This is the era of techno-monopoly power in which techno-capitalism has colonized not only the internet, as critics signalled in the early stages of this era (McChesney 2013; Morozov 2013), but increasingly also key aspects of everyday life, with the advent of ubiquitous digital platforms. Cities and larger urban and metropolitan environments have provided fertile ground – or what this book conceptualizes as the urban field – for the rise and fast growth of techno-monopoly power.

What is the techno-monopoly we are talking about? Notions such as “Big Tech”, “tech giants”, “tech behemoths”, “tech titans” and the like, have become customarily used in the public sphere to refer to the rise of a narrow set of technology corporations – operating in the sphere of circulation rather than that of production – that have acquired a monopolistic position in terms of market power. The phenomenon of giant tech monopolies has led a growing number of authors on the academic left and beyond to signal the emergence of a new era of “neo-feudalism”, variously defined as “digital feudalism” or “techno-feudalism”, characterized by the dominance of rentierism over capitalist profit-making and the rise of a new high-tech oligarchy (Christophers 2022; Dean 2020; Kotkin 2020; Mazzucato 2019; Varoufakis 2023). The techno-feudalism thesis stems from a pre-existing tendency within critical social thought that interprets neoliberal globalization as a kind of neo-medieval order in which transnational technocrats act as novel princes supported by vassals who are subjected to their unaccountable power (Ziegler 2005). Amongst the proponents of the techno-feudalism thesis, Varoufakis (2023) has argued that a historic mutation of capital into “cloud capital” has taken place through the development of technology, the increasing power of tech companies and the ways in which technology and algorithms, for instance, are currently being used by finance corporations and governments. Accordingly, in his view, we are moving from capitalism to feudalism, the way of governing land that prevailed in Europe in the Middle Ages. For Varoufakis, during the past two to three decades, barriers have emerged in the digital space of the internet.