High Desert Institute

Lore: Fourth Corporate War: Technofeudalism

Corporate War IV: Technofeudal

(approx. 2008–Present)

Core pattern: enclosure returns, but it’s digital: identity, attention, compute, data, discovery, and distribution become “land.”

Sovereignty model: “you don’t own things; you access them under a lord’s terms.”
Primary terrain: app stores, clouds, model weights, chips, undersea cables, identity/payment rails, platforms, algorithmic discovery.
Weapons: lock-in, API tolls, subscriptionization, surveillance, deplatforming, compute rationing, walled gardens, interoperability denial.

What makes it a corporate war

Firms control the means of participation: Identity, distribution, and speech visibility are controlled by private platforms. To exist digitally is to be a tenant.
Exit costs are engineered: Network effects, closed standards, and proprietary ecosystems make leaving a platform prohibitively expensive or socially isolating.
“Private law” governs daily life: Terms of Service (ToS) and algorithmic enforcement regulate behavior more directly and frequently than public law.

Current Status

This is the ongoing conflict of our time, where the battle is for control over the digital infrastructure that underpins reality itself.

Major Battles

The App Store Wars (Epic vs. Apple)

The Tollbooth Rebellion

Major Belligerents: Epic Games vs. Apple / Google.
Stakes / Terrain: The 30% tax on all digital commerce and the right to exist on the platform without paying the landlord.
What Happened: Epic tried to bypass the payment system; Apple removed Fortnite. A legal battle ensued over the definition of a monopoly.
Outcome: Partial legal victory for Apple (walled garden upheld), but regulatory pressure increased globally (DMA in Europe).
Strategic Consequences: Highlighted that in a technofeudal system, you do not own your business; you operate it at the pleasure of the platform owner.

The Reddit API Protests (2023)

Enclosure of the Commons

Major Belligerents: Reddit Inc. vs. Its Own Users / Moderators.
Stakes / Terrain: Access to data for AI training vs. the ecosystem of third-party apps and community tools.
What Happened: Reddit priced its API to kill third-party apps (to hoard data for AI). Moderators went on strike; Reddit threatened to remove them.
Outcome: Reddit forced the API changes, destroyed third-party apps, and proved that “community” has no leverage against ownership.
Strategic Consequences: The end of the “open web” era; data is now a proprietary resource to be mined, not shared.

The OpenAI Board Coup (2023)

Capture of the Safety Brake

Major Belligerents: Microsoft / Capital vs. Non-Profit Governance.
Stakes / Terrain: Control over AGI development and commercialization speed.
What Happened: The non-profit board fired CEO Sam Altman for lack of candor. Microsoft and employees threatened to leave.
Outcome: Restoration of Sam Altman, effective removal of non-profit oversight, cementing Microsoft’s control.
Strategic Consequences: Demonstrated that no governance structure can withstand the pressure of trillion-dollar capital incentives.

← More Info About The Corporate Wars

The Exodus

The Net vs the Nets

During the fourth corporate war, the technofeudal platforms became fully enshitified. They had made it illegal to leave. They had made it illegal and infeasible to build an alternative. They aggressively moved to destroy and defang any serious avenues to better alternatives on the net.

Enshitification happens in several stages:

Stage 1: Good to Users The platform provides a high-quality, valuable service to attract users and build a large audience, often operating at a loss funded by venture capital. The focus is on user growth and experience to gain a strong market position.
Stage 2: Good to Business Customers Once the user base is large enough to form a “two-sided market,” the platform shifts its focus to extracting value from its business customers (e.g., advertisers, sellers, content creators). This usually involves degrading the user experience to force business customers to spend more (e.g., making organic reach harder to encourage ad buys).
Stage 3: Extraction of Value for Shareholders Having become stronger than both users and business customers, the platform takes all remaining surplus value for itself, prioritizing short-term profits for shareholders. The quality of service for everyone declines significantly, as the company is “too big to care” due to lack of competition.

A necessary biproduct of the enshitifaction of the net was an exodus of the technological priesthood. The right conditions were there, and it just happened. The smart creatives who had actually built the platforms found themselves adrift on the net, steeping in an endless miasma of shit.

Gradually at first, and then all at once, the technological priesthood departed the mundane enshitified net, creating their own pocket universes in the form of private nets. These manifold microgrids functioned as independent nodes for family and friends; where free and open source alternatives thrived.

FOSS alternatives to the enshitified platforms had long since been superior options. They were everything from stage one of enshitification, with stages 2-4 being impossible. Eventually, a moment came when suddenly everyone realized Omelas wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and they walked away. They wallked away from the Net and they built the Nets.