When Thomas Piketty published in 2013 Capital in the 21st Century146 years after the Capital by Karl Marx, brought back the issue of inequality. His thesis was that the concentration of wealth is structural in capitalism and that the answer should be fiscal, with progressive taxes on wealth, high incomes and inheritances. The proposal seemed convincing a few years ago, however in the age of artificial intelligence it has become incomplete and outdated.
Today’s capital is not just measured in real estate, factories or shares. The true source of power lies in intangibles such as data, algorithms and computing power. Wealth no longer depends on the ownership of land or machines, but on the appropriation of information flows and control of the digital infrastructure that processes millions of interactions per second. Big tech accumulates value because it can transform data into predictions, predictions into consumption and consumption into profit.
This logic is based on an unprecedented concentration of capital, computing power and decision-making power. The more the ability to train models becomes concentrated, the more wealth, political power and the capture of institutions by these interests become concentrated.
This is where Piketty’s proposal reveals its limits. How to tax the value of a language model trained on billions of texts, most of which were created free of charge by users? How to measure the assets of a platform that is worth not for what it owns, but for what it knows? Traditional fiscal logic is too slow to keep up with an economy driven by algorithms and too narrow to capture the new form of accumulation.
The work also changed its nature. Marx saw the added value in the factories of Manchester and today it is found in the invisible exploitation of digital interactions. Every online search, every photograph, every journey recorded by a cell phone generates value for others. At the same time, millions of workers face being replaced by automatic systems or their tasks becoming precarious.
Political and legal institutions remain anchored in a pre-digital world. Parliaments, regulators, and tax systems were designed to deal with tangible property, industrial enterprises, and classical capital flows. They prove to be inadequate in the face of conglomerates that operate globally, dominate data and evade border controls. Democracy appears slow and unable to respond to the speed of algorithmic capital.
It is in this void that “techno-feudalism” emerges, in which digital platforms function like modern feudal lords, charging rent for access to services, controlling virtual territories and reducing citizens to vassals who produce value without fair compensation. The concentration of power is no longer just economic and becomes almost sovereign, capable of shaping behavior, influencing debates and even conditioning the autonomy of the States themselves.
Is it enough to redistribute accumulated wealth or is it not more urgent to question how it is generated and who controls it? If data is produced collectively, shouldn’t it be treated as a common good? If artificial intelligence relies on human labor, direct or disguised, can the value be legitimately appropriated privately? Just like energy or water, shouldn’t AI be regulated as critical infrastructure, subject to transparency and sharing?
The AI era shows the plasticity of capital, which adapts, shifts and reinvents itself in real time. The conflict between private accumulation and collective interest now reappears inscribed in code, algorithms and global networks. The question is not just whether inequality will increase, but whether democracy itself will resist being shaped by systems we do not control.
E-governance specialist
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