What would Cyber-Feudalism would be like?

I want to ask everyone here about what would Cyber-Feudalism would be like. since I was starting to write a spin-off of my novel Fictionverse Project: Original Universe name Fictionverse Project: World of Cyber Shinobi which is inspired by the Taimanin Franchise but mostly on Action Taimanin & Taimanin RPGX

Cyber-Feudalism is combination between Feudalism & Cyberpunk

I have no idea as they are basically fundamentally incompatible ideas.

Feudal society (although nowadays more typically divided into manoralisms and vassalage) existed because of a lack of state capacity to administer the realm. So the solution was that the king gave away land to vassals to administer, who then gave it away to their vassals, etc etc. This way, each individual could oversee a small bit of land while the realm was held together via personal ties. This is vassalage. Manoralism meant that the peasants were also tied to a lord, and did not have many freedoms.

How does any of this relate to cyberpunk, where one of the foundational ideas is that megacorps own everything, including your body (via cybernetics)? Corporations that, by their very nature, require enormous state capacity to run everything or else you just have a regular capitalist society.

The only scenario I am coming up with is some kind of galaxy-wide cyberpunk empire, where the state capacity is not sufficient to cover the entire galaxy (limitations of FTL, sheer size etc.) and thus you get a feudalism-like system.

I still think that clashes because of what fundamentally their relations are. A galactic empire that isn't a corporation would not be cyberpunk; a galactic empire that is a corporation is not feudal.

So it's either a feudal story with cyberpunk aesthetics or a cyberpunk with feudal aesthetics (or both aesthetic) but you run into the issue that it cannot fundamentally be both.

And if you just wanna do cyber-samurai Jack then there's not necessarily much need to think about how all this would work

Depends on how literal you want to be. Any sufficiently rigid caste based society could loosely be termed "Feudal" in the sense that only a small elite have access to the resources required to enact life choices. If the majority of people were born poor and had to grind online characters to generate items for the wealthy to play their games, that could qualify.

Basically an extension of your standard cyberpunk dystopia.

>Any sufficiently rigid caste based society could loosely be termed "Feudal" in the sense that only a small elite have access to the resources required to enact life choices

What you describe isn't feudalism. Which just brings me back to "you can't have both unless you go for the aesthetics only".

So, I generally agree with devak that this is a very hard sell as you're trying to combine feudalism and corporatism in a manner which is really hard to make work? I think the closest I could come would be to combine these traits:

1) The general populace cannot afford implants, or effectively resist implanted warriors, thereby creating your 'peasant' group.

2) This general populace still provides something that is needed. If we're in cyberpunk world, it's probably not food/raw materials. Maybe literally their body parts if cloning doesn't work in this universe? Or maybe just literal slave labor?

3) You have cybernetically enhanced 'knights' who owe fealty to corporate masters who provide them with enhancement in exchange for them keeping the peasants in line?

Now, it doesn't make a lot of sense how such a society could evolve, but neither do most cyberpunk dystopias.

Edited by ECD on Nov 2nd 2022 at 4:10:53 AM

Regarding (2), I might suggest that what the populace provides in labour at the various mundane tasks of a megacorp; in place of serfs working the land, we have wage-slaves working the cubicles.

In short, the kingdom becomes the corporation (complete with neighbouring kingdoms becoming rival corps); the king becomes the CEO; the feudal nobility becomes the executives; and the serfs become the desk-workers. And, as suggested above, knights become a class of corporate security-turned-military, outfitted with expensive cyberware that makes them formidable foes—both against the workers and against rival corps.

We can then have the technical government be weakened such that the corps become, if not technically the ones in charge, then de facto running things. Further, the police and military may be either weakened to the point that corporate "security" takes over their work, or be entirely privatised into the corporate ranks.

The thing is, that's an extraction dictatorship. The money flows into the company account from the labor and the company then distributes that money to the inner circle.

A feudal system is defined by being closer to a pyramid scheme than a dictatorship. The serfs work the land and provide wealth to the knights and barons in exchange for the privilege of not starving to death. The knights and barons provide a portion of that wealth to their upline, the big important nobles, your dukes and princes, who provide a portion of their direct income from their personal holdings and a portion from their subordinates to the king.

To use an extremely tortured analogy, state income is a pie produced by the people, with everyone producing a small slice. An extraction dictatorship (or a corporation, they're basically interchangeable in practice) is about taking the entire pie and putting it in one place, then slicing the pie unfairly to benefit the slicer. A feudal government is based on serfs producing a tiny slice of pie, and passing it up to a person who's trusted to hold onto more pie, who takes most of that pie for themselves, then gives the rest to the person above them, who's trusted with even more pie, who takes most of the pie they're given and passes some on to the king.

There's layers of taxation and extraction in a feudal state that a corporate state won't willingly implement because feudal systems give less money to the leadership than modern dictatorships, and also would give the C-suite much less control over the various executives than a straight dictatorship would. Feudal governments are almost always engaged in violent internal disputes of one kind or another, those castles weren't just for defense against invaders. A company wouldn't willingly adopt a feudal structure.

Those multinational companies which have a command branch and several exterior branches in other countries, with names like "Horvanfjord Tech North America" or whatever are probably the closest companies get to feudal systems, but those branches rarely have unique subsidiaries of their own that no other branch has, nor does the company have the direct competition between branches that would make the situation truly feudal. That last bit is another reason that companies would avoid going feudal, having direct competition between branches is a terrible idea, as everyone who's tried to run a country "darwinistically" found out (lots of the early 20th century dictatorships tried to do that by encouraging competition between branches of government, but it ended up being extremely self-sabotaging and caused huge problems.)

Edited by Florien on Nov 3rd 2022 at 2:11:50 AM

To my mind the analogy remains close enough to call it "cyber-feudalism" nevertheless—an exact match doesn't seem necessary, to me.

However, one could perhaps bring the scenario closer by having the activities of the workers directly produce wealth that they pass up the line—perhaps they're harvesting bitcoin or some other digital wealth (manufactured VR experiences, maybe).

Or perhaps society has moved away from money and towards something manufactured—maybe the "serfs" manufacture cyberware (or the parts thereof), which is then distributed up the chain, some to be incorporated directly by the execs and their "knights", the rest (and best) to be passed up to the CE Os and their personal guards.

So, another way to go would be almost the reverse of cyberpunk standard tropes? Feudalism arises due to the limited state capacity requiring society to be broken down into pieces which can be run basically by individuals (or relatively small groups) and then stack those pieces on top of one another. Thereby creating the 'retinue of retinues effect'.

Now, a cyberpunk world basically cannot lack for organizational capacity, but it might lack for force capacity. If you up the ability of individuals to resist through use of things like force-field technology, or anything else which would enable small groups to stand off larger groups, than you might be able to recreate the dynamics which produced feudalism in a more technologically advanced structure.

You could get pretty cyber with it, I'm not sure how 'cyberpunk' it would be (though you could have corporations acting as the equivalent of churches or towns rather than kings, in some areas as, or more powerful than states, in others far less and a constant push-pull might also justify the more fragmented power base feudalism relies on to remain in effect).

Not to beat the horse too much but every single option so far is still applying one system with the aesthetics of the other: feudalism with cyberpunk cosplay or cyberpunk with feudal cosplay.

In particular, the power to administer a state and the power to do violence are pretty much synonymous. if the state can't administer it's violence then it simply cannot apply it's laws. if there's a powerful underclass then there's no underclass.

Going back to my earlier suggestion:

Surely here the "state", analogised to the megacorp, does have the means to so enforce its laws? And yet it still has an underclass.

So I think this somewhat overstates matters. One can be powerful and still vulnerable in other ways (one obvious way to do this would be to limit the size of areas which could be protected, such that sieges are required to break them, but they cannot reliably feed themselves). Indeed, a big part of the problem of feudalism is the see-sawing nature of power depending on offensive and defensive technology, which creates real opportunity costs to needing to force compliance, even against a far weaker foe.

Now, nothing is going to be exactly parallel, but I think you're overstating the all powerful nature of the state/company in Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk relies heavily on extremely powerful enemies and entirely fragmented social orders. Having a collapsed state lapsing into cyberfeudalism doesn't seem impossible to me, but such a society would likely be extremely vulnerable (as actual feudal societies were) to surrounding state entities.

But I think that devak is generally correct on the underlying point, which is that it's going to be very difficult to combine feudalism, a historical method of organizing societies and people and cyberpunk which is a wildly unrealistic dystopian version of the future. But Feudal Future might provide some examples to get you thinking about it?

Edited by ECD on Nov 3rd 2022 at 12:49:03 PM

Yes it is feudal future but with cyberpunk aestetics

Oh, well, if the cyberpunk elements are just aesthetic then it becomes fairly straightforward, I would say: have a standard feudal setup, but have the king be plugged into their throne, their advisors be A.I.s, the knights wield monofilament longswords, etc.

The King and his heir are the only ones with the codes to the kill bot army.

Honestly a rather germane topic for a story I'm going for.

For the record I do agree that it seems mutually exclusive enough that you have to go with cybercore feudalism or cyberpunk with feudal aesthetics. For the altter there is a few ideas

• Knights with Powered Armor and neon Tron Lines for example seems like a simple synesthetic of both aesthetics. Mechanical steed optional.
• For a more general outlook, I do have an idea for a corporation that runs itself like a kingdom, with the relevant flavor (granted it is specifically due to an idea i have for a Maharabhata adaptation with some twists) such as Princes, Princesses, Crowns, etc. Though I'm not sure where on the "scale" such a company would be on.
• As for where the cybernetics fit into all this, I'd say involving Clarke's Third Law and keeping them a secret from the peasantry and their analogs would be a decent place to start, but that might be too close to fantasy for what you might be going for. The general idea would be for the tech to be the basis of superstitions used to control the population, especially if used for a techno religion basis.

I do think the two eras have a common theme of shall we say...lawlessness. In one the state had no capacity to enforce the law without delegating it to landlords, in the other they do not have the same power and people turn to big business for it. In both it is a divide between the haves and the have nots. However the rest are so mutually exclsuvie that it is only possible by using one as window dressing for the other.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Nov 5th 2022 at 8:15:22 AM

I know, one or two months late, but I'd like to elaborate a bit on why you can have feudalism and a galactic empire.

Fundamentally, feudalistic socities arise when your states do not have the means to project power (that is military, law enforcement, taxation, but also social spending) across their territory. Thus, they cannot compel or reward local authorities (e.g in the Middle Ages, local lords) and have instead to rely on trust. Hence giving people control over territory in exchange for loyalty i.e vassalage. These people often need to entrust other people with control to portions of this territory. Rinse and repeat and you get a layered pyramid of people, which have entrusted part of their authority (not just territory, but also legal rights in a given territory) to the people making up the layer below, in exchange for said people's loyalty and service.

A galactic empire run as a corporation could end up having the same issue if FTL transportation is sufficiently difficult. Thus, they would have to entrust planets and star systems to planet/star system authorities in exchange for services from these. A relationship that is based mostly on trust and soft power rather than hard power.

Not sure what your point is, since nobody contested that you can't have either a feudal galactic empire or a cyberpunk galactic empire. Just that you can't have both.

A corporation that cannot enforce it's structure isn't a corporation, and so will fall apart. And cyberpunk heavy demands megacorps in charge, not necessary as The Government but close enough that The Government has no sway.

You could thus have both systems in a galactic empire, where part of a feudal obligation is a megacorp, but it's notably not cyber-feudal, just cyber-within-feudalism. Because the megacorp would not have a feudal structure, but be part of a larger feudal structure.

It is, in fact, similar to how megacorps have existed in our words, where local power was hard to enforce by nations and so simply turned over to a corporation (like the East India Company) but that doesn't make it a megacorp-democracy, but a megacorp-within-a-democracy.

Edited by devak on Dec 13th 2022 at 6:51:39 PM

Nothing about a corporation with subsidiaries requires close control of the subsidiaries by the corporation, though.

(Come to think of that, isn't cyberpunk more an aesthetics+social structure combination, rather than a way to run a state?)

Cyberpunk has been watered down into an aesthetic. it's originally supposed to be a critique of capitalism, specifically in the way that technology will not create an utopia but simply reinforces existing power structures. Megacorps are such a big feature because they are capitalism incarnate, and thus the primary villain.

Implants and artificial systems thus reinforce that in a capitalist system, you won't even own your own body.

Ultimately it just became "brooding city with implants"

I'd actually imagine your typical cyberpunk setting is akin to feudalism, with CE Os being the feudal lords and cyborg soldiers being the knights.

Cyberpunk Arasaka would prefer to call it a Daimyo-Samurai relationship but I'm just splitting hairs. I'd like to see a setting that plays into this more with perhaps some knightly aesthetic and ritual. We've already seen Adam Smasher become a one man army so it's not implausible to borg someone out so much they become a force unto themselves like knights of old.

What you could do is have them use power armor instead of augments, this would get the right aesthetic.