The Middle Ages were not simply an age of ignorance and mud. Medieval Europe produced universities, cathedrals, sophisticated philosophy and remarkable works of engineering. It also endured disease, poor sanitation, endemic violence and political fragmentation. Great intellectual and artistic achievements existed alongside conditions that a modern society would regard as intolerable.
There is something increasingly strange about seeing a version of that contrast reappear in the twenty-first century. The difference is that medieval societies generally lacked the knowledge and resources required to solve many of their problems. Modern Western societies possess those resources in abundance. We know how to provide sanitation, maintain public order, control infectious disease, police borders and enforce basic standards of behaviour. When those things fail today, technological incapacity is rarely the explanation.
At the same time, another form of social organisation has emerged in the digital economy. A small number of technology companies now control much of the infrastructure through which people communicate, advertise, conduct business and establish public reputations. The fashionable description "techno-feudalism" is imperfect, but it captures something important about the concentration of private power in institutions upon which millions of people have become dependent.
These two developments may initially appear unrelated. One concerns declining standards of public order; the other concerns digital monopolies and corporate power. Yet they have developed together. At street level, governments increasingly struggle to enforce standards that previous generations regarded as elementary. At the digital level, private corporations have acquired powers over speech, commerce and access that governments themselves once exercised with considerable caution.
The decline of public order is particularly striking because it has occurred during a period of extraordinary technological capability. Western societies can sequence a genome, land reusable rockets and conduct surgery with robotic instruments. Yet some of their wealthiest cities have struggled with homelessness, public drug use, human waste, theft and deteriorating public spaces.
The contrast is not explained simply by lack of money. Governments spend enormous sums attempting to address these problems. Nor is it necessarily explained by lack of technical knowledge. Modern societies know how sanitation works and understand the relationship between disorder, crime and declining public confidence.
The difficulty is increasingly political and philosophical. Authorities have become reluctant to enforce certain rules when enforcement falls disproportionately upon groups considered disadvantaged or vulnerable. Compassion is an important consideration in public policy, but compassion cannot eliminate the need for standards. A society must still decide whether people may occupy public spaces indefinitely, use drugs openly, threaten strangers, damage property or create serious sanitation problems.
The older liberal understanding was that laws should apply generally while particular circumstances could be considered when dealing with individuals. Increasingly, however, disadvantage itself can become an argument against enforcement. The result is a peculiar inversion in which people who comply with regulations experience extensive supervision while those persistently violating basic rules may encounter considerable official reluctance to intervene.
This creates understandable resentment. The employed citizen pays taxes, registers a vehicle, obtains licences, obeys planning regulations and complies with workplace rules. Businesses face detailed health, environmental and safety requirements. Yet the same citizen can encounter public spaces where behaviour that would never be tolerated in a workplace or private business is accepted for months or years because enforcement has become politically difficult.
None of this means that homelessness or addiction can simply be arrested away. Serious mental illness, drug dependence and housing shortages are genuine social problems requiring treatment and competent policy. But acknowledging their complexity does not require abandoning public order. A functioning society should be capable of helping a homeless person while also maintaining the proposition that a footpath belongs to the public rather than permanently to whoever first establishes a camp upon it.
Similar tensions appear in immigration policy. Borders exist because political communities necessarily make distinctions between members and non-members and determine the conditions under which outsiders may enter. A serious immigration system requires identity checks, security screening, enforceable visa conditions and some assessment of a person's ability to function within the receiving society. Treating every restriction as morally suspect eventually makes coherent immigration policy impossible.
This emerging reluctance to exercise ordinary public authority can reasonably be described as a kind of new medievalism, although the analogy should not be pushed too far. Medieval governments often failed to maintain order because their administrative capacities were weak. Modern governments sometimes fail despite possessing extraordinary administrative and technological capacities. The failure is therefore more often a question of political choice, institutional incentives and competing moral priorities.
Alongside this weakening of public authority has come an extraordinary strengthening of private digital authority. Much of modern life now passes through platforms owned by a relatively small number of corporations. Social interaction, professional networking, advertising, retail sales, entertainment, cloud computing and access to audiences increasingly depend upon privately controlled systems.
Traditional capitalism assumes that dissatisfied customers can take their business elsewhere and that competitors can challenge established firms. That mechanism still operates throughout much of the economy. Digital markets, however, possess characteristics that can weaken it. Network effects reward scale because a platform becomes more useful as more people join it. Enormous capital requirements create additional barriers to entry, while control over app stores, cloud infrastructure, advertising systems and payment mechanisms can give established companies influence over businesses operating further down the chain.
The result is not literally feudalism. Users are not medieval serfs and technology executives are not hereditary aristocrats. Nevertheless, the analogy identifies a real problem: people increasingly conduct important parts of their economic and social lives on infrastructure they neither own nor meaningfully govern.
A person can spend years building an audience or business on a platform only to discover that access depends upon rules that can change quickly. Decisions about suspension, visibility, monetisation and acceptable speech may be made through processes that are difficult to challenge. An account can be economically valuable to its user while legally remaining subject to contractual terms largely written by the platform itself.
The problem becomes particularly important when platforms perform functions approaching those of public infrastructure while retaining the discretion of private businesses. A local shop refusing a customer normally leaves hundreds of alternatives. Exclusion from a dominant digital platform can have much greater consequences because customers, professional contacts, advertising networks and accumulated reputational capital may all be concentrated there.
This is where the term techno-feudalism has some explanatory value. The concern is not simply that technology companies are large or profitable. Large companies can produce enormous benefits, and the digital revolution has given ordinary people capabilities that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. The concern is dependency combined with concentrated control.
There is also a paradox in the relationship between weakening public authority and strengthening private authority. As people lose confidence in public spaces and institutions, they purchase private substitutes. They move into secured buildings, send children to private schools, employ private security, travel by private vehicle and conduct more of their lives through digital services that promise convenience and control.
Those responses are rational individually, but collectively they can accelerate institutional decline. People with sufficient resources increasingly insulate themselves from failing public systems, leaving those systems with fewer influential defenders. The wealthy can avoid deteriorating streets, schools and transport. The people who cannot escape them bear the consequences.
Political elites are particularly vulnerable to this separation. Decision-makers who live in safe neighbourhoods, work in protected buildings and travel through controlled environments can underestimate the consequences of disorder for people without those protections. Policies that appear compassionate from a secure distance can look very different to a shopkeeper dealing with repeated theft or a commuter using a deteriorating public transport system every day.
Technology adds another layer of insulation. Political and corporate decisions affecting millions of people can now be made by institutions geographically and socially remote from those affected. Moderation policies can determine what citizens in one country may readily say or discover even when the people administering those systems live elsewhere and face little direct accountability to the communities involved.
The answer is not hostility to technology or nostalgia for an imagined past. Medieval society was neither freer nor more prosperous than modern liberal society, and smashing digital infrastructure would solve nothing. The appropriate response is much less dramatic: restore competent government where government has legitimate responsibilities and preserve meaningful competition where private institutions have acquired excessive power.
That means enforcing ordinary laws consistently while maintaining humane treatment for people in genuine difficulty. It means treating sanitation, public safety, borders and functioning infrastructure as prerequisites of civilisation rather than embarrassing remnants of an authoritarian past. Compassion and order are not opposites. Durable compassion normally requires order because public generosity disappears rapidly when citizens conclude that institutions have lost control.
In the digital economy, the equivalent task is to preserve competition, portability and meaningful avenues of appeal. People should be able to move their data, businesses and audiences where reasonably possible. Dominant platforms should not be able to use control over one essential layer of infrastructure simply to prevent competition in another. The objective should not be government control of speech but reducing the consequences of being excluded by any single private gatekeeper.
Western civilisation does not suffer from a shortage of technical knowledge. It possesses capabilities medieval rulers could scarcely have imagined. The deeper problem is deciding where authority should be exercised, what standards a society is prepared to defend and how concentrated power can be kept accountable.
That produces the central contradiction of the present age. We have unprecedented technological power alongside declining confidence in ordinary public authority. Governments hesitate to exercise powers they unquestionably possess, while private digital institutions exercise forms of control that scarcely existed thirty years ago.
The danger is not that the West is literally returning to the Middle Ages. It is that a technologically sophisticated society can reproduce some of the characteristics associated with fragmented authority: deteriorating public order below and increasingly concentrated private power above. A civilisation capable of reaching orbit should also be capable of maintaining safe streets, functioning borders and clean public spaces. It should be capable of enjoying the extraordinary benefits of digital technology without making participation in social and economic life dependent upon the goodwill of a handful of private platforms.
The technology is not the obstacle. The difficult questions are political: what standards are worth enforcing, what institutions deserve authority, and how much concentrated power a free society should tolerate. Those are old questions. Our mistake is assuming that possessing modern technology means we have permanently solved them.
https://amgreatness.com/2026/09/01/progressive-regression-and-the-new-medievalism/