Private contracts, platform rules, and opaque algorithms now govern everyday life—echoing medieval patterns of fragmented, unaccountable power.
new feudalism, technofeudalism, adhesion contracts, arbitration, algorithmic scoring, platform rules, private law
“The history of the modern democratic state can be understood as a story of shifting authority and lawmaking, first from private potentates to sovereign monarchs, and then to publicly accountable democracies.” Yet in the early 21st century, this centuries-long trend appears to be reversing. From ubiquitous “I Agree” buttons on user contracts to inscrutable algorithms deciding our fates, the balance of power is tilting away from public law and back toward private authority. Policymakers and scholars are increasingly warning of a “new feudalism”: a social order where private contracts, corporate algorithms, and platform rules function as a kind of privatized law of the land, eerily reminiscent of the localized, unaccountable power structures of medieval times.
Under this new paradigm, giant technology firms and financial actors often act as lords of their own domain, enforcing rules through take-it-or-leave-it terms of service, predictive scoring systems, and mandatory arbitration clauses that sidestep courts. Individuals—consumers, workers, tenants, smaller businesses—find themselves in the position of digital vassals or serfs, bound by unilateral private agreements with little say or recourse. As entire realms of economic and social life become governed by private “law,” public oversight and democratic accountability wane. The result is a fragmentation of sovereignty not unlike the feudal era, when power was decentralized among nobles and the king’s law gave way to the baron’s law on each estate.
In feudal Europe, political authority was highly decentralized and personal. Kings were nominally sovereign, but real power rested in a web of private agreements between lords and vassals. Land was granted in exchange for loyalty and service; justice and protection were provided as personal favors rather than as impersonal rights. Each lord had jurisdiction within his fief, essentially a private government on ancestral land. Public and private power blurred, and the “king’s law” applied unevenly.
Over centuries, centralized states eroded this system, standardizing laws and curtailing baronial privileges. Modernity replaced feudal bonds with the idea of a social contract: citizens equal under a uniform law, with the state answerable to the people. Today’s concern is that private forms of power are resurging through contracts and code.
Most interactions with large institutions are now governed by standardized, take-it-or-leave-it contracts of adhesion: EULAs, ToS, employment agreements, leases, bank and card agreements. These documents—rarely read, never negotiated—operate like private law codes. Platforms set “community standards,” license your content broadly, limit their liability, and reserve unilateral termination power. Enforcement is technical and immediate: accounts can be suspended, funds frozen, listings delisted—no courthouse needed.
Across industries, boilerplate terms waive rights that public law would protect, pushing disputes into private forums or foreclosing them entirely. The effect is a quiet replacement of public, transparent rules with private edicts written by the more powerful party.
If adhesion contracts are the oaths, algorithms are the sheriffs. Credit scores, tenant-screening systems, automated hiring tools, gig-work ratings, search and feed rankers—these gatekeepers determine access to housing, jobs, capital, insurance, attention. They are often opaque, error-prone, and hard to contest. A score can function like a caste marker; a ranking tweak can crush a publisher; a facial-ID mismatch can “deactivate” a driver. Each platform is a jurisdiction with its own rules, enforced by code.
Mandatory arbitration clauses move disputes from open courts to private chambers with limited discovery, no precedent, and repeat-player advantages. Class-action bans further isolate claimants. The result is a privatized justice system that keeps patterns of abuse out of public view and weakens the development of public law.
Platform “rents” (app stores, marketplaces, ad networks) resemble ground rents of old fiefs. Participation demands tribute and compliance; banishment ends livelihoods. Wealth and rulemaking concentrate with the owners of the infrastructure, while most participants operate as precarious dependents. Large zones of social life fall into “shadow” regulation—rules without public accountability.
We are not returning to manors and knights, but the structure rhymes: fragmented authority, privatized rulemaking, opaque enforcement. Counter-movements—antitrust, data rights, arbitration reform, algorithmic transparency—aim to drag private fiefdoms back under public law. A digital-age Magna Carta would insist on baseline due process, portability, interoperability, transparency, and avenues to public courts. Otherwise, we risk entrenching a patchwork of clickwrapped principalities.