Technofeudal Fever Dreams — Silicon Fiefdoms and the Urban Anxieties of Empire
Scholar Erin McElroy examines how tech platforms create neo-feudal power structures reshaping cities, labor, and the meaning of ownership itself.
Why we picked this
The technofeudalism thesis has been circulating for a few years now. McElroy brings it down from abstraction to the street level, where platform economies are already reshaping who gets to live where.
Erin McElroy’s lecture examines what happens when the language of feudalism (fiefdoms, lords, serfs) stops being metaphorical and starts describing actual power relations in platform-dominated cities. Her work connects the abstract debate about whether we have left capitalism for something worse to the concrete anxieties of displacement, surveillance, and precarious labor that define life in tech-saturated urban centers.
The talk is part of the Heyman Center’s spring Thursday Lecture Series on “Pedagogy of the Deed,” which asks how education and action intersect. McElroy’s contribution brings that question into the built environment: if platforms are restructuring cities, what forms of knowledge and resistance does that demand?
Free and open to the public at the Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room.