Didn’t have time to go into details in my last post. I think the most important traits of technofeudalism are regulatory capture of the government and ubiquitous rent-seeking—“you’ll own nothing” (I highly doubt in the “…and be happy” part).
The big corpos have realised that extracting value is easier and more profitable than creating value. Hence subscription everything including heated seats and better acceleration in cars, platform economy (Uber, Air BnB et al.). The latest Unity fiasco is also an example of a company trying to extract as much value from the game developers as possible, and it will not be the last attempt at this.
What makes technofeudalism possible is the IT infrastructure of the world (hence “techno”). Uber-like platforms and subscription services for hardware were not practical half a century ago, but ubiquitous Internet access, smartphones and DRM makes it easy today.
In short, just like the peasants in the old feudal ages had to pay to the lord to have a place to live and make a living off the land (and realistically had nowhere to go to where this was not the case), in technofeudalism you have to pay for your techno-lord corporate middlemen to have a place to live and be able to use the tools (software or hardware) you need to make a living with no realistic alternatives due to regulatory capture.
Perfection.