Blockchain holds the promise of helping us out of the grips of our current Big Tech, digital feudalism. Through decentralisation, big corporations and governments may lose their influence over the digital landscape. However, power games will still be played in the new world of blockchain, and we must work hard to make sure that it is once more not solely the rich who hold all the cards, write Wessel Reijers and Morshed Mannan.

In a recent article for The New Yorker, Charlie Dektar envisions what a deactivation procedure for Facebook’s planned ‘metaverse’ might look like: a user cowering before the throne of a Mark Zuckerberg avatar, who with menacing calm dispatches the supplicant from his digital realm.

This dystopian vision speaks towards a growing public concern with digital feudalism. Large platform operators are seen as feudal lords of their respective walled gardens. In these gardens, the lords are able to arbitrarily exercise their whims on users and workers, while simultaneously extracting rents from them. Rents range from the commodification and sale of user data, via the exploitation of zero-hour contract workers hired by the platform, to the intensified surveillance of both groups.