The feudal information age
I should start this with the disclaimer that I’m no expert on what life was like during Europe’s feudal age.
In Present Shock, an assessment of today’s information-saturated culture subtitled “When everything happens at once,” Douglas Rushkoff occasionally talks about the transitional period between the feudal system of the Middle Ages in Europe and the commerce-based society that emerged during the Renaissance. I was particularly interested in his description of the miniature local economies that emerged during this time, before monarchies started issuing coins from a royal treasury on a large scale.
In towns, residents were issued slips upon making a deposit in a centralized grain storage area, indicating how much grain they would then have the right to withdraw later. People traded these slips as a sort of local currency for other goods—and, Rushkoff points out, the slips depreciated naturally in value since the grain wouldn’t last forever, so there was no real drive to hoard it or invest it.
Until the ruling class got involved with their gold coins, this was a healthy local economy with the beginnings of what would become a middle class. (And, indeed, central currency didn’t kill off the middle class by a long shot, but perhaps it did bring the center of wealth back into cities, thus keeping rural peasants artificially dependent on the crown.)
I think Rushkoff’s point with the example was to show how quickly during that time the leading ideas about wealth and class were changed, and how our current economic system takes its cues from these old negotiations with dropping the oligarchy and moving toward a commerce-based system. It was a huge adjustment, with wide-reaching implications for all manner of power dynamics. It was somewhere in there that Europe had two popes, after all. Uneasy times.
Present Shock isn’t really about economics, though—it’s about culture, and so I began thinking about this historical mention in the context of our modern relationship with technology and how we handle these big cultural changes (which is what Rushkoff spends most of the book focusing on). What would my 13th-century equivalent have thought was coming when he first got word about the grain store slips? How did the feudal lords react? Did they have any idea what we were collectively working towards in that moment?
It’s easy for us to sit on this side of the timeline and think how obvious it all seems; of course a centralized currency would be the path for national economic expansion, and of course a middle class would emerge from the growing importance of trade and skilled labor. But what serf ever grumbled to himself that he couldn’t wait for the middle-class thing to happen? Was “economics” even a word back then?
No one can really see these historical moments coming. All we can really do is look at patterns. And it occurred to me that we’re in a similar feudal moment now—not with respect to the economy, but with regard to how we manage our communications.
Certainly, others have criticized corporate monopolies before now, and the telecom companies are no exception here. But I’m not really griping about the fact that we’re paying one of perhaps three major companies a not-really-negotiable monthly rate for internet access; it’s not the price point that concerns me, but the fact that it’s such a limited number of private companies that we all rely on for reliable transmission of our cabled communications.
As far as internet communications go, too, there are a just a handful of major businesses handling email on a large scale, and a very finite number of big data centers handling the server load that keeps all this information flowing.
We feel connected to the internet, rely on it for commerce, and simply find it convenient to ignore that there’s a very small subset of people who are actually in positions of power to determine how it all keeps running—and who truly “owns” all these electronic records, as the recent NSA news has brought into light.
When it comes to our data on the internet, we’re serfs again, working land we’ll never own the rights to. I don’t think there’s anything inherently corrupt about electronic communication—no need to abandon the internet, folks—but I do think we’re at a point of transition here. What is the equivalent of a middle class in this situation? It may still be just out of the reach of our imaginations, but a solid place to start is learning what we can about the dependencies already in place.
