Reddit Asks the Question: 'What’s a Piece of 2000s or 2010s Internet Culture That Younger People Wouldn’t Understand?'

By Petr Navovy | reddit | February 6, 2025 |

Header Image Source: FXX

There are two relatively recently coined terms that keep recurring when people try to describe the mess that we find ourselves in at the turn of the first quarter of the 21st century: 1) ‘Enshittification’, and 2) ‘Technofeudalism’. The two are, naturally, inextricably linked.

Author Cory Doctorow coined ‘enshittification’ in 2022 to describe the process by which online platforms (and other services) capture a market with an interesting/innovative/useful product, amass a large user base, and then gradually get worse and worse (while still often reaping ever larger profits).

‘Technofeudalism’ is the term used by author and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis in his book of the same name. Varoufakis uses the term in an effort to diagnose, in his usual witty and insightful way, the economic model currently ruling the world. The book’s full title is ‘Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism’, which might strike some as slightly hyperbolic, but Varoufakis makes a compelling argument for his position that the form of capitalism that (in various iterations and forms) ruled the roost from its multiple imperial heartlands over the past few centuries has now mutated so much thanks to advances in technology so as to warrant an entirely new label. As this interview with Varoufakis in The Guardian puts it:

“Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook,” he writes. “You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”
It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism. And us? We’re the serfs. “Cloud serfs”, so lacking in class consciousness that we don’t even realise that the tweeting and posting that we’re doing is actually building value in these companies.

Further in that piece author Shoshana Zuboff is quoted as saying: ‘In big tech we face a totalising power that in key respects disqualifies itself from being understood as capitalism, but rather as a wholly new form of governance by the few over the many.’ It’s difficult to argue with these points, and it’s difficult to not be nostalgic for the very recent technological past as a result, before platform owners became the new feudal lords and when tech seemed to still signal some hope and promise, instead of just inventing new ways of enslaving us. Reddit had this topic on its mind the other day when it asked the question: ‘What’s a piece of 2000s or 2010s internet culture that younger people wouldn’t understand?’ You can check out the full thread here, but below are some highlights: