The Road to Digital Serfdom
We stopped owning things and barely noticed
In 1944 the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote a book called The Road to Serfdom outlining what he saw as the inevitable march of a socialist society to authoritarianism and dictatorship. This book was set against the backdrop of World War 2 and what were significant socio-economic changes in Europe and particularly in the United States under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.
In his seminal work Hayek argued that societies which ‘progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs’ would inevitably descend into totalitarianism and authoritarianism. When Hayek wrote his book he felt that The United States and The United Kingdom were progressing their societies in the direction of serfdom, where individuals had very few rights. This was over 80 years ago and most intellectually honest people can see that we are no longer on this road, but have reached the destination.
In the last 80 years wealth has become more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people while most of the population in countries like The United States are trapped in the vicious chokehold of wage and debt slavery. As far as economic systems go it is hard to describe the economic system of The United States as anything except corporate feudalism, with workers toiling away at the behest of their corporate overlords. This is by design and the designers are what I refer to as: The Transatlantic Aristocracy.
Dr. Hayek’s core thesis was that serfdom would be the inevitable result of The State taking over the means of production. To be sure, save for the brief period between the post Civil War era in The United States and The Federal Reserve Act of 1913, The United States was the closest thing to a free market economic system that has ever existed anywhere in the world throughout known history.
Most systems of governance around the world have been and continue to be variations on a feudal model, perhaps this is the inevitable result of human hierarchical structures operating in a system whereby control of land and the proceeds of that land are the prime drivers of economic reality.
The mechanization that occurred at the turn of the 20th century particularly in The United States was one of the first examples in recorded history when ownership and control of land was not the only means by which wealth could be accumulated. This period of mechanization is commonly referred to as The Second Industrial Revolution. The Second Industrial Revolution led to a dramatic increase in the productivity of labor and land, thereby creating a whole new generation of ‘New Money’ that challenged the hegemony of the Land Barons of Western Europe. This technological boom was one of the first real challenges to the feudal systems that dominated the world for millennia.
Consider, for example, the mechanization of agriculture in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Innovations like the mechanical reaper, the thresher, and eventually the tractor fundamentally changed the economics of farming. Even the forced confiscation of labor could not compete with mechanized production. In a sense it was technology that stripped away the economic justification for slavery, making it possible for the moral case against it to finally prevail.
The fundamental shift in wealth and influence from the land owning class to the industrial class challenged the established world order that had existed for a thousand years. It was precisely this technological revolution that led the land owning European aristocrats to trade their titles for the wealth of the nouveau riche from The United States through what came to be known as Dollar Princesses. The Dollar Princesses were the daughters of the wealthy industrial elite in The United States, who were married to the European Aristocracy to create a new transatlantic alliance.
The increased productivity that The Second Industrial Revolution facilitated led to the fall of agricultural commodity prices. This change in the economic reality of agriculture meant the European aristocracy could no longer finance their wars, colonialism, and profligacy through the control of land.
The wealthy ‘new rich’ were flush with cash but bereft of title and the European aristocracy was flush with title and bereft of cash. Subsequently the aristocracy of Europe begrudgingly traded their title for cash and cemented their familial lineage through marriage of necessity. These economic realities also, in part, gave rise to the First World War and the Second World War that was its progeny. In addition to these conflicts The Second Industrial Revolution and the transatlantic marriages were the precursor to The Federal Reserve Act and the income tax which was enabled by The 16th Amendment. Both The Federal Reserve Act and The 16th Amendment were ratified in 1913.
The European Aristocracy gave rise to The Transatlantic Aristocracy and they continue to exert their control over The United States and Western Europe today.
Even with their new found cash The Transatlantic Aristocracy knew that their control of land was no longer sufficient to maintain their vaunted position in the human hierarchy and so they took steps to control not just the means of production (land), but now, through The Federal Reserve, the means of exchange. Additionally, the income tax enabled them to confiscate the productive capacity of the individual, allowing them to realize the fruits of this productivity boom and ensure the serf class could not challenge their hegemony.
The Transatlantic Aristocracy realized their vision in full when in 1971, as part of what became known as the Nixon Shock, the US dollar was completely divorced from the Gold Standard. This was directly responsible for separating productivity from wages. It was at this time that the road to serfdom had finally reached its destination.
The Transatlantic Aristocracy had successfully re-installed themselves as The Lords and the population at large as their serfs, this time not just through the control of the means of production, but through the complete control of the currency.
The hoi polloi had once again been brought to heel.
The Transatlantic Aristocracy and its successful control of the currency is directly responsible for the digital serfdom that we experience today.
Along The Road to Digital Serfdom
It took two world wars and 60 years, from the time of The Federal Reserve Act, for The Transatlantic Aristocracy to regain its hegemony over ‘The West’. In that time a new technological innovation developed that threatened to challenge their hard won power, namely: the transistor and the digital communication that it enabled.
The transistor made radio and television broadcasts mainstream and allowed for an unprecedented flow of information. It was also the precursor to the modern digital computer and The Internet.
The Transatlantic Aristocracy was able to gain a stranglehold over broadcast television and radio through the establishment of the Orwellian-named Fairness Doctrine and the centralization of television broadcasting through the big 3 broadcasters (CBS, ABC, NBC) and their affiliate networks. They further strengthened their control of broadcast communication with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which led to the corporate consolidation of broadcast communications such that currently, in The United States, 6 companies control 90% of all media distribution.
Just as The Transatlantic Aristocracy consolidated control of the means of exchange through The Federal Reserve and Bretton Woods, they took steps to consolidate and control the means of communication and digital distribution. Their control, however strong, was short lived, because the transistor also gave rise to the personal computer and what is now called The Internet.
Although technically the backbone of the modern internet, The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), was invented in 1974, The Internet as it is broadly understood didn’t really come to be until the early 1990s. The 1990s saw an explosion of innovation and distribution of information as the world and The United States started getting ‘online’. In addition to being a new means of communication, The Internet made possible new business models and means of content distribution.
These new means of communication and distribution quickly threatened incumbent corporate power centers. One of the most notable examples of this was the file sharing system known as Napster which threatened the music industry by making it possible to share music across the world in a matter of minutes.
The Transatlantic Aristocracy understood that this explosion in information could threaten their hegemony in the field of information, which during the period from 1971 to the 1990s had been nearly complete. By the late 1990s The Transatlantic Aristocracy had nearly complete control over News, Entertainment, and Academia.
The Internet threatened to erode their hegemony. By the early 2000s there was an explosion of websites and platforms driven by user content that enabled the widespread dissemination of information.
Suddenly the entire globe was able to communicate and collaborate in near real-time. By the late 1990s there were dozens of online search engines including AltaVista, Yahoo, Google, and Ask Jeeves to name a few.
Email enabled individuals to communicate with one another in real time through direct peer to peer exchange, mostly beyond the reach of The Transatlantic Aristocracy’s surveillance apparatus.
MySpace, which launched in 2003, was the first global social media network and in its early days was truly an open platform for all types of creators to share ideas, interests, opinions, music, and a variety of other information. MySpace came before Facebook and was its largest competitor.
Beyond just information, internet technologies began to arise that promised to facilitate open access to markets globally.
Global payments technologies like PayPal and later Bitcoin fundamentally disrupted the traditional role of middlemen that the global banking cartel had enjoyed. The early 2000s felt like a renaissance moment, a true ‘democratization’ of information.
Events like the Arab Spring proved the power of open communication to overcome incumbent political powers. Years later the GameStop Short Squeeze proved that loosely organized groups with common goals could coordinate in a way that threatened the power of the global financial elite.
Indeed, for the first time since The Age of Enlightenment (made possible by new technologies like industrial printing), it felt like digital internet technologies were going to transform our society and empower individuals more than ever before.
The Transatlantic Aristocracy took notice and they responded.
The playbook was familiar: the same strategy of consolidation that had been applied to land, then currency, was now applied to the digital domain. Starting in the late 1990s and accelerating in the 2010s there was a concerted effort to:
- Centralize Email Communication
- Consolidate Access to Search
- Centralize Social Communication
- Co-Opt Digital Payments
Centralized Email
Email is one of the earliest examples of a peer to peer communication protocol that enabled mass communication with low cost setup and limited barriers to entry. There was a concerted effort to move users away from email services provided by ISPs, private servers, and other pay services to ‘free’ centralized email services.
Microsoft, for example, bought Hotmail in 1997.
Yahoo offered free email services starting in 1997, which was later eclipsed by the now predominant Gmail.
By centralizing email, they would be able to know exactly what was being communicated, to whom, and for what purpose. Google uses the content of email to great effect for advertising and we know now, because of The Snowden Leaks, that the United States government runs a program known as PRISM to spy on basically all of humanity.
Consolidate Access To Search
While the internet protocol is decentralized by its nature, The Internet with all its information needs a mechanism for accessing that information. This is the purpose of a search engine. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Google was a little known search engine used predominantly by nerds and geeks. Throughout the 2010s Google was granted access to nearly unlimited capital and subsequently dominated the global internet search market.
The Transatlantic Aristocracy figured if they didn’t yet have a handle over the protocol, they could at least control the entry points by dominating internet search and digital advertising.
In the early days Google was, in fact, one of the best search engines, giving unbiased access to the whole of The Internet. This is one of the reasons it was widely adopted.
During the period between 2009 and the present, Google ceased to be an unbiased presenter of data and began to systematically curate search results for purposes of advertising and censorship. It began prioritizing results from ‘reputable’ sources to fight ‘misinformation’; legacy news sites like Reuters and the Associated Press were prioritized over independent outlets. Sites like Wikipedia, which were increasingly monitored and controlled by intelligence agencies, also got priority.
By consolidating search The Transatlantic Aristocracy was able to curate and control what was considered The Internet.
Because of PRISM they had nearly unfettered access to the search history across the entire world.
Centralize Social Communication
Social media represented a significant evolution in the nature of The Internet.
Social media is different from the passive consumption of information, because it represents the ability to form social bonds on a global scale. Social media also represents the ability not just to communicate, but to coordinate with others that share common goals.
Things like Facebook Groups enabled social coordination, political engagement, and at times facilitated kinetic actions like protests. The Transatlantic Aristocracy systematically drove users to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. One of the ways this was done was by removing competitors.
MySpace, for example, was purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for over $500 million in 2005 at a time when MySpace had the same number of users as Facebook.
After their acquisition of MySpace, News Corp essentially mothballed the entire project and cleared a path for Facebook to become the dominant player in social media around the world.
While Facebook was favored by the average person, sites like Twitter served as the social platform for the literati, frequented by legacy media journalists and politicians.
By centralizing social communication The Transatlantic Aristocracy didn’t just gain an amazing platform for monetization, they gained access to the personal lives of the world. Additionally they became the gatekeepers to society for the average person. When an individual is banned from Facebook, for example, they don’t just lose their voice — they lose their friends, their memories, and their digital lives. Centralized social media, it turns out, is an excellent means of control, coercion, and oppression.
Co-Opt Digital Payments
Digital payments are one of the most transformative realities of the internet. In particular, decentralized payment systems like Bitcoin represent a fundamental shift in global power dynamics and threaten to completely disrupt the global banking sector as we know it.
Unlike email and social media, digital payments represent not just the exchange of information, but the exchange of value — and in the case of Bitcoin, the ability to exchange value without a centralized intermediary like a bank. Digital payments and in particular Bitcoin are probably the biggest threat to The Transatlantic Aristocracy.
In the early days of PayPal the founders Elon Musk and Peter Thiel articulated a vision of a decentralized digital currency on the internet. Whatever their original intentions, PayPal became just another payments processor for banks and subsequently was of little threat to the global banking cartel.
Bitcoin, unlike PayPal, did and continues to represent an existential threat to one of The Transatlantic Aristocracy’s most powerful levers: International Settlements.
Through The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) central banks like The Federal Reserve control access to value exchange around the world. The BIS, a nearly 100 year old institution, is THE clearinghouse for nearly all international settlements of accounts.
For now they have attempted to mitigate the effect of Bitcoin by centralizing exchanges for cryptocurrency, thereby controlling the mechanism by which these currencies are exchanged (exchanges do not need to be centralized, but that is the predominant mechanism for crypto exchange).
By controlling and centralizing the exchanges they have controlled the point of exit where crypto can be exchanged for more conventional currencies like dollars.
The Path to Digital Freedom
Although we have been on the road toward digital serfdom for nearly as long as the internet and other digital technologies have existed, there is hope for those who wish to live in a world where digital technologies empower individuals and create a more egalitarian society.
The Internet is not a monolithic structure. In fact it is generally more precise to call it The Internet(s), because it is first and foremost a protocol for communication and accordingly it is not constrained by conventional physical barriers. As long as the protocols that make the internet possible are remembered, it cannot be owned or controlled completely by any one institution.
This will be the first post of many to discuss issues related to digital freedom, but there are specific steps that may be taken to begin embracing our natural state as free humans. We can, each of us, begin the process of revival to return The Internets to its root idea of a fully decentralized web owned and created by its participants. Specific steps include:
- Using non-standard tool sets, for instance paying for email from non-mainstream providers
- Hosting our own platforms like Mastodon, Nostr, Peer Tube, and Matrix Chat to name a few
- Buying hardware that is open source first from vendors like System76
These steps are not merely technical preferences — they are acts of structural resistance. Every user who exits a centralized platform removes a node from the surveillance and monetization graph that The Transatlantic Aristocracy depends on. The friction is real; leaving Gmail means losing convenience, leaving Facebook means rebuilding social connections. But the cost of staying is the continued surrender of your communication, your data, and your autonomy to institutions that have demonstrated, repeatedly, that they will use that access against you.
The most immediate and powerful thing that anyone can do is refusing to participate in the established centralized platforms that prevent a truly free exchange of ideas and values.
I will personally be working on establishing a more free ecosystem by building and hosting my own systems for social interaction, video sharing, and as with this blog, offering alternatives to established professional networking platforms like LinkedIn. In the future I will share more ways to assert our natural rights of free speech, free thought, and freedom of association. Keep an eye out for more posts on this topic.