The Idle Armies of Technofeudalism

If manual labor is being replaced by robotization, and cognitive labor by AI, what then is left as employment for the average human being?

Intro from David Pinder:

This is an exciting occasion for me because this is my first ever guest post. It’s from Jef Teugels, who describes himself thus: “I live and work where art, systems innovation, and education collide. As an artist, I paint the tension between collapse and creation; as a researcher and educator, I help others navigate that same threshold —where transformation begins.”

In the near future, I’m hoping Jef will join me here on Aargh! for a podcast conversation but, first, right now, meet Jef through this truly thought-provoking essay, reproduced here with his kind permission …

The Idle Armies of Technofeudalism

If manual labor is being replaced by robotization, and cognitive labor by AI, what then is left as employment for the average human being?

by Jef Teugels

There is an old saying that warns us: “The devil will find work for idle hands to do.” It is one of those aphorisms so enduring that we no longer question its weight. In a technofeudal world — a world toward which we are accelerating with fanatical faith in technology’s promise — we may soon learn, with tragic intimacy, just how sharp that warning truly is.

I posit this: in the coming decades, we will see the rise of massive, permanent armies of the unemployed. Not the cyclically unemployed, not the frictionally unemployed, but a vast and growing underclass of structurally irrelevant human beings, made obsolete not by the decline of industry or some passing economic phase, but by the relentless logic of automation, artificial intelligence, and hyper-consolidated digital capital.

We already flirt with this reality — but to understand its full gravity, we must recall what came before. The first wave was robotization. Factories automated. Assembly lines reprogrammed. A great displacement unfolded across the world’s manufacturing sectors. Millions of workers were forced to leave industrial labor. But for a time, adaptation was possible: many transitioned into the service economy or repositioned themselves as “knowledge workers” in an expanding digital age. The idea of the cognitive worker — analyst, manager, designer, marketer, programmer — became the new social contract of middle-class survival.

That contract is now being torn apart. For this time, it is knowledge itself that is under attack. AI systems are rapidly encroaching on cognitive labor. They summarize. They synthesize. They create. They advise. The human mental faculties that once provided comparative advantage are now being replicated, often surpassed, by machines. It is no longer only the hands being displaced — it is the mind.

Already, entire sectors of employment are hollowing out. Middle management is thinning. Service jobs are next. Creative industries once thought to be uniquely human are under siege by generative algorithms. The “knowledge worker” is a category destined for erosion.

Business leaders are not resisting this trend — they are accelerating it. In 2023, 75% of U.S. business leaders reported they were actively using or exploring AI to replace human employees, with nearly half of those already using AI acknowledging that it had directly led to layoffs. A Goldman Sachs report the same year projected that one-fourth of all work tasks in the U.S. and Europe could soon be automated by AI — with white-collar sectors such as office support, legal, financial operations, and management facing some of the greatest disruption. The appetite for displacement is not theoretical — it is corporate strategy.

Even programming, long held up as the pinnacle of modern cognitive work, is now in the crosshairs. In early 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman bluntly stated at Davos: “We are very close to the point where AI will be able to write computer programs better than most human programmers. Not all, but most. And this will be one of the first big categories of knowledge work to be automated away.” When even the architects of the new digital order openly predict the obsolescence of their own class, it becomes clear how rapidly the old social contract is disintegrating.

Amidst this unfolding reality, some political actors have already begun shaping a response that fits neatly within the technofeudal framework. Recently, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that the Trump administration believes federal funds should be redirected from elite institutions like Harvard to vocational schools that train electricians and plumbers. On the surface, this appears as a populist gesture — a rebalancing toward practical skills. But viewed through the deeper lens of emerging technofeudalism, it is a tacit acknowledgment that cognitive labor is being hollowed out. The future being prepared for the majority is one of servicing the residual physical infrastructures of the elite, while the knowledge domains consolidate around the techno-aristocracy. The message is clear: forget aspiring to the cognitive class — that territory is now being automated and enclosed.

And here a stark question presents itself, one we can no longer afford to evade: if manual labor is being replaced by robotization, and cognitive labor by AI, what then is left as employment for the average human being — particularly in the megacities where these trends converge most acutely? The growth of megacities is no coincidence; it mirrors the gravitational pull of digital economies and elite capital. According to United Nations projections, by 2050, 68% of the world’s population will live in urban areas, with the number of megacities—cities of over 10 million inhabitants—expected to rise to 43. The spatial concentration of economic exclusion will only intensify. But as millions continue to pour into these vast urban centers, drawn by diminishing prospects, they may find only exclusion, underemployment, or managed idleness awaiting them. The promise of the city — as a place of upward mobility and opportunity — is rapidly decaying under the logic of technofeudalism.

Of course, the market apologists will argue that new kinds of work will arise, as they have in past industrial revolutions. But there is a fundamental difference this time: the pace of displacement far exceeds the pace of new job creation, and the qualitative nature of “new work” may not scale to absorb the dispossessed. We should not romanticize the transition to a digital aristocracy with visions of a flourishing creator economy. Not everyone will become a successful YouTuber, a niche content creator, or an artisan programmer. Most will not. The asymmetry is too great.

And here another uncomfortable question arises — one I can pose from experience, as someone who lectures inside a business school. Business schools pride themselves on delivering "leaders." But leaders of what? And of whom? In a world where the middle class is hollowed out, where traditional employment contracts collapse, and where the ranks of the idle armies swell in the megacities, who exactly are these future alumni meant to lead? Increasingly, the only domains left to “lead” are the technocratic apparatuses of containment, the algorithmic management of surplus populations, and the curation of narratives designed to pacify discontent. The rhetoric of leadership has become dangerously detached from the reality of the emerging order.

In the technofeudal schema that is rapidly crystallizing, wealth and productive capacity are concentrating in the hands of a techno-elite who control the platforms, algorithms, and data. The traditional bourgeoisie — owners of land and capital — are themselves being outmoded, their assets subordinated to the new infrastructure of digital dominion. The “barons” of this world are no longer industrialists or financiers, but platform owners and sovereign data lords. Their power is territorial in a new sense: they rule over clouds, not land.

What remains for the rest? To be managed. To be governed.

And here lies the danger: when wave after wave of displaced workers are rendered idle, society will face an existential choice — not of how to reintegrate them into productive life, but of how to contain them. The surplus population will grow beyond what even the most optimistic schemes of universal basic income can pacify. UBI is no panacea when meaning, purpose, and dignity have been stripped from existence.

An idle population is not a neutral one. To assume otherwise is to ignore both history and human psychology. The human need for purpose, for participation in something larger than the self, cannot be sated by consumerist bread and circus. And when such needs are unmet — when the mind, like the hands before it, is stripped of purpose — boredom metastasizes into resentment, and the devil indeed finds work for idle hands.

But in this world, it will not be the old devil of petty crime and disorder. It will be the new devils of networked extremism, algorithmic tribalism, and digitally mediated insurrection. The armies of the unemployed will not gather in physical streets alone, but in virtual spaces where grievances are weaponized, where conspiracy flourishes, and where nihilism is cultivated as a counterculture. Political instability will not be a side effect — it will be an inevitability.

And we must be blunt about another risk: the temptation to ready these idle armies for war. History offers no shortage of examples. For certain economies, and certain political actors, war is not merely an unfortunate byproduct — it is a profitable enterprise. When surplus populations become too large, too restless, or too destabilizing, external conflict becomes a convenient pressure valve. Tellingly, the global private military and security industry is now valued at over $260 billion per year, making it one of the fastest-growing segments of the global security economy. The infrastructure for militarized containment is already being built — and funded. In a world where technofeudal elites will struggle to contain internal unrest, the prospect of channeling the idle toward militarized purposes — whether through conventional forces, mercenary networks, or paramilitary proxies — should not be dismissed as dystopian fantasy. It is an all-too-familiar page from the oldest playbook of power.

There are those who already foresee this and, quietly, prepare. In the corridors of power among the techno-elite, discussions of “resilient communities,” “private security ecosystems,” and “civilizational bunkers” are not fringe but increasingly mainstream. The elites do not plan to fix the system; they plan to weather its collapse while governing the underclasses through a mixture of surveillance, algorithmic nudging, and social control.

And governance it shall be, not democratic but technocratic — a project of urban containment as much as social control. Not participatory but paternalistic. The language will be humane, the interfaces friendly, but beneath the user experience will lie a regime of soft coercion designed to manage risk — that is, to manage the idle masses. A caste of managers, mediators, and machine governors will rise to serve this function, performing the necessary work of social triage.

It is tempting, even for critics of this emerging order, to imagine some reversal — a grand Luddite movement, a re-democratization of technology, a humanist renaissance. But here I must be brutally honest: I see no such reversal on the horizon. The economic and political incentives driving technofeudalism are too entrenched. The rate of technological acceleration is too great. The ideological capture of the managerial class is too deep — and business schools continue to reproduce its blind spots.

Instead, I foresee that we will indeed confront what I have called “the idle armies” — not in one dramatic wave, but in successive waves, each larger than the last. With each cycle of innovation, more human functions will be rendered surplus — first the hands, now the mind; soon even the trades — more lives untethered from the old contracts of labor and society. The elites will first attempt benevolent management. When that fails, harsher forms will emerge.

History teaches us that no ruling class, however sophisticated, can forever suppress the explosive potential of mass resentment — though some will, inevitably, seek to direct it toward external war. The powder keg of idleness, if left unaddressed, will find its match. And in the networked age, the spread of that fire will be instantaneous.

So what, then, can be done? Here I hesitate, for to offer easy solutions would be intellectually dishonest. The structure of the crisis is too deep. But if there is any hope, it lies not in trying to resurrect a dying labor market, nor in betting on the charity of elites, but in reimagining the social contract itself — in building new forms of meaning, participation, and belonging that are not tethered to obsolete notions of “employment.”

Without such a reinvention, we face a grim future: a world of idle armies, governed by a distant elite, where the devil indeed finds more than enough work for idle hands to do.

In recent debates, I often encounter voices promoting ecovillages and experimental communities as pathways toward societal redesign. They describe them as the “alternate world.” But perhaps it is time we admit the deeper truth: what we now call the “alternate” is, in fact, the real world — the world of human scale, of regenerative potential, of actual stewardship and care. It is the technofeudal machine that is the historical aberration. The tragedy is that the real world is now treated as fringe, while the machinery of enclosure and dispossession rolls on.

And he will not want for volunteers.

Jef Teugels

Kraków, Poland, June 8, 2025

Copyright © Jef Teugels 2025. All rights reserved.

Reproduced here with permission.

Thanks for reading.