Once the chasm widens a bit more, the “efficient market” cover story bridge collapses into the abyss.
In the conventional view, Neofeudalism and Neocolonialism are mad fantasies: the world is an efficient market of buyers and sellers guided by the invisible hand of self-interest, overseen by a fair referee, the State.
This is of course exactly what those benefiting from Neofeudalism and Neocolonialism would say: since I’m doing great, everyone’s doing great.
The view from inside Neofeudal, Neocolonial monopolies is more realistic. Inside the Big Tech monopolies, the leaders quite rightly compare their digital empire to that of the East India Company, which ruled most of India as a private corporation so powerful that it was in many way its own State, even as the duties on its massive commerce funded the British state and expanded the British Empire by other means.
Two books offer insight into corporate colonialism and by extension, into corporate neocolonialism:
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple
Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism by Philip J. Stern
In other words, private empires extend national empires which in turn empower private empires. The Big Tech corporations operate as Network States, a new iteration of the corporation-as-empire model. The Big Tech monopolies don’t need private armies like the East India Company maintained, or a merchant fleet; they operate in the digital world as global fiefdoms.
Those beholden to these digital empires also have a more realistic view. For example, Anupam Mittal, founder and CEO of People Group, in reference to Google’s new billing system, called the company the “Digital East India Company” and its policies “neocolonialism at its worst.”
The mad fantasy isn’t Neofeudalism / Neocolonialism, it’s the absurdly self-serving mirage of an efficient market of buyers and sellers blah-blah-blah, the cover story used by every apologist for monopoly since the late 1700s to cloak the harsh reality that markets are opportunities for monopolies and cartels and the profits and wealth generated are asymmetrically distributed not by some invisible hand but by the very visible hands on the levers of Neofeudalism / Neocolonialism.
These hands don’t really care what currency you use to pay them; gold is fine, bitcoin is fine, gold-backed currencies are fine, it doesn’t matter what you use to pay, but pay you will.
