Escaping Techno-Feudalism

I gave a talk at AI Engineer Singapore wearing a t-shirt with a smiling face on it. If you grew up on a Mac, you know the one. It's the Happy Mac, the Finder icon Susan Kare drew in 1984. I dressed up as a computer because I really love computers, and that one icon contains the whole argument.

What computers are for

The Macintosh was my first computer. As a kid I made things in MacPaint, then web pages, then apps, then music in Ableton, then images in Photoshop. Different tools, same idea. The computer is one of the most powerful creative instruments humanity has ever invented. You can build anything you can imagine. You can find anyone in the world building something you didn't know you needed.

Look at the Happy Mac. The gray face on the left is the human. The blue face on the right is the machine. They're merged into a single happy expression. Two faces, one smile. Susan Kare drew the relationship she wanted us to have with our computers.

That's also what AGI should feel like. Not a god. Not a replacement. A merging.

The internet used to be wild

A fresh OS install. A custom desktop wallpaper. A personal homepage with a guestbook. A Winamp skin you spent a Saturday on. The early internet was handmade and personal and a little janky. Our computers were ours. We named them. We customized them in absurd ways. The web was full of small, weird, lovingly maintained corners nobody was monetizing.

It doesn't feel that way anymore. Most of what we do on a computer now happens inside someone else's product, on someone else's server, with our data inside someone else's database.

Techno-feudalism

Feudalism was the operating system of the medieval world. Peasants paid rent to knights. Knights paid rent to lords. Lords paid rent to a king. Great for the king. Awful for the peasants. Most of human history is the story of slowly clawing our way out of that arrangement.

We tell ourselves we escaped. In our digital lives, we did not.

You pay rent to a SaaS company. The SaaS company pays rent to a cloud provider. The cloud provider pays rent to whoever owns the model and the chips. The peasant at the bottom is you. Yanis Varoufakis calls this techno-feudalism. He's right.

The lived experience is familiar. Your life is fragmented across thirty products that lock you in. They take your data and sell it back to you. The PM at your favorite app is never going to ship the feature you actually want, because their incentive is to monetize your attention, not to serve you. You don't own anything. You rent your work, your contacts, your photos, your calendar, your taste, your inbox.

Some SaaS is useful. Some infrastructure has to live in the cloud. I'm not interested in burning down the whole world. I am interested in burning down the part where regular people are peasants by default.

A new tool to rebuild with

For the first time in a long time, regular people have leverage. The leverage is coding agents. With a good agent, the cost of building the software you actually want has collapsed. Anyone who can describe what they need can have it built and running, on infrastructure they control, in an afternoon.

This is the most important thing happening in technology, and it's not the chatbot. It's that the asymmetry between people who write software and people who use software is finally closing. Personal agents are the front door.

The two paths

Look for a personal agent today and you'll mostly find two options.

DIY: a stack you run yourself on a Mac mini under your desk or a VPS you rent. Yours, end to end. Beautiful when it works. A second job when it breaks. Your agent's uptime depends on you remembering to renew a TLS cert.

SaaS: ChatGPT, the consumer assistant of the month. Easy to start. Easy to depend on. By the time you've routed your calendar, your tasks, your memory, and your half-finished projects through it, you're a peasant again — just in a friendlier robe.

There's an obvious gap between the two. Something with the ergonomics of a SaaS product and the ownership model of a server you rent. We've been building that for almost two years.

Zo: a personal computer, on the internet

Zo is the third way. Every Zo user gets their own always-on Linux machine in the cloud, with an agent on top of it. You can text it, email it, or Telegram it. It's model-agnostic — Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, your own Codex subscription. You get root access. You can install whatever you want. You can host whatever you want. The whole thing is yours.

The historical pattern

Computing has done this before.

In the beginning, computers were mainframes. To compute, you had to be a tech-enabled company. Then the personal computer arrived, and within a generation, owning a computer stopped being a privilege of institutions and became a default of being a person.

The mainframe of our era is the modern stack: cloud, SaaS, vendor integrations, model APIs, deploy pipelines. Until very recently, you had to be a tech-enabled company to operate one. Coding agents plus access to the cloud kill that gate. We can hand a regular person the same operational capability a small software company has — without making them a software company.

This is the revolution that's actually happening. It's quieter than the AGI debate, and it's the part that will matter most for ordinary people. The internet is going to get fun and wild and personal again, because the people using it are going to start owning the software they use again.

Stop being a peasant

The Happy Mac icon worked because it was a picture of an honest relationship: human and machine, merged, both smiling. Our software lives stopped feeling like that, and the fix isn't more SaaS. The fix is to give every person their own corner of the cloud, with an agent in it that answers to them.

That's what Zo is. That's why we built it. The internet you remember liking is still possible. We just have to stop renting it.