Techno-feudalism: your community does not belong to you
You fund the audience, then you pay to reach it. Meta pulled in 196,2 billion dollars in ad revenue in 2025. Anatomy of a toll, and the way out.
Key takeaways
- A community on a platform is not an asset: you fund the audience, then pay a second time to access it.
- Google, Meta, and Amazon capture 58,8 % of all US ad spend, up from 47,1 % in 2020.
- Instagram openly sets targets for its teams on creator output and none on brand output, deemed too commercial.
- The test comes down to one question: if your main account disappeared tomorrow morning, would you lose visibility or your acquisition channel?
- The only territory you have left is the conversation between your customers, which 88 % of consumers trust more than any ad.
Capitalism is dead, killed by capital itself, and another system has taken over: techno-feudalism, where digital giants dominate the global economy.
The thesis comes from Yanis Varoufakis, economist and former Greek Minister of Finance, who laid it out in a book, Les Nouveaux Serfs de l’économie (2024). Once you accept the analogy, it is hard to look at your media plan the same way.
I reviewed mine.
What is techno-feudalism?
It is an economic regime where profit gives way to rent: you no longer produce, you own the land on which others produce and you collect a toll.
In feudal times, power was defined by control over land. Lords collected rent, while peasants worked on land that did not belong to them.
Today, the lands are platforms. The lords are called Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Zhang Yiming (founder of ByteDance, the richest man in Asia in 2026 with around 105 milliards de dollars, according to Bloomberg), Tim Cook. The peasants are content creators, app developers, game makers, and every brand that posts. Just like back then, lords are only men.
The toll shows up on the balance sheets. Google, Meta, and Amazon alone capture 58,8 % of all US ad spend, up from 47,1 % in 2020 (EMARKETER / MAGNA). Meta alone reported 196,2 milliards de dollars in ad revenue in 2025, up from 160,6 milliards in 2024 (Meta, annual results). This figure is backed entirely by the time we spend watching what others have produced.
You might be reading this article after seeing a post on LinkedIn. Microsoft land, managed since 2026 by Lord Dan Shapero. We are all his peasants. Back to work, folks.
Why does your community not belong to you?
Because you lack the three attributes of ownership: direct access, the contact list, and the right to stay.
Your communities follow you. They watch your content. They comment, and you reply to them. Emotionally, the relationship is real. Legally and technically, it does not exist.
Nothing they produce belongs to you: not the value, not the audience, not the data. A follower is a line in someone else’s database, which can be rerouted, restricted, or deleted.
Even your reach is out of your hands: the algorithm decides who gets shown your latest video, and it will only be a fraction of your followers.
Do not worry: to reach ‘your’ community, you can always sponsor your posts. Platforms will gladly sell you ad space to speak to people who already said yes to you.
You funded building the audience. Then you pay to access it.
Would you accept that for any other line item in your budget?
Why do platforms prefer creators over brands?
Because their product is attention time, and an individual produces more of it than a brand. Instagram makes no secret of this.
In an interview with Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, explicitly distinguishes two categories:
- The creator: an individual who produces original content with ‘some degree of commercial intent’, not necessarily monetary, and who grows on the platform while helping it grow.
- The publisher: a brand, a magazine, a newspaper. They also produce original content, but with ‘definite commercial intent’.
The distinction might seem subtle. Yet it dictates who gets favored by the algorithm: Mosseri specifies that his teams have numerical targets for creator output, and none for publisher output.
The rationale is straightforward: ‘We focus on creators because we believe that power will continue to shift from institutions to individuals, across all industries’ (full interview transcript).
The creator economy is worth around 250 milliards de dollars and could approach 480 milliards in 2027 (Goldman Sachs Research). In comparison, brands invested 32,6 milliards de dollars in direct partnerships with creators in 2025 (The Drum), a fraction of what Meta’s ad network alone pulls in over the same period.
Brands can keep pouring colossal sums into content and sponsored posts. Meanwhile, platforms slip three ads between two stories on top of it. This shift in value is explored in From the creator economy to the recommendation economy.
What are the concrete risks for a brand relying on platforms?
Four, and none of them are theoretical.
1. Instability. An account can be restricted, demonetized, or deleted overnight, with no effective recourse. In 2025, TikTok deleted the account of a Nigerian creator followed by 2,2 million people (The Guardian Nigeria), and moderation enforces values you did not choose (see Brand safety: when platform values are no longer yours). A channel whose terms are rewritten without you is not a channel. It is an exposure.
2. Losing CRM. By outsourcing the relationship to platforms, brands lost direct access to their customers (see Customer acquisition is broken). The day a rule changes, there is nothing left to fall back on. This exact realization is why we built Frak.
3. Brand erasure. The most insidious one. What matters to a platform is that as much content as possible gets consumed, no matter who made it. That is why we all say: ‘I saw this on Instagram,’ ‘I just saw this post on LinkedIn.’ Never the creator’s name. Never the brand’s name. Just the name of the land.
4. The measurement blind spot. Direct traffic accounts for about 37 % of website visitors, and any share via WhatsApp, Slack, or Discord comes in with no referrer. The share of your growth that owes nothing to platforms is therefore the one you measure the worst (see the deep dive on dark social).
Landowner or peasant: the one-question test
One question is enough: what would happen if your main account disappeared tomorrow morning?
If the answer is ‘we lose our acquisition channel,’ you are a peasant. If it is ‘we lose visibility, but keep our customer relationship,’ you are an owner.
| Metric | Peasant | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Customer relationship | Mediated by an algorithm | Direct, link-to-link |
| Data | Owned by the platform | First-party, owned by you |
| Reach | Allocated, adjustable | A function of satisfied customers |
| Cost of access | Auction, rising | CAC set in advance by the brand |
| If the account drops | Revenue drops | Visibility drops, relationship holds |
Most brands I meet sit on the left while believing they are on the right: they confuse follower count with access to those followers.
Escaping feudalism without leaving platforms
Nobody leaves platforms. That is where attention is concentrated, and cutting yourself off on principle would be poor management.
The challenge is to stop renting your entire growth from them.
Moving from one column to the other takes three things:
- A direct link to your customers, free of algorithmic middlemen, ready to activate on a Sunday night without asking for permission.
- Ownership of your data, in first-party and in real time, because data you do not store is data you rent.
- Growth backed by your community, exactly the way platforms lean on theirs to grow.
The third point flips the dynamic, and that is what we are building at Frak: the brand sets its acquisition cost in advance, and on a 10 € CAC, 8 € goes to the customer who recommended and 2 € goes to the platform. Data stays with the brand, and nothing is spent without an attributed sale. Across our first onboarded brands, we observe a 26 % lower acquisition cost. The framework is detailed in Recommendation Economy.
Your customers are not a rented audience. They are real people talking to other real people across channels no algorithm controls: a conversation, a WhatsApp message, a lunch. And 88 % of consumers say they trust those recommendations more than any other channel, which is 50 % more than the lowest-ranked formats (Nielsen, Trust in Advertising 2021).
It is the only territory that still belongs to you. It would be a shame to leave it fallow.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is techno-feudalism?
It is the thesis put forward by economist Yanis Varoufakis in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2024): capitalism has given way to a digital rent regime. A handful of platforms own the infrastructure on which brands, creators, and developers operate, extracting a toll without producing the content that draws the audience.
Can a brand truly own its community?
Not on a third-party platform. A follower is an entry in a social network’s database, to which you have neither direct access nor vested rights. A brand owns its customer relationship wherever it holds the identifier, consent, and contact channel: email, SMS, app, or personalized recommendation link.
How do you reclaim customer data from social platforms?
Platforms do not export this data: you have to generate new data outside of them. The approach consists in shifting part of the interactions to an owned channel, with a recommendation link attributed to an identified customer. Every share then creates data that belongs to you.
Should you leave social media?
No. These platforms concentrate the audience, and cutting yourself off would cost more than the dependency itself. The goal is to reduce the share of growth that relies exclusively on them, while simultaneously building an owned channel: direct relationship, first-party data, and acquisition powered by existing customer recommendations.
I am Virginie Maire, co-founder of Frak Labs, turning your customers into a scalable, profitable, and authentic acquisition channel. A committed entrepreneur and mother of two, I have navigated media, social networks, influence, and e-commerce for 20 years… and I am still having as much fun as ever!