“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” — Attributed to Mark Twain
The Inversion
In 1904, Elizabeth Magie designed “The Landlord’s Game”—a board game with two distinct sets of rules. Under the first set, wealth circulated freely and all prospered. Under the second, players competed ruthlessly, extracted rents, and drove each other to bankruptcy. Her question: “Which set of rules creates a more just society?” The lesson was clear: the game was meant to condemn monopolies, not celebrate them.
A century later, Monopoly has become a celebration of rentier capitalism—and something similar has happened to our digital spaces. The promise of an open, democratic internet has mutated into a collection of walled gardens where we labor for digital landlords. This is what economist Yanis Varoufakis calls “Techno-Feudalism”: a system where platforms replace markets, rent replaces profit, and digital serfs serve new lords who rule by algorithm rather than divine right.
The Cartographers of Control
Before founding Niantic, John Hanke created Keyhole, which became Google Earth. Pokémon Go’s geographic data originated from Ingress, where players unknowingly performed free cartographic labor submitting “portals” of interest. By 2017, companies were paying Niantic up to $0.50 per unique visitor driven to their locations. Starbucks converted 7,800 coffee shops into PokéStops. What appeared to be spontaneous exploration was carefully orchestrated commercial flow.
What Pokémon Go encloses isn’t land but attention, movement, and the social experience of public space—assets potentially worth far more than 30% of today’s wages. This mirrors the historical enclosure movements, when common lands open to all were progressively fenced off for private profit.
The Casino Architects
Monopoly Go represents the culmination of decades of psychological research into habit formation. The game’s core mechanic—rolling dice to move around the board—is restricted by artificial scarcity of dice purchasable for real money. Events create time pressure and social comparison, driving spending. Some loyal players invest thousands of dollars monthly—not to win a game that can never truly be won, but to maintain position in an endless cycle of consumption.
The Mutation of Capitalism into Techno-Feudalism
These games represent something qualitatively different from classical capitalism. Under techno-feudalism: platforms replace markets as the primary economic space, rent replaces profit as the primary value extraction mechanism, digital serfs replace wage laborers, and algorithmic governance replaces contractual relationships. Pokémon Go players have no rights to the creatures they “catch”—the company can remove access overnight. This asymmetry of power isn’t capitalism; it’s feudalism in digital form.
Breaking the Digital Enclosure
This trajectory isn’t inevitable. Emerging alternatives suggest different possibilities: decentralized digital infrastructure (Mastodon, Bluesky, Matrix), platform cooperativism (Resonate, Stocksy), digital commons licensing (Creative Commons, open-source software), and public technology. Games themselves could lead this resistance—imagine a version of Pokémon Go that marked corporate exploitation in physical space rather than driving players toward it.
Elizabeth Magie designed The Landlord’s Game to show that economic arrangements are choices, not natural laws. Her game contained two sets of rules to demonstrate that alternatives are always possible. The digital enclosure currently underway is similarly a choice. We can choose to build systems that distribute rather than concentrate power—or we will live as serfs on virtual land we can never own, enclosed by walls we cannot see but cannot escape.
Originally published on Mettascope Magazine, March 2025.
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