Only a few people realize that we are currently undergoing a transformation of historic proportions. Those who do not wake up now will find themselves as serfs in a techno-feudal reality.

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At the western end of the Atlantic Ocean, an autocrat is raging in the White House in Washington.

The whole world seems to belong to this king and his court. A world property that can be used at will. They just casually mess with Greenland.

Then the Strait of Hormuz is to be renamed the “Strait of Trump.”

All rules of decency are being widely ignored. Not only the forgotten men and women on the US aircraft carriers are starving. Even the own MAGA clientele is being plucked and robbed of their money with the issuance of the so-called Trump Coin. Any negative consequences? So far, absolute impunity.

Image: Peter Thiel (Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0)

One might think that all of this will soon be over.

However, this could turn out to be a fatal mistake. Because if Trump goes, then his vise JD Vance comes, and he is still in his prime and always knows what he’s doing. JD Vance, however, is merely the creation of Peter Thiel. Thiel is, as we all know, a multi-billionaire and, among other things, the main owner of Palantir. The multi-billionaires from Silicon Valley are constantly in and out of the White House. The political agenda of the Trump administration follows the directives of the Heritage Foundation one-to-one, as outlined in the political script named Project 2025. So-called “normal mortals,” that is: workers, farmers, employees, and the middle class, are not even consulted. Meanwhile, the state’s assets are being consistently driven into insolvency.

There is a nice magic word for this development: “disruption.” Actually a term from the private sector, but increasingly used for upheavals in the political sphere as well. Consequently, an outdated production method is swept away by a new, supposedly more efficient production method. Related to the term “disruption” is also the concept of “creative destruction,” coined by the sociologist Joseph Schumpeter. Creative destruction also involves the destruction of entire infrastructures in order to forcibly implant entirely new structures in their place. An example of this is the weavers’ uprising in Silesia in the nineteenth century, which pushed an entire region into unemployment. Or the winding down of mining in Thatcher’s Britain. Or the consistent fresh start from scratch after the Second World War.

What we are experiencing now, however, is a whole different ballgame.

To understand this, let’s take a little step back into history. The breathtaking rise of the serf to a wealthy citizen, self-responsible farmer, or wage laborer with documented rights took place over a millennium. Our relatively happy, carefree childhood, youth, and early adulthood were not granted to us out of the gracious whim of the great lords and bishops[3]. Our grace was stubbornly and persistently wrested from the powerful, generation after generation. Time and again, there were bitter setbacks and defeats. But until recently, the standard of living kept improving. When the West Germans even became the capitalist showcase for the communist East, they were really doing great. But for the past fifty years, the other side has been on the rise again, taking away from us, either with shock tactics or very gently and imperceptibly, the possessions that our ancestors fought for. They have hypnotized us. We sleep while the thieves invade our privacy and steal our valuables, our data, and even our genetic blueprint.

The Theft of Public Space

We live in times of unrestrained capital concentration. An even more rapid concentration of wealth.

But when fewer and fewer people accumulate more and more property and power, the personal feelings and character traits of these few individuals become increasingly defining for the lives of the billions of dispossessed people on this Earth.

This trend is aided by the fact that more and more capital is circulating on the stock exchanges, demanding investments. This is the hour of talented start-up entrepreneurs, who attract the unemployed stock market capital with a few smart ideas, which they boast about. If they are lucky and have not completely lost touch with reality, they can become really rich with start-up capital. Many of these start-up foxes, such as Elon Musk, have also managed to siphon off massive subsidies and benefits from the states’ solidarity funds. The entrepreneurial miracle has all too often been generated from public funds.

In any case, in this way, some individuals manage to become super-rich within one or two decades and set about shaping the world in their distorted image. As an example, let us mention Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is a person with significant emotional burdens. The constant moving by his parents made him relationship-challenged. When little Peter was three years old, he asked his father what comes after death. Papa Klaus told him bluntly, “There’s nothing more after that.” You will just be gone![4] At Stanford University, Peter Thiel was bullied for his homosexuality in the macho environment of the male-dominated campus world. His course of study was anything but brilliant. For five years, he initially dabbled in studying philosophy. To blow off steam, he poured all his energy into publishing a student newspaper. This student publication polemicized against a perceived “leftist” zeitgeist among the fellow students. He positively referred to the ideology of libertarianism. Libertarians reject the state as a shaping power and fully rely on the creative genius of entrepreneurs and the experimental spirit of engineers. Democratic participation of all parties involved is rejected by the libertarians.

But then Peter Thiel realizes that he must take a societal position to enforce his libertarian ideas. He studies law in turbo mode. As a seasoned lawyer, he now wanted to become a federal judge in Washington. The brief and curt rejection of Thiel’s request by the federal court eventually prompted him to implant his ideology instead where the action was at the time: in Silicon Valley, to be precise. With the start-up pioneers of clever software applications. Amazingly, Peter Thiel quickly becomes the guru of the young guard of computer nerds. He knows how to make the engineering knowledge of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, and all the others work for him. Today, Peter Thiel is by no means the richest man in the world, but he is certainly the chief strategist of these aging billionaire computer whizzes.

And Peter Thiel began revealing his anti-democratic agenda in speeches and essays quite early on. Particularly revealing is Thiel’s 2009 article, which he published in the house magazine of the reactionary Cato Institute, and which bears the delightful title: “The Education of a Libertarian”[5]. Thiel recalls his time at the private university Stanford. How he was mocked by his “leftist” classmates. And he said to himself: I’m banging my head against a brick wall here! And his conclusion is clear: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”[6] It is simply unacceptable that every Tom, Dick, and Harry can stop or at least hinder the equally brilliant and visionary engineer-entrepreneur with some trivial planning approval procedures. Freedom is the freedom of the genius individual. Period. The greatest enemy of geniuses like Peter Thiel is the publicly accessible audience. The open marketplace of co-determination and exchange of interests for everyone. It must be prevented that people meet and exchange ideas in this public space, and then possibly decide and implement measures that hinder the brilliant individual in their development.

The public sphere must be abolished! In a speech at a Libertarian festival, Thiel also states that the ideas of the Libertarians will never have a chance of being implemented in a democratic discourse.

The means that Peter Thiel proposes in the late 2000s are as follows: Destruction of the public sphere through the increasing monopolization of electronic communication media. The isolation of individuals through (un)social media. The direct personal contact of people, the closeness, the eye contact, the touch must be reduced to a functional minimum. After two and a half decades of penetration by electronic communication media, we can conclude that this calculation has worked out. Political demonstrations have largely disappeared from the scene. Continuous discussion forums live on site have become rare. Disruption of contact is palpable. So: complete success of this strategy to eliminate public space.

The second Peter Thiel option is pure science fiction. The brilliant engineers are supposed to create new spaces in outer space. This is apparently still a topic. Elon Musk wants to go to Mars, Jeff Bezos wants to go to the Moon. Let them. And then Peter Thiel hatched a third idea on how to crush or at least circumvent the hated democratic public. The talk is about the Seasteading Institute, which Thiel had founded. On the open ocean, where no state has any say, cities should be built on floating pontoons. These pontoon cities would be operated as private enterprises. This third option of floating cities has so far been Peter Thiel’s biggest flop. To this day, not a single floating private city has been built.

Private Cities in the Midst of Nation-States

The retreat of private cities to the open sea is no longer necessary. Since 2009, nation-states have been so severely financially ruined and hollowed out that private cities are now sprouting up worldwide like mushrooms right in the heart of nation-states. Privat cities are now being planned or are already under construction in the USA, East Asia, South America, and above all in Africa. The number of states that are already considered to have failed is increasing, and their despots are happy if anything is happening in their area of power. Thus, we already find ten private cities under construction in Africa.

Image source

These private cities are enclaves within the territory of a nation-state. Private cities have their own legal system on their territory, completely separate from the host country. The private cities operate with their own currency. Often, it is a cryptocurrency, preferably Bitcoin. The establishment of digital currencies is explicitly also part of the abolition of a democratic public sphere in Peter Thiel’s worldview. Because cryptocurrency evades the influence of nation-states. The entire private city is a private business enterprise[8]. Accordingly, there is no democratically elected mayor and no city treasurer in private cities who must answer to the city council. Instead, the private city is headed by a Chief Executive Officer, and the finances are managed by an accountant. The citizens here also have no say. They buy in with a certain sum of money. Instead of a constitution, they agree to the general terms and conditions of this private city company. If the customers of this private city have any objections to the terms and conditions, they can withdraw their deposits. They can then go to another private city whose terms and conditions they prefer.

Find the mistake. On the one hand, such a private city is a gilded cage for its residents. For the most part, the residents of these private cities submit to strict digital total surveillance at all locations. Anyone who wants to visit the residents from the outside as a guest must undergo strict security checks at the entrance gate. For these private cities in failed states are a logical evolution of the long-existing gated communities – cities with walls and strict security, which shut out the rich and beautiful from the poor have-nots, who might otherwise spoil the lives of the privileged with annoying begging or even robbery.

This is the result of a decades-long, increasingly severe spread of income and wealth inequality worldwide. The private cities are the practical consequence of a perception distortion among the rich and privileged. Instead of allowing the gap between the rich and the poor to continue widening, the simplest and most practical way would actually be to restore enough distributive justice so that the poor do not have to secure their survival through begging or robbery. The rich and privileged do not want to share with anyone. Exclusion instead of inclusion is their creed. The prevailing apocalyptic and paranoid mood in these circles only allows for solutions in the security sector: more security, even more isolation. It’s like the Middle Ages again. Some can afford the protection behind city walls, while in the “shitholes” of failed states, people are starving. No medical care and no security. The dispossessed and disenfranchised outside the city walls have to deal with criminal gangs that enforce their version of “order.”

“These are just marginal phenomena!” you might say?

Special Economic Zone Gaza

Since Donald J. Trump’s inauguration in the White House, the idea of private cities and special economic zones has experienced a tremendous upswing. For Donald Trump is the executor of those tech moguls around Peter Thiel, who are vigorously pushing for the rapid privatization of the entire world. In this context, we also read Trump’s initiative for the Abraham Accords. The USA, Israel, the Arab sheikdoms, together with Morocco, form a political alliance. Under the umbrella of the Abraham Accords, plans are flourishing to transform the Gaza Strip into a fully privatized private zone – without the Palestinians who currently still inhabit it. The Palestinians are to either “voluntarily” leave the country with a severance payment of $5,000 after the disarmament of Hamas, or they will be placed in internment camps. The now depopulated Gaza zone will be redeveloped with eight private smart cities. Additionally, a Tesla factory as a gift for Elon Musk, as well as a state-of-the-art, emission-free, AI-controlled Mediterranean port. All run by private entrepreneurs. This fits with the fact that Saudi Arabia is building an ultramodern planned city out of desert sand, named Neom, which could very well use a state-of-the-art Mediterranean port. So Gaza will also not be a territory of Israel. But Israel will take on protection guaranties for this special economic zone. Data centers for artificial intelligence are to be established all over the Middle East.

The deviation from this famous script has now been delivered precisely by Donald Trump himself, as he, together with Israel, wanted to unlawfully and completely unprovokedly invade Iran. Which, as is well known, did not work. Now the heavily battered Arab Gulf sheikdoms must first spend their money on rebuilding their destroyed infrastructure, instead of donating more capital to the American tech oligarchs for their ambitious AI projects.

Our freedom is not defended at the Hindu Kush, but in Iran[10].

But while the rapid privatization of the Middle East is experiencing a certain delay for the time being, Latin America is next being politically reshaped so that soon politicians everyplace will be in power who vehemently advocate the idea of private zones. In Honduras, the private city of Prospera has existed for quite some time on the dream island of Roatán[11]. After the previous president Xiamara Castro wanted to turn off the tap on Prospera, it is now merrily continuing under her successor Nasry Asfura. Only the governments of Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and Nicaragua are still opposing the sell-off of public space. In Argentina, however, tech oligarchs are settling in en masse, led by Peter Thiel. They are massively buying up land in the west of Argentina, at the foot of the mountain ranges. They say quite openly: the Third World War has long been underway. And we beautiful and rich people are now settling in places where the nuclear overkill doesn’t reach[12].

If we want to stop and end our expropriation and disenfranchisement, we first need to find a term for this hideous monstrosity that now stands so conspicuously in the room. Some people say: this is just capitalism in its ugliest guise! Sure, this is capitalism in its rawest, most unvarnished form. Nevertheless, this new land grab is not adequately characterized by the term capitalism. Other people say: this is tech fascism[13]! But fascism could only silence the public. He could not destroy the public sphere and the principle of inclusion. But what is happening now aims to destroy every public sphere. The destruction of all the achievements of the Enlightenment. The destruction of the opening of the world for all Earth citizens. Neither turbo-capitalism nor fascism have been able to achieve this so far. The progress of a thousand years of advancement and humanity is to be shredded. In other words: it should return to how it was in the early Middle Ages.

That’s why I propose the term “New Feudalism” to name this pernicious trend. To finally take the bull by the horns.

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Hermann Ploppa is a political scientist and journalist. Ploppa recently published the book “Der Neue Feudalismus – Privatisierung, Blackrock, Plattformkapitalismus” (The New Feudalism – Privatization, Blackrock, Platform Capitalism). As Amazon does not yet stock the book, it is best to order it from the author at: [email protected]. Visit the author’s blog here.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] https://asiatimes.com/2026/08/us-military-morale-in-the-middle-east-is-in-the-overflowing-toilet/?utm_source=The+Daily+Report&utm_campaign=2fd393ff27-DAILY_16_12_2025_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1f8bca137f-2fd393ff27-31745443&mc_cid=2fd393ff27

[2] https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

[3] Hermann Ploppa: Der Neue Feudalismus – Privatisierung, Blackrock, Plattformkapitalismus. Marburg 2025

[4] Max Chafkin: The Contratrian – Peter Thiel and the Rise of the Silicon Valley Oligarchs. New York 2021.

[5] https://hermannploppa.substack.com/p/die-geistige-entwicklung-eines-libertaren?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web&embedding_publication_id=5734834

[6] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

[7]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45o8tQMGtvU

[8] Andreas Kemper: Privatstädte – Labore für einen neuen Manchesterkapitalismus. Münster 2021

[9] https://www.globalresearch.ca/netanyahu-dirty-work-blackrock/5901866

[10] https://www.globalresearch.ca/thank-you-iran/5920268

[11]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyXOWG_VoNo

[12] https://spain.news-pravda.com/en/world/2026/08/09/22284.html

[13] Gil Duran: The Nerd Reich – Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. New York 2026

Featured image is from the author

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