aware today. If you haven't already, I suggest reading Democracy Awakening by Heather

Cox Richardson and subscribing to her YouTube channel because she kind of explains all this far better than I can.

When we look at the overwhelming problems in society today, it is important to understand that none of

these things happened overnight. Like Trump didn't just create them in 2016. Everything we see happening was the

result of deliberate policy choices that occurred over like 60 years while the majority of people slept through the

warnings and completely checked out. The Southern Strategy, Reagan's trickle-down policies, the left moving center right

in the '90s, Bush creating the modern surveillance state and expanding executive power, Obama's military

strikes without congressional approval, the legitimization of genocidal fascism, all these things helped get us exactly

to where we are today. And when you actually understand history, you will see Trump is a cause and a symptom of

decades of policy and ideology, and he really is just like neoliberalism taken to the extreme. I think today we are all

just so aware of everything, and it's why Heather named her book Democracy Awakening because Trump was the wake-up

call. Knowledge is power, and I almost feel like in the tiniest of ways that we needed a second unrestrained Trump term

to finally wake up privileged non-minority Americans to see that fascism can happen anywhere, and that we

need a new deal-like movement that offers real change to combat it, not the do-nothing centrism of the past. And I

mean, there are also some serious advantages we have today compared to the past. For one, most of the population

was illiterate, and information just wasn't as widely available. They also didn't have the Enlightenment, which

seared the values of equality, justice, individual rights, or a separation of powers into us all. Now, I know what

you're thinking. Well, yeah, we might hear about these values all the time, but I mean, look around the world. Look

at Trump. Look at this entire video. Most don't even follow them. And to that, I would say, yes, that's true. But

the awareness of contradiction itself is what is significant. We often take these values for granted in the West, but they

are incredibly powerful. Like the founders knew this, and dictators all over the world also know this, which is

why they fight tooth and nail to suppress them. I mean, the civil rights movement and even just the push to end

slavery were people just striving to faithfully fulfill those values because of the contradictions, not despite them.

In other words, because we are all mostly raised to believe in these liberal values of freedom and justice

for all, we are then more sensitive to injustice in the world, which leads us to fight and make our societies better.

Like yeah, that fight might be long, and it can be unbearable to see such atrocities everywhere, but the very fact

that we don't just accept it and still strive toward a more perfect society makes us so different from literally any

other time in human history. Like I really don't think people appreciate this fact enough. Back then, people

would see horrific, immoral, unimaginable things every day, but guess what? Social hierarchies were ingrained

in their minds, and these values that everyone is equal, or that we should want a more equitable world, or that

even just progress itself was a thing, didn't exist. The exact fact that we are raised to believe America is this

exceptional place, yet we constantly point out all the ways it's not, shows us that even when these liberal values

are so obviously ignored, just the awareness of them leads us to never settle and relentlessly fight for

change. Do you think anyone in Great Depression America could have ever imagined the prosperity and reform that

would arrive like just 15 years later? In the 19th century, most Americans thought the wealthy elite slave owners

would win the Civil War and export their system not just to the north, but also around the world. I mean, America was

literally built on slavery, and the fact that we don't have it anymore is one of the biggest accomplishments I look to to

give me hope. Because if there's anything I would have never expected to happen when understanding the people who

formed this country, it would be the abolishment of slavery. Yet here we are. I just believe that things usually have

to get really, really bad before they get better. And all I can say is do not give up and to know nothing is ever set

in stone. Societies change all the time when all hope seems lost. It's just that these changes are often born from

crisis. And if there's anything we know for sure, it's that today we are in crisis.