By Ricardo Abud
Yanis Varoufakis doesn't use the metaphor of feudalism for rhetorical whim. He uses it because it accurately describes something that the vocabulary of classical capitalism can no longer name: a system where competition doesn't take place in markets, but rather taxes are paid on platforms; where power doesn't stem from factory ownership, but from control of the digital infrastructure on which almost all human life unfolds. And if there's a generation that was born directly into this system, without having known anything before it, it's Generation Z.
Calling them "digital natives" is a condescending term that obscures more than it reveals. Being a native to something doesn't imply understanding or mastering it. A medieval serf was also a "native" to the fiefdom. Google organizes knowledge. Meta organizes relationships. TikTok organizes desire. Amazon organizes consumption. These aren't companies in the classical sense, entities that compete in open markets, but rather digital feudal lords who collect rent for access to territories they control, territories that are nevertheless inhabited by billions as if they were natural, inevitable, almost atmospheric spaces.
Varoufakis distinguishes between market capitalism, where profit comes from production and exchange, and technofeudalism, where it comes from rent extraction on platforms. The difference is political, not technical. In capitalism, the worker was aware of the exploitative relationship. In technofeudalism, the user actively and enthusiastically produces value without any compensation, convinced that they are exercising their freedom. That is the system's master trick: making servitude feel like an expression of the self.
Generation Z has access to unlimited information, can build global audiences from their bedrooms, and question norms with unprecedented fluency. None of this is false. However, this freedom is built on an architecture designed by engineers whose goal is not emancipation, but retention. Platforms don't sell products to users; they sell users' attention to advertisers. Generation Z isn't TikTok's customer: it's its raw material.
Infinite scrolling isn't a design accident; it's an engineering decision modeled on the same principles that govern slot machines. The question isn't whether this generation is free, but whether the freedom it experiences has been prefabricated to remain within certain profitable boundaries. The "content creator" produces, distributes, and promotes their work on platforms that can modify the algorithm without warning, demonetize without explanation, and suspend accounts without effective appeal. There's no possibility of unionization, no collective bargaining agreement. And yet, millions of young people aspire to precisely this, because the discourse of "passion as work" has colonized the collective imagination of what constitutes a fulfilling life. When that passion unfolds on external, algorithmically controlled infrastructure, liberation has an expiration date.
Generation Z will also be remembered as the first to confuse access with knowledge, opinion with analysis, and visibility with value. They grew up convinced that Google solves what study used to solve, that a Twitter thread is equivalent to a thesis, and that accumulating digital certificates on LinkedIn replaces rigorous training that builds critical thinking, not just employability.
In this context, the traditional university isn't waiting for them with answers: it's waiting for them with the same old debts, the same curricula designed for a job market that no longer exists, and the same degrees that Amazon's hiring algorithm discards in 0.3 seconds if the CV format isn't right. Four, five, or six years of university to compete with an artificial intelligence that never sleeps, doesn't ask for a raise, and doesn't need health insurance isn't an investment in the future: it's an expensive ritual that the system keeps alive because someone has to pay the student loans, and because the illusion of social mobility is cheaper than real social mobility. The university degree hasn't died, but it's dying, transformed into what it always was for many: not a tool for thinking, but a class pass that now doesn't even open the doors it promised.
The deepest and least visible effect of technofeudalism on Generation Z is cognitive. The algorithm not only decides what they see, but also gradually determines how they think about what they see. TikTok is the most radical example: it doesn't show what your friends share, but rather what the predictive model has determined will keep you watching. The result is an identity reinforced by its own attention patterns, an illusory coherence that is actually algorithmic optimization. Knowing that the mechanism exists doesn't neutralize it, just as knowing that sugar is addictive doesn't completely protect you from addiction.
Generation Z is not simply a passive victim of technofeudalism: it is also its fuel and its most potentially explosive contradiction. The same young people who produce free value for Meta organize boycott movements against Meta. The same ones who aspire to be creators clearly articulate their critique of the precariousness of this model. Critical knowledge is more democratized than ever, although it arrives served up as "content" within the very logic of consumption it seeks to question. Being aware of the system can function as a pressure-relieving valve that reduces the tension without changing the structure.
Rebellion is possible; no generation has been incapable of producing resistance. But technofeudalism co-opts dissent with unprecedented efficiency, almost in real time, within the very infrastructure where criticism was born. A video denouncing platform capitalism on TikTok generates views that enrich ByteDance. And yet, something is stirring in the cracks of the system. Not with the speed that the urgency would demand, but with a direction that is beginning to become discernible. Platform workers' movements are winning legal battles in Europe and Latin America. Regulations on digital monopolies are advancing with unprecedented seriousness in Brussels.
Several countries in the Global South are negotiating access terms to platforms from less asymmetrical positions than a decade ago. And on a cultural level, a skepticism toward social media is growing among young people themselves, a skepticism that didn't exist five years ago: digital minimalism communities , a revival of analog technologies, and conversations about mental health and care that are no longer happening only on the margins, but at the center of public debate.
Even more significantly, the very generation the system attempted to turn into raw material is now producing the conceptual frameworks to name its own condition. Young philosophers, economists, activists, and artists under thirty are articulating critiques of technofeudalism with a sophistication that took their predecessors decades to achieve. Not because they are more intelligent, but because the urgency is greater and the conceptual tools are more readily available. The democratization of critical knowledge is real, even if it occurs within contradictory platforms.
The deterioration of the family unit and the cracks in the current education system are intertwined phenomena that define this experience. The traditional family faces an erosion of its dynamics due to technological mediation, displacing the transmission of values toward algorithms and virtual communities under the logic of this new domain. At the same time, formal education is undergoing a crisis of relevance; while young people demand pragmatic learning, the system lags behind with industrial models that fail to capture the attention of minds accustomed to immediacy. This scenario creates an authority vacuum where the lack of a solid structure leaves this generation searching for its own identity in an environment of constant uncertainty.
Hope doesn't lie in Generation Z achieving "responsible use" of technology, nor in a benevolent regulator dismantling digital fiefdoms by decree. It lies in something more visceral: in the fact that a generation born of the system is the first to understand, with surgical clarity, the anatomy of its own confinement. Knowing the inner workings of the fiefdom is an advantage the medieval serf could never have imagined. Accurately naming the power structures that inhabit us remains, today as in the 13th century, the most profound act of insurrection. And this generation, amidst the noise of the algorithm and the flickering of the screen, is finally learning to name them.
THERE IS NOTHING MORE EXCLUSIONARY THAN BEING POOR
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