Imagining the Splinternet: What if the Web Were a Series of Walled Gardens?

Introduction: The Twilight of the Free Market and the dawn of the Enclosure

The trajectory of the twenty-first century political economy suggests a departure from the competitive market dynamics that defined industrial capitalism, moving instead toward a model of extractive dominance that political economists, sociologists, and technologists increasingly identify as "technofeudalism." This paradigmatic shift is not merely a transformation of economic inputs—from coal and steel to data and attention—but a fundamental restructuring of sovereignty itself. As the Westphalian nation-state strains under the weight of transnational capital and borderless digital networks, a new spatial and ethical reality is emerging: a fractured world of "sovereign clouds," corporate city-states, and digital fiefdoms where the user is no longer a citizen or a consumer, but a serf within a carefully curated algorithmic estate.

The premise of this investigation, rooted in the theoretical frameworks provided by Yanis Varoufakis, Cédric Durand, and Jodi Dean, posits that capitalism is being cannibalized by its own success. The engine of profit, driven by market competition, is being replaced by the engine of rent, driven by the monopolistic control of digital platforms.¹ In this new epoch, power is not derived from the production of commodities but from the ownership of the digital ground upon which social life occurs. The "cloudalists"—the owners of the servers, the fiber optics, and the proprietary algorithms—extract value not by selling goods, but by charging for access to the markets they have enclosed.

This report undertakes an exhaustive ethical and structural evaluation of this emerging "technofeudal" world. It takes as its starting point the speculative inquiry of a digital observer who asks: "In a techno-feudal world of city-states, what would the internet look like?".³ This question serves as a heuristic device to explore the tangible realities of 2024 and 2025, where the theoretical has begun to bleed into the geopolitical. We observe the rise of "Sovereign AI" strategies in nations fearful of digital colonization ⁴, the normalization of "compute arbitrage" as a financial instrument ⁵, and the explicit articulation of "Network States" by Silicon Valley elites seeking to exit the social contract of liberal democracy entirely.⁶

Central to this analysis is the schism between two divergent ethical responses to this encroachment. On one side lies the Neo-Medieval Fortress, a libertarian, privacy-centric ethos (often termed "Lunarpunk" or "Cypherpunk") that seeks safety in encryption, anonymity, and separation.⁷ On the other lies the Digital Commune, a collectivist, participatory ethos (termed "Solarpunk" or "Democratic Confederalism") that seeks power in federation, transparency, and the reclamation of the commons.⁸ Bridging these divides are emerging technologies of "Plurality"—such as quadratic voting and soulbound tokens—that attempt to encode a more nuanced social reality into the binary logic of the blockchain.⁹

As we navigate the anatomy of this transition, we must grapple with the profound ethical implication: that the architecture of our digital networks is becoming the constitution of our political lives. The choice between a global "Splinternet" of walled gardens and a resilient, decentralized mesh is not a technical preference but a decision about the nature of human freedom in the age of the algorithm.

Part I: The Spatial Economy of Technofeudalism

To understand the ethical dilemmas of the technofeudal age, one must first map its geography. The "flat world" of globalized neoliberalism is buckling, replaced by a topography of jagged edges, high walls, and deep moats. This new spatiality operates on two levels simultaneously: the physical territory of the city-state and the virtual territory of the sovereign cloud.

1.1 The Erosion of Westphalia and the Rise of the Network State

The nation-state, the dominant political unit since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, is facing a crisis of legitimacy and capability. Unable to tax mobile capital or regulate transnational information flows, the state is viewed by a growing faction of the technological elite not as a protector, but as an inefficient impediment to progress. This sentiment has crystallized in the concept of the "Network State," articulated most prominently by investor Balaji Srinivasan.⁶

The Network State turns the logic of nation-building on its head. Historically, a people shared a territory and then developed a government. Srinivasan proposes that a "cloud community" form first, organized around shared values and encrypted coordination, and then crowd-fund the acquisition of physical territory to gain diplomatic recognition. This is the ultimate commodification of sovereignty: the state becomes a startup, citizenship becomes a subscription, and governance becomes a service level agreement (SLA).⁶

This vision aligns closely with the "Charter City" movement, championed by figures like Paul Romer and Peter Thiel. The Charter City is a zone of exception, a patch of land governed by a distinct legal and commercial code designed to maximize economic efficiency, often at the expense of democratic oversight.¹² In this model, the "citizen" is reimagined as a "customer." If the customer is dissatisfied with the governance services—security, dispute resolution, sanitation—they are theoretically free to "exit" and move to a competitor.

The Return of the Fiefdom

However, the ethical critique of this model is severe. Critics argue that the "customer" model of citizenship reinvents feudalism. In a democracy, the citizen has a "voice"—the right to try to change the system from within. In the Charter City or Network State, the primary right is "exit." But exit is a privilege of the mobile and the wealthy. Those who cannot afford to move, or who lack the "human capital" valued by the city-state, are left behind in the "Paper Belt"—the decaying remnants of the legacy nation-state.¹⁴

Furthermore, within the corporate city-state, the power structure is explicitly monarchical or oligarchic. As Curtis Yarvin, a neoreactionary theorist influential in these circles, argues, a corporation is run by a CEO, not a committee. Therefore, the most efficient state should be run by a "sovereign CEO," accountable only to the shareholders (landowners), not the residents.⁶ This marks a definitive rupture with the Enlightenment ideals of universal suffrage and human rights, signaling a return to a pre-modern structure where rights are tied to property and status.

1.2 The Splinternet and the Architecture of Control

Paralleling the fragmentation of physical territory is the Balkanization of the internet. The vision of a single, interoperable global network is collapsing into a "Splinternet," characterized by "sovereign clouds" and data localization laws. By 2025, geopolitical rivalry, particularly between the US and China, has accelerated this trend, with nations demanding that data generated within their borders remain physically stored on servers within their jurisdiction.⁴

This fragmentation creates a digital landscape that mirrors the feudal map. The "Cloud Lords"—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba—act as the new geography. They provide the "land" (servers), the "roads" (fiber optics), and the "marketplaces" (App Stores) upon which the digital economy functions.

The Thought Experiment Envisioned: Infrastructure in a Technofeudal World

Speculative inquiry from the thought experiment ³ asks: How would city-states connect with each other—fiber lines, wireless links, satellites, or mostly illegal/underground networks?

In a fully realized technofeudal scenario, the infrastructure of connection becomes a site of intense political contestation.

• The Official Layer: Connectivity between corporate city-states would likely be maintained via high-speed, heavily encrypted proprietary fiber lines. These "trade routes" would be monitored by the Cloud Lords, ensuring that only authorized traffic (commercial data, verified identity tokens) passes through. This is the "Clean Network" writ large—a sanitized, surveillance-heavy internet where anonymity is impossible.³

• The Shadow Layer: For those excluded from the official networks (the "cloud serfs" or rebels), connectivity would rely on "scavenged infrastructure." The thought experiment speculates on the use of "abandoned cables" and "legacy satellites." In reality, we already see the precursors to this in the use of LoRaWAN mesh networks (like Meshtastic) and decentralized ISP initiatives (like NYC Mesh).¹⁶ These networks operate largely "off-grid," bouncing low-bandwidth signals between peer-to-peer nodes, bypassing the centralized gateways of the telecom giants.

The Data Tariff and the Checkpoint

In this fractured world, moving data across boundaries incurs a cost. We are witnessing the emergence of "data tariffs" and "compute arbitrage".⁵ Just as medieval merchants paid tolls to cross a lord's bridge, digital entities must pay "gas fees" or "inference costs" to move intelligence from one sovereign cloud to another. The "sovereign cloud" is not just a storage facility; it is a border checkpoint. By 2027, it is predicted that 35% of countries will be locked into region-specific AI platforms, making cross-border collaboration technically and legally fraught.¹⁵

1.3 The Thermodynamics of Value: Energy as Currency

A defining feature of the technofeudal economy is the shift from fiat currency, backed by the credit of a nation-state, to currencies backed by thermodynamic reality: energy and compute.

In a world of fragmented sovereignty, trust in a central banker evaporates. What remains is physics. Henry Ford’s visionary 1921 proposal for an "energy-backed currency" ¹⁹ finds its realization in the Proof-of-Work mechanisms of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Here, value is anchored in the expenditure of energy. "Energy credits" or "computational cycles" become the base layer of the economy.²⁰

Compute Arbitrage

This has given rise to a new form of financial activity: "compute arbitrage." As AI models become the primary engines of economic production, the cost of "inference" (processing a query) becomes a critical input. Traders now exploit price differentials in electricity and processing power across different jurisdictions.⁵ A trader might buy "compute futures" in an energy-rich, regulation-light zone (e.g., a hydro-powered charter city in the Global South) and sell that processing power to a firm in a high-cost jurisdiction (e.g., the European Union).

The ethical implication is the commodification of cognitive labor. If "thought" (inference) is priced in watts, then the human mind is placed in direct competition with the silicon chip. For the "cloud serf," their value is measured by their ability to generate data that optimizes these models, or by their ability to minimize their own energy consumption to survive in a resource-constrained environment.

Table 1: The Tiers of Citizenship in the Technofeudal State

Class	Role	Economic Basis	Political Rights	Access to Infrastructure
Cloudalist (Lord)	Owner of Platform/Protocol	Rent extraction (Cloud/App Store fees)	Absolute / Sovereign	Control of the root keys and fiber backbones
Vassal Capitalist	Merchant on Platform	Profit from sales (minus rent)	Contractual (Terms of Service)	Licensed access; subject to algorithmic visibility
Technocrat (Clergy)	Developer / Engineer	High wages / Equity	Meritocratic influence	Privileged access to "God Mode" tools
Cloud Serf	User / Data Producer	Unpaid data labor / Gig work	None (User Agreement)	Restricted / Monitored / Ad-supported
The Exiled	Disconnected / Dissident	Scavenging / Black Market	None / Criminalized	Mesh networks / Sneakernet / Dark web

Part II: The Ethical Schism – Two Paths Through the Dark Forest

The collapse of the unified public sphere has forced a divergence in ethical strategies. As the state recedes, individuals and communities are faced with a stark choice: retreat into the fortress or build the commune. These two paths—roughly mapping to Libertarian/Privacy and Collectivist/Anarchist—represent the dominant ideological poles of the new era.

2.1 The Neo-Medieval Fortress: Privacy, Exit, and Lunarpunk

The libertarian response to technofeudalism is rooted in the "Cypherpunk" tradition, which views cryptography as the primary defense against state and corporate overreach.²³ This ethos prioritizes Negative Liberty—the freedom from interference.

The Logic of Lunarpunk

As the surveillance capabilities of the technofeudal state expand, the optimistic transparency of the early internet ("information wants to be free") has given way to the paranoid realism of "Lunarpunk." Unlike "Solarpunk," which imagines a bright, visible future, Lunarpunk assumes a hostile environment. It argues that in a world of predatory algorithms, visibility is a trap. Survival requires "darkness"—anonymity, encryption, and the construction of "Dark Forests" where communities can exist undetected by the Eye of Sauron (the state or the platform).⁷

The thought experiment scenario of illegal encryption ³ is central to this worldview. In a city-state where the Sovereign CEO demands total visibility to ensure stability, encryption becomes a revolutionary act. The Lunarpunk response is the development of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs)—cryptographic tools that allow a user to prove they know a secret (like a password or citizenship status) without revealing the secret itself. This allows for interaction without exposure.

The Sovereign Individual

The ethical subject of this worldview is the "Sovereign Individual".²⁵ This concept, popularized by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, anticipates a world where individuals with high cognitive capability decouple themselves from the dependency of the welfare state. They carry their wealth in their heads (or on hardware wallets) and shop for jurisdictions like customers shopping for shoes.

Critique: The ethical failure of this model is its atomization. By redefining freedom as "exit" and rights as "property," it abandons the concept of the public good. It creates a society of fortified monads, each protected by their private keys, but incapable of collective action to address systemic threats like climate change or pandemic disease. It leaves the vulnerable—those who cannot code, those who have no assets to encrypt—to the mercy of the feudal lords.²⁶ It is, in essence, a philosophy of "lifeboat ethics."

2.2 The Digital Commune: Voice, Federation, and Solarpunk

The collectivist response prioritizes Positive Liberty—the freedom to participate in self-government. It draws inspiration from the political theory of Democratic Confederalism, practiced in the autonomous region of Rojava, and the aesthetic-political movement of Solarpunk.⁷

The Logic of the Commons

This approach rejects the "feudalism" of the platforms not by exiting to a private island, but by reclaiming the infrastructure as a "Commons." It envisions a "Techno-Socialism" or "Commons-Based Peer Production" where the means of connection—the servers, the algorithms, the mesh networks—are owned cooperatively by the users.²⁹

In the context of the thought experiment, the Solarpunk response to the city-state is federation. Instead of walled gardens, they advocate for "Cosmolocalism"—the idea that knowledge (design, code) should be global and light, shared freely as a commons, while production (food, manufacturing) should be local and heavy.³¹ This reduces dependency on the global supply chains controlled by the Cloudalists.

Democratic Confederalism

Murray Bookchin’s influence on this stream of thought is profound. The model of Democratic Confederalism proposes a system of bottom-up assemblies. Local communities make decisions through direct democracy, and these communities federate into regional councils for coordination, but the higher levels have no power to override the lower levels.²⁸

In the digital realm, this manifests in the DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) not as a profit-maximizing corporation, but as a coordination tool. Collectivist DAOs use blockchain not to hyper-financialise interactions, but to ensure transparency and accountability in the management of shared resources.

Critique: The ethical risk of this model is the tyranny of structurelessness. As seen in many horizontal movements (like Occupy Wall Street), the refusal to formalize leadership can lead to paralysis or the emergence of informal, unaccountable hierarchies. Furthermore, the reliance on "community" assumes a level of social cohesion and time-commitment that is difficult to sustain in a precarious, gig-based economy. The "meeting that never ends" is the dystopian inverse of the "dictator who decides instantly".³⁴

2.3 The Bridge: Technofeudalism and the Future of Rights

The tension between these two ethics—privacy vs. participation, encryption vs. transparency—is the defining struggle of the era.

• On Identity: The Libertarian seeks Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), where the user owns their data in a portable wallet, revealing nothing.³⁵ The Collectivist seeks Contextual Identity, where reputation and trust are embedded in community relations, potentially using Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) to prove membership and character without commodifying it.³⁶

• On Infrastructure: The Libertarian builds Darknets (Tor, I2P) to hide from the state. The Collectivist builds Community Mesh Networks (NYC Mesh, Guifi.net) to replace the state/corporate provider.¹⁶

The thought experiment’s question regarding citizenship and access ³ highlights the synthesis of these views. In a technofeudal city-state, access to the "Global Internet" might be a privilege of rank. The "Cloud Serf" sees a curated, censored Intranet (like the "Kwemyang" in North Korea or the "Halal Internet" in Iran). The "Noble" (Tech Executive) has a VPN-enabled, unfiltered connection. The ethical battle, then, is whether to build a tool that allows the Serf to sneak through the firewall (Libertarian) or to organize a movement to tear down the firewall (Collectivist).

Part III: The Technologies of Plurality and the Third Way

Is it possible to transcend the binary of the Atomized Individual and the Stifling Collective? Emerging from the intersection of economics and computer science is a third framework: Plurality. Championed by economist Glen Weyl and technologist Audrey Tang, Plurality seeks to use digital tools to recognize and empower social groups without essentializing them.⁹

3.1 Mathematical Democracy: Quadratic Voting and Funding

Technofeudalism thrives on the weakness of traditional "one person, one vote" democracy, which often fails to capture the intensity of preference and suppresses minority voices. Plurality proposes Quadratic Voting (QV), where participants are given a budget of "voice credits." They can spend more credits to cast more votes on issues they care deeply about, but the cost rises quadratically (1 vote = 1 credit, 2 votes = 4 credits, 3 votes = 9 credits).

This mechanism allows for a more nuanced expression of collective will. It prevents the "tyranny of the majority" while still enabling collective action. In a Technofeudal city-state, a guild or community could use QV to allocate shared resources (like bandwidth or energy) in a way that maximizes overall satisfaction rather than just serving the loudest faction.³⁸

3.2 Soulbound Tokens (SBTs): Encoding the Social Graph

The concept of Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) addresses the hyper-financialization of Web3. Most crypto-tokens are transferable assets (money). SBTs are non-transferable tokens that represent attributes: "I am a citizen of City X," "I have a degree in Engineering," "I vouched for this loan."

SBTs attempt to bridge the gap between the "trustless" world of crypto and the "trust-based" world of human society. By creating an on-chain record of reputation and affiliation, SBTs could allow for "under-collateralized lending"—giving the poor access to credit based on their community standing rather than their assets.³⁹

The Dystopian Risk: However, the ethical danger is immense. As critics like Molly White have pointed out, a permanent, immutable record of one's "social score" is the infrastructure of a totalitarian Social Credit System.⁴⁰ If a Technofeudal Lord requires an SBT showing "Loyalty" to access the internet, the technology of liberation becomes a tool of absolute control. The difference lies in who controls the ledger—the user (via a decentralized wallet) or the state.

3.3 Regenerative Finance (ReFi): Reprogramming Value

Finally, the movement for Regenerative Finance (ReFi) seeks to align economic incentives with ecological survival. In a world where "Energy is Currency," ReFi proposes that the creation of ecological value (planting trees, restoring wetlands) should mint currency.⁴¹ This challenges the Technofeudal extractive model. Instead of mining Bitcoin by burning coal, a community might "mine" tokens by proving (via satellite data or sensors) that they have sequestered carbon. This "Solarpunk" economics attempts to make the preservation of the biosphere economically rational.⁴³

Part IV: Phenomenological Scenarios from the Technofeudal Future

To fully grasp the ethical stakes, we must move from the abstract to the concrete. Returning to the thought experiment³, we can construct three phenomenological scenarios of life in this world.

Scenario A: The Blackout and the Mesh (The Activist's Reality)

Context: A corporate city-state in the Pacific Northwest (a "Charter City" run by a consortium of tech firms) faces labor unrest. The "Sovereign CEO" orders a communications blackout to disrupt the "Cloud Serf" union.

• The Experience: The official internet—the 6G towers, the fiber lines—goes dead. Phones show "No Signal." But in the basements and rooftops, the Meshtastic nodes light up. These are small, battery-powered LoRa radios.¹⁶ They don't carry Netflix or 4K video; they carry text, encrypted and slow, hopping from node to node.

• Ethical Evaluation: This is the "Solarpunk" resilience in action. The technology is primitive compared to the gigabit fiber of the lords, but it is sovereign. It represents a shift from "high-tech/low-freedom" to "low-tech/high-freedom." The ethical imperative here is stewardship—keeping the nodes alive is a civic duty.

Scenario B: The Data Tariff at the Border (The Migrant's Reality)

Context: A freelance coder moves from the "European Data Union" to a "Neo-Shanghai" sphere of influence to chase lower energy costs for their AI models.

• The Experience: Crossing the digital border is visceral. Their "Soulbound Tokens" (credentials, credit score) from Europe are incompatible with the local protocol. They must pay a "bridging fee" (Data Tariff) to port their identity.¹⁸ Worse, the local "Sovereign Cloud" laws require them to decrypt their hard drive for inspection.

• Ethical Evaluation: This illustrates the failure of the "Exit" strategy. The migrant is not a "Sovereign Individual" but a refugee. The fragmentation of the internet strips them of their accumulated digital capital. The ethical failure here is the lack of interoperability—the refusal of the feudal lords to recognize a common humanity (or common protocol) across borders.⁴⁴

Scenario C: The Energy Audit (The Serf's Reality)

Context: In a resource-scarce city-state, citizenship is tied to an "Energy Credit" quota.

• The Experience: Every action—turning on a light, running a search query, buying bread—deducts from a personal energy wallet. The wealthy buy "carbon indulgences" and run massive server farms; the poor ration their heat. The "Smart City" sensors monitor consumption in real-time.

• Ethical Evaluation: This is the dystopia of eco-fascism. The rationalization of resources (necessary for survival) is weaponized to enforce class hierarchy. The "techno-collectivist" ideal of managing the commons is perverted into a panopticon of consumption. The ethical demand here is for Energy Justice—a guaranteed base of energy as a human right, not a commodity.¹⁹

Conclusion: The Imperative of Architectural Politics

The "Technofeudal" hypothesis serves as a vital diagnostic tool for the present moment. It reveals that the pathologies of the digital economy—surveillance, inequality, loss of agency—are not accidental "bugs," but features of a structural regression to a pre-modern form of sovereignty.

The report's analysis of the thought experiment confirms that the internet of a technofeudal world is not a single place. It is a Splinternet, a patchwork of "Clean Networks" (for the lords), "Dark Forests" (for the privacy advocates), and "Mesh Networks" (for the rebels).

The ethical bridge between the Privacy/Libertarian impulse (Lunarpunk) and the Collectivist/Anarchist impulse (Solarpunk) remains the most urgent project of our time.

• Privacy without collectivism leads to the Network State—a world of gated communities and private mercenaries, where the rich exit and the poor drown.

• Collectivism without privacy leads to the Panopticon—a world of transparency where "social credit" enforces conformity and the "tyranny of the majority" crushes dissent.

The "Third Way"—exemplified by Plurality—suggests that we can build technologies that are private by default but public by consent. We can design identity systems (SBTs) that allow us to carry our reputation without building a surveillance state. We can design voting systems (Quadratic Voting) that value intensity and minority rights. We can design networks (Mesh) that are resilient and community-owned.

In the final analysis, the technofeudal world is not inevitable. It is a design choice. The code is still being written. The "city-states" of the future may be prisons of algorithms, or they may be the "gardens in the machine".²⁴ The difference will not be determined by the technology itself, but by the politics we embed within it.

Table 2: Comparative Analysis of Ethical Frameworks in the Digital Age

Feature	Technofeudalism (Current Trend)	Neo-Medieval / Lunarpunk (Libertarian)	Digital Commune / Solarpunk (Collectivist)	Plurality (Synthesis)
Primary Value	Order / Rent	Liberty (Negative)	Justice / Solidarity	Diversity / Cooperation
View of the State	The State is a competitor/partner to be captured	The State is an enemy to be evaded (Exit)	The State is a tool to be reclaimed/federated (Voice)	The State is a platform for coordination
Identity Model	Sovereign ID: Issued by Gov/Corp, fully tracked	Self-Sovereign (SSI): Anonymity, ZK-Proofs	Contextual: Reputation-based, relational	Soulbound: Non-transferable, intersectional
Economic Logic	Extraction: Rent-seeking, Monopoly	Hyper-Market: Crypto-capitalism, Austrian Economics	The Commons: Peer production, Mutual Aid	Quadratic: Public goods funding, Radical markets
Infrastructure	Cloud Fiefdom: Centralized, Proprietary	Darknet: Tor, I2P, Encryption	Mesh: LoRaWAN, Community ISPs	Interoperable: Open protocols, Data Unions
Key Theorists	Varoufakis, Thiel, Yarvin	Davidson, Rees-Mogg, Cypherpunks	Bookchin, Ocalan, Benkler	Weyl, Tang, Buterin

Table 3: Glossary of Emerging Concepts

Term	Definition & Context
Cloud Rent	The economic surplus extracted by platforms (e.g., Amazon, Apple) not for production, but for granting access to their digital territory. A defining feature of technofeudalism.1
Compute Arbitrage	The trading of computational processing power across jurisdictions to exploit differences in energy costs and regulations. A key financial activity in the AI era.5
Data Tariff	A tax or fee imposed on the transfer of data across "sovereign cloud" borders, analogous to customs duties in physical trade.45
Democratic Confederalism	A political model based on local assemblies and federation, rejecting the nation-state. Practiced in Rojava; influential in "Solarpunk" political theory.28
Lunarpunk	A counter-aesthetic to Solarpunk that emphasizes privacy, encryption, and "dark" spaces as necessary defenses against surveillance capitalism.7
Network State	A proposed political entity where a digital community organizes online first, builds an economy, and then acquires physical territory to gain diplomatic recognition.6
Quadratic Voting	A collective decision-making system where voters buy votes with "credits," with the cost increasing quadratically (cost = votes²). Designed to protect minority interests.38
Soulbound Token (SBT)	A non-transferable blockchain token representing a person's identity, credentials, or affiliations. A tool for building "trust" in a trustless network.36
Sovereign Cloud	Cloud infrastructure physically located within a specific nation's borders and subject to its laws, designed to ensure "AI Sovereignty" and data security.4

Detailed Thematic Deep Dives

4.1 The Psychology of Enclosure: Psychopolitics

The transition to technofeudalism is not merely structural but psychological. Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that we have moved from Foucault’s "disciplinary society" (controlled by walls, prisons, and factories) to a "performance society" (controlled by motivation, project-management, and self-optimization). Han calls this Psychopolitics.⁴⁶

• The Mechanism: In the feudal cloud, the serf is not coerced by the whip but by the "Like." The system exploits freedom itself. We voluntarily expose our data, our desires, and our locations because we are seduced by the convenience and the dopamine hit of visibility.

• The Trap: This creates a "smart power" that is far more efficient than the "hard power" of the old feudal lords. The technofeudal subject feels free because they are not in chains, yet their entire reality is curated by an algorithm whose objective function is rent extraction.⁴⁷

• Ethical Response: The Lunarpunk refusal of visibility ("going dark") is a direct response to Psychopolitics. It is an attempt to reclaim the "interiority" of the self by withdrawing from the digital panopticon.

4.2 The Materiality of the Cloud: The Geopolitics of Energy

The term "cloud" is a deceptive metaphor. It implies weightlessness. In reality, the technofeudal estate is heavy, hot, and hungry.

• Data Centers as Castles: The modern castle is the Hyperscale Data Center. These are fortified bunkers, consuming the electricity of small nations. They are the physical anchors of sovereignty.⁴⁸

• The Energy-Currency Nexus: The snippet ¹⁹ referencing Henry Ford’s energy currency is crucial. In a world where AI training runs cost millions of dollars in electricity, energy is the hard asset. The "Energy Credit" becomes the de facto reserve currency. This creates a new geopolitical fault line between "Energy Rich" zones (Iceland, Paraguay, Ethiopia) which host the compute, and "Data Rich" zones (Europe, US) which consume the intelligence.

• Inequality: This system risks creating "Energy Apartheid," where the wealthy have unlimited compute (and thus unlimited agency/intelligence extension), while the poor are "throttled"—their cognitive reach limited by their energy wallet.²¹

4.3 The Legal Architecture: Smart Contracts vs. Law

A fundamental tension exists in how disputes are resolved in the technofeudal city-state.

• Code is Law: The Libertarian/Technocratic view champions the Smart Contract.⁴⁹ If a tenant fails to pay rent, the smart lock on their apartment automatically disables. There is no judge, no appeal, no "human nuance." This is efficient but potentially cruel. It represents the "perfection" of bureaucracy.

• Law as Deliberation: The Collectivist view argues that law is inherently social. A contract cannot anticipate every emergency (e.g., a pandemic causing mass unemployment). Therefore, governance requires "human-in-the-loop" mechanisms—juries, assemblies, DAOs with voting override powers—to interpret the "spirit" of the law rather than just the "letter" of the code.³⁴

4.4 The Aesthetics of Resistance: Solar vs. Lunar

The aesthetic dimensions of these movements are not trivial; they shape political imagination.

• Solarpunk: Art Nouveau, plants, glass, sunlight. It visualizes a future we want to live in. It mobilizes hope. But critics argue it can be naive about the violence of the state.⁵⁰

• Lunarpunk: Cyberpunk, mushrooms, bioluminescence, shadows. It visualizes the defense mechanisms needed to survive. It mobilizes caution. But it can be depressive and isolating.⁷

• Synthesis: A viable resistance needs both: the Solar vision of what to build, and the Lunar tactics of how to protect it while it's growing. This is the essence of the "Dark Forest" theory of the internet—you build the solarpunk commune inside the lunarpunk forest.

Works cited

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3. In a techno-feudal world of city-states, what would the internet look like? : r/sciencefiction, accessed January 30, 2026, https://www.reddit.com/r/sciencefiction/comments/1qrdi0j/in_a_technofeudal_world_of_citystates_what_would/

4. Sovereignty in the Age of AI: Strategic Choices, Structural Dependencies and the Long Game Ahead, accessed January 30, 2026, https://institute.global/insights/tech-and-digitalisation/sovereignty-in-the-age-of-ai-strategic-choices-structural-dependencies

5. From SaaS to Tokens: How the "Compute-Arbitrage" Strategy is Redefining 2026 OpEx Models - SNATIKA, accessed January 30, 2026, https://snatika.com/single-blog/from-saas-to-tokens-how-the-compute-arbitrage-strategy-is-redefining-2026-opex-models

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