Technofeudalism Doesn't Burn Books—It Unpublishes Them
In the digital age, censorship no longer needs fire. It only needs a server farm, a contract clause, and a friendly chat with a platform lord.
In March 2024, reporting revealed that the Trump administration may have tried to pressure Amazon to remove books it found ideologically threatening. If so, there was no public decree, no courtroom drama, no great bonfire in the town square—only a quiet maneuver in the shadowy space where state power meets platform compliance. If it proves not to have been true in this case it nevertheless bears thinking about, if only because it is so plausible, given what this administration has proven itself capable of.
Digital book removal is, of course, a far more efficient course of action than burning books.
Welcome to technofeudalism, where power is not seized by controlling factories or armies, but by managing the informational terrain on which contemporary life unfolds—DNS records, app store policies, recommendation engines, fulfillment networks, and above all, the cloud.
This is not capitalism in its classical form. This is something new, or at least newly visible. In this regime, cloud capital—the infrastructure of storage, access, and algorithmic gatekeeping—supplants the industrial ownership of yesteryear. You don’t need to destroy ideas. You only need to remove them from the searchable index, to revoke access to the files, to suspend the account that shares them. No spectacle, no martyrdom—just a broken link.
And here's the rub: the mechanisms that make this possible aren't just authoritarian impulses. They're also deeply woven into the fabric of intellectual property law.
IP as an Arm of Cloud Power
The digital economy has long depended on IP to justify ownership not just of content, but of access. Platforms don't just “host” books, videos, or music. They license them, track them, and revoke them at will.
Even physical books are increasingly treated as rights-managed objects. When a title is removed from Amazon’s store or from Kindle’s backend, it’s not confiscation—it’s “compliance with licensing terms.” In the logic of IP, no one ever owns knowledge. They merely rent it. And landlords can evict.
What this means in practice is that all public memory is becoming contingent. Contingent on contracts, on terms of service, on whether a corporation finds it profitable—or a government finds it tolerable—for that memory to exist.
And because IP is enforced not only by law but by code and infrastructure, it allows both corporations and states to act without public deliberation, without visibility, and without accountability.
From Burning Books to Blackholing Meaning
In an earlier era, censorship required visibility. A banned book became a cause célèbre. Burning books sparked resistance. But technofeudal suppression is deniable. No one sees the fire. You only notice the silence. A title you once saw is gone. The author is de-platformed. The link goes dead. And you're not sure if it's a glitch, a decision, or your own faulty memory.
This is not just about state overreach. It is about the total enclosure of public memory by private infrastructure, governed by a tangle of IP restrictions, market logics, and shadow negotiations. It is about the slow suffocation of schmooze-level social reality—those informal, face-to-face, improvisational exchanges that once sustained communal knowledge—beneath a regime of algorithmic silence.
Reclaiming the Means of Cultural Continuity
The Left has not yet risen to the challenge. Too often, we respond to censorship in terms of content, not infrastructure. We protest the banning of a book without questioning why it is Amazon’s choice to make. We decry a de-platforming but do not ask why every platform is a privately-owned fiefdom.
The Communitarium Project begins here: with the recognition that meaning is infrastructural, and that power over memory is the power to shape reality. We must stop treating digital access as a convenience, and start treating it as a terrain of struggle. The IP regime must be contested—not only for its corporate excesses, but for its role in handing our cultural bloodstream to a handful of cloud barons.
We do not yet know the full list of books removed under Trump’s pressure. But we do know this: the next generation of censors will not burn the books. They will simply revoke the license.
And no one will know they were ever there.