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Over the past two decades, corporations and venture capitalists have adjusted business models to change the digital world. As a result, the global economy has undergone a massive shift, changing the way we work, consume and pay for things. Under this new ‘digital feudalism’, we find precarious employment via digital platforms, we buy goods and services in perpetuity through subscriptions, and we pay for it all with debt.
Digital Feudalism explores this new moment in capitalism, and how reliant global economies have become on these processes of consumption, work, and debt.
Stuart Hall famously argued that the cultural studies must maintain a “couplet” where culture and society, are articulated together in analysis and in theory. If Hall’s statements are a measure of best critical practices in cultural studies then Digital Feudalism measures up! Arditi’s development of sharp and inaugural contributions from Marxist, or critical-sociological, approaches into critique and analysis do more merely alert us to new cultural forms but, in Arditi’s hands, they allow us to view the totality of lived relations differently. Arditi illustrates how the features of our tech-laden and tech-mediated world though increasingly patterned on an ersatz hyper-modernism are, in fact, grotesque new relations of deference and servitude more closely associated with feudalism. Through an analysis of cases that exhibit the structures and practices associated with digital feudalism—subscription services, gig work, Amazon, influencers, the metaverse, and crowdfunding to name a few—Arditi reframes the strike-waves and the composition of movements to come with a warranted note of pessimism regarding capital’s "savage" capacities for adaptation. Stitching together the best of critical social theory and cultural studies, Arditi offers readers a clear and crucial lens on our current conjuncture. The prognosis? Digital Feudalism specifies that the center no longer holds. Rather, we face a less-comfortable, rougher, and far-less reasonable, democratic unfreedom beyond which there is no clear horizon line for better or for worse.
David Arditi is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Arlington,a scholar of digital technology and an expert on streaming cultures.
Chapter 1. Introduction: A Squid Game Reality
Chapter 2. Buy More, Own Less: Subscriptions and Unending Consumption
Chapter 3. Working on your own: Precarious labor in the gig economy
Chapter 4. Debt Peonage and Primitive Accumulation
Chapter 5. Amazon and Baron Bezos
Chapter 6. Unboxed: Content Creators and influencers
Chapter 7. Metaverse: enclosing new spaces
Chapter 8. From Patron to Patreon: Crowdfunding Information
Chapter 9. Conclusion: Fed-up While Locked Down