Technofeudalism, or capitalism same as it ever was? Placing the blockchain in global capitalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this article, I place the blockchain within competing interpretations of the present as either an emerging technofeudal mode of production, or as a relatively unchanged capitalism. Drawing on a wide literature on zones – spaces in nation-states where the usual rules do not apply – I highlight three reconfigurations of territory, authority, and rights (TAR) associated with the blockchain today. These are: (1) the transnational expansion of crypto-related practices; (2) the national regulation and legitimation of cryptoassets; and (3) the reemergence of a liberal discourse linking human rights to the global exchange of private property. Through these examples, I demonstrate how the blockchain is part of a broader reshaping of accumulation and legal legitimation, mirroring the emergence of capitalism and the nation-state, but on a global scale. I conclude by arguing against the position that the reemergence of fascism is a red herring distracting us from the coming technofeudalism; instead, I claim that technofeudalism obscures the links between today’s techno-authoritarian shift and the enforcement of global corporate private property relations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".