Against The New Feudalism Of Algorithms And Oligarchs
from the we-are-not-peasants dept
Americans are not peasants. We are citizens of a republic founded on the revolutionary proposition that ordinary people can govern themselves. This isn’t poetry or aspiration—it’s the foundational premise of the American project. And right now, a faction of tech oligarchs is betting everything on proving that premise wrong.
They want to replace “We the People” with “We the Users.”
When Peter Thiel writes that democracy and freedom are incompatible, he’s not making a philosophical observation. He’s stating a preference. When Elon Musk guts federal agencies while posting American flags, he’s not reforming government. He’s replacing citizenship with administration. When Silicon Valley oligarchs speak about “optimization” and “efficiency,” they’re not talking about improving systems that serve citizens. They’re talking about managing peasants.
Because that’s what they think we are. Peasants. Masses incapable of self-governance. Users to be monetized. Workers to be replaced. Voters to be manipulated through algorithmic feeds designed to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. Populations requiring management by those with superior intelligence and technological sophistication.
You see this in your daily life. An algorithm decides what news you see, not your own judgment about what matters. Your feed is curated by systems optimized for engagement rather than truth, designed to keep you scrolling rather than thinking. Your attention becomes their commodity. Your consciousness becomes their resource. Your capacity for independent judgment gets systematically eroded by platforms that treat you as a user to be optimized rather than a citizen capable of self-governance.
This represents the complete inversion of the American founding premise. The revolutionary generation staked everything on a radical proposition: that ordinary people could govern themselves, that citizenship was possible, that republican self-governance was superior to rule by kings, aristocrats, or anyone claiming the right to govern based on superior status, breeding, or intelligence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident” means exactly what it says—not that kings acknowledge these truths, not that the intelligent agree with them, not that the powerful grant them, but that citizens assert them as the foundation of legitimate government. Self-evident to whom? To us. To the people who govern ourselves through collective deliberation rather than submitting to administration by our betters.
Lincoln understood what was at stake when he stood at Gettysburg and declared that the war would determine whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Not government for the people by superior managers. Not government of the people by technological elites. But government by the people themselves—the radical proposition that citizens possess the capacity to govern rather than requiring governance by those who claim superior qualification.
The distinction between citizens and peasants isn’t semantic. It’s ontological. Peasants exist to be governed. Their role is obedience, tribute, and acceptance of decisions made by those qualified to make them. Citizens govern themselves. Their role is participation, judgment, and shared responsibility for collective outcomes.
We are not peasants. And yet every assault on American institutions over the past several years represents the systematic effort to transform us into exactly that.
The systematic elimination of civil service protections doesn’t improve government efficiency—it replaces professional judgment answerable to law with personal loyalty answerable to power. The attacks on independent agencies don’t reduce bureaucratic waste—they eliminate the institutional mechanisms through which citizens check oligarchic extraction. The celebration of “disruption” doesn’t foster innovation—it destroys the stable frameworks within which genuine self-governance becomes possible.
DOGE isn’t a government efficiency project. It’s the systematic replacement of citizenship with administration, democratic accountability with optimization metrics, collective self-governance with management by superior intelligence. When Elon Musk eliminates entire agencies staffed by career professionals and replaces them with political loyalists, he’s not improving government. He’s implementing his explicit belief that most people are incapable of meaningful judgment and require direction from those smart enough to know better.
This is why the flag-posting rings so hollow. Genuine patriotism implies reciprocal obligation—that loving your country means contributing to its maintenance as a collective project, that national pride entails responsibility for national institutions, that citizenship is something you participate in rather than perform. What the tech oligarchs demonstrate is nationalism without reciprocity: they want the aesthetic of belonging to a great nation while refusing every actual obligation that citizenship requires.
They love America as a brand, as an identity marker, as a territory they control. But they hate America as an actual collective project requiring their submission to democratic judgment, their participation in shared governance, their acceptance that other citizens possess equal standing to challenge their preferences and constrain their power.
Even Steve Bannon—nationalist populist, former Trump strategist, authoritarian movement builder—recognizes what the Silicon Valley faction represents. In a rare point of agreement across factional lines, Bannon has observed that the tech oligarchs aren’t patriots but post-national extractors using patriotic language to disguise systematic looting. When even authoritarian allies can see that you’re not engaged in national renewal but oligarchic capture, the performance has become too obvious to maintain.
Americans are not peasants. We are citizens of a republic founded on the revolutionary proposition that self-governance is possible, that ordinary people possess the capacity for judgment, that democratic deliberation beats optimization by superior intelligence. Every accommodation to oligarchic extraction, every acceptance of their framing, every failure to defend citizenship against those who would reduce us to subjects in their optimization experiments—all of it betrays the fundamental premise that makes America America.
We deserve better than this because citizenship is the foundation of what we are. Not subjects. Not users. Not populations to be managed. Citizens.
And citizens don’t wait for permission to defend what we are. We govern, or we lose everything that makes us who we are. The choice is here. The choice is now. History will not forgive us if we forget what we are—and surrender without a fight to those who would reduce us to peasants in a land our ancestors bled to make free.
We are not peasants. We are citizens. And citizenship is not a gift granted by superior intelligence. It is a responsibility we claim, a burden we carry, a right we defend—or lose forever to those who never believed we deserved it in the first place.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
Filed Under: algorithms, america, culture, democracy, elon musk, governance, government, liberty, optimization, peter thiel, steve bannon, tech bros
Comments on “Against The New Feudalism Of Algorithms And Oligarchs”
I think he’s complaining because that was supposed to be the exclusive domain of the Republican grift complex and the techbros decided it was theirs.
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I think it’s a little more than just that. Even Bannon recognizes that, as bad as Nazis might be, they at least want the nation to continue to exist long-term so they can rule it. The techbros consider nations to be things that can be discarded once they’ve been drained of all value while the techbros move on to the next target, just like they and their private-equity compatriots do with companies currently.
Always know it’s a Mike Brock article when it opens with a trite statement of fact that is apparently supposed to feel important. At least this one isn’t the length of a novel.
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Mike Brock got his hands on the Forcing You To Read Articles Beam, too? DAMN HIM! HE MUST BE STOPPED!
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It’s perfectly valid to offer criticism on something you read even if you weren’t forced to read it. This article, like most of Mike Brock’s writing, is repetitive, overlong, and simplistic. It isn’t as bad in those respects as some others he has written, but it still is not great.
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The criticism loses some of its validity when it starts by implying the critic has read articles by this writer before, doesn’t like them, and came in here to mock the writer. If you know you won’t like an article by a certain writer but you read it anyway and go “well this is shit just like their last article, now I’m mad”, you’re the one at fault for making yourself upset. Nobody forced you to read the thing you knew you would dislike—or to whine about how much you disliked the thing you were already biased against going in.
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My RSS reader doesn’t display the author’s name prominently, just the feed name. I don’t notice who wrote it unless they mention themselves, except when the article starts out with a pronouncement like “2+2=4. Water is wet.” Then my Brockdar goes off, I get mildly irritated, and mark it as read.
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And because you don’t feel like your time was wasted enough, you decided to comment. And then because you don’t feel like your time was wasted enough, you decided to return to defend your comment. You either don’t care about wasting your time, and thus your criticism is irrelevant, or you feel compelled to respond to things you dislike and should cure yourself of the habit if you actually find it distasteful, otherwise every complaint is about your choices, not the author.
The GOP’s EULA sucks. I’m filing a class action lawsuit.
I’ve been pointing out the sociopathic concept of software as policy recently. An organization switched to Workday and suddenly “policy” changed and when the administration was asked about why the policy changed, they eventually admitted that it’s because “that’s how the software demands it.” So, if your software is designed by software engineers just trying to make software work, they might do something without understanding the context of why someone might want it to work differently. But we’re several steps removed from just software engineers designing functional code. We’re deep in software as a service where administrative choices dictate how the software functions. So then the executives at the software firm are functionally dictating policy to client organizations, and if the executives are greedy sociopathic assholes, that is represented in the code in an abstract form. And this is also the problem with LLMs. It’s fine to argue over the ethics of the training process, but the greater threat is when LLMs controlled by sociopathic tech robber barons are plugged into everything and their sociopathy becomes policy, possibly even in violation of labor laws, privacy laws, etc.
This essay might not be perfect, but it does tie together the techbros’ obsession with “efficiency” with the problem of copyright. By using the courts to establish a privately enforced restriction on free speech and expression, holders have been able to enforce a sort of aristocracy on the use of ideas that would otherwise be free. A person enjoying a well-established IP might be tempted to create their own original characters and scenarios to be inserted into that universe, but that expansive world is owned by a private entity who will enforce their rights against you for writing fanfiction or making fan art. Copyright has been used to claim white noise and animal sounds in online videos and even musicians who hear a melody have been advised not to write that song for fear of violating copyright.
What more proof do we need to know that copyright only exists to entrench a monopoly of the modern-day nobility? Why not use self-sacrifice and more generous terms on what we, the “peasants” in this system create to topple these noblemen and restore art to the masses?
So... Ban Algorithms?
IMHO, the problem we have is that Section 230 should not apply to algorithmic media. If a site shows you the same front page as everyone else sees, plus whatever topics you subscribe ahead of time or actively search for (again, with the same priority of posts for those topics as everyone else sees) and makes you search for anything that does not cover, uses the same algorithm to rank pages and posts for everyone, then it should be covered by Section 230.
But when a site specifically picks what it thinks you personally want to see, different from other visitors, it is essentially editorializing much as a newspaper does for its letters page, effectively eliminating some items from view and pushing forward others. It should therefore like a newspaper be responsible for the content you see – its veracity, its lack of libellous content, its consequences on its readers/viewers. No hiding behind Section 230 or other exemptions. When you pick what each person sees individually, you are liable for the content.
I see two paths based on this article either:
or
I lean towards number 2 but just like any organism, if the infection is bad enough it can kill the host.