Since Donald Trump’s re-manifestation through his 2025 presidential election it feels as if we are no longer living in a simulation, rather we are being simulated within new “Dark Ages”—especially with the ongoing militarization of Europe and Trump’s imperialist tendencies. Their technofeudal allies such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg roleplay as monarchs, with their barons operating under vassalic contracts, while the rest of us roleplay as feminist knights, anarchist sorcerers, and environmentalist druids, oscillating between resistance, reenactment and aestheticized escapism. As technocapitalism mutates into technofeudalism, medieval aesthetics and politics re-emerge as a contested terrain: instrumentalized by oligarchs who desire to refashion worldbuilding into empire-building, mainstreamed as escape, and yet weaponized by countercultural collectives for insurgent world-co-building. But can there be true insurgency when our roles descend from heavily scripted aesthetics? Are we merely peasants fed with pre-technocapitalist fantasy content, or self-mythologizing dissidents performing rituals that ultimately reinforce the power distributions we seek to resist?
In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023), Yanis Varoufakis—and previously Cédric Durand, in Techno-féodalisme: Critique de l’économie numérique (2020)—declared that capitalism is being replaced by technofeudalism; a new map of political economy where the market is ruled by oligarchs via platforms[1]. Within technofeudalism, companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft do not simply compete in markets; their dominion extends further through networks of dependency, where smaller companies survive only as clients or subcontractors. This layered structure resembles a neo-vassalage: platforms grant access and protection in exchange for tribute, ensuring that innovation itself remains tethered to technofeudal lords, with assets endlessly recycled and resold in closed circuit accumulations.
In the 2020 article Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism? (2020), Jodi Dean, picks up from McKenzie Wark’s Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (2019), and claims that “Capitalism is turning itself into neofeudalism”, while stressing out how neofeudalism is being born out of the ashes of platform capitalism. Platform capitalism—coined by Nick Srnicek (2017)—refers to how big tech companies orchestrate transactions and user interactions to capture data and extract value for profitability.[2] However when this extraction is done without any true competition, it leads into technofeudalism. Another side effect of this is that users are caught in a web of tech company terms and conditions, while already being entangled within state law and bureaucracy, just like how individuals owed allegiance to multiple feudal lords and institutions in the Middle Ages.[3]
As we can see, the phenomena of power consolidation in the hands of technofeudal lords has been going around for a while, but a more unmasked shift is been perceived since the COVID-19 pandemic where the technofeudal logic intensified due to accelerated digitalization of the market and services, as discussed in COVID-19 and digitalization: The great acceleration (2021) by Joseph Amankwah-Amoah, Zaheer Khan, Geoffrey Wood and Gary Knight:
“One likely consequence of COVID-19 is the accelerated trend towards digitalization of business models coupled with the shift of commercial activities from predominantly offline and brick-and-mortar outlets to online outlets.”
During COVID-19 consumerism itself mutated under this new order in a disaster-capitalist fashion. With physical shops shuttered, Amazon and its peers did not merely provide convenience, they absorbed the markets entirely, eliminating smaller companies and independent brands by making them vassals within their digital kingdoms. Streaming platforms such as Netflix thrived as cultural monopolies, feeding the lockdown attention economy through endless content, while the video game industry saw unprecedented profits as digital escapism became the new social infrastructure.
This shift was accompanied by the darker dimensions of platform rule: algorithmic surveillance normalized under the guise of “contact tracing,” massive data-harvesting disguised as “public health infrastructure”, and the increased use of policing systems to manage the digital commons. During that period, the data-collecting software company Palantir built a COVID tracking tool for the Trump administration. The company’s name is named after the crystal balls Palantír from J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic-fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings, devices used for predictions, surveillance, and communication.
Unsurprisingly enough Peter Thiel—Palantir’s co-founder—has several other companies named after Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, such as the capital firms Mithril Capital and Valar Ventures, named after the fictitious precious metal Mithril and the god-like immortal spirits Valars, and the defense technology company Anduril Industries, named after Aragon’s sword, Andúril. Thiel’s mythic naming aestheticizes power through medieval fantasy—a pattern not limited to him alone, just like Musk naming his son after Aragorn (Strider Sekhar) and his daughter Azure after the most powerful spell in Elden Ring. Following this power-driven fascination with medieval fantasy Jeff Bezos himself also funded Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series (2022—present), as if seeking to forge his own “rings of power.”
Yet parallel to this oligarchic worldbuilding, neo-medievalism is flourishing across fashion, the red carpet, celebrities and influencer culture, presented sometimes as a feminist response to the “Dark Ages”, while other times collapsing into consumable spectacle. Back in 2020 Balenciaga adopted “knightcore” through armor-style boots worn by Cardi B, while more recently Natalie Portman wore a chainmail Dior dress to the Deauville Film Festival. With Joan of Arc being revived as a contemporary feminist icon, many celebrities and designers are inspired and reinterpret the medieval story through their work as seen with Dilara Findigoklu’s A/W 2023 collection inspired by Mahsa Amini protests in Iran as a response to “medieval practices around policing women’s bodies”, and Chappel Roan’s appearance and performance at the 2024 MTV Music Video Awards. This spectatorial revival extends to social-media feeds and moodboards being shaped with “bardcore” or “medievalcore” aesthetics featuring velvet capes, medieval-inspired prints, and DIY chainmail headpieces or armor dresses as everyday streetwear.
Within this equation appears mainstream gaming of course: having always fed gamers with medieval-fantasy action role-playing games, major game titles have remastered and released games which feature medieval-fantasy settings and gameplay such as the first-person shooter (FPS) Doom: The Dark Ages (2025), the role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023), and the action role-playing game (ARPG) Elden Ring (2022)—and its spin-off Elden Ring Nightreign (2025).
Among remastered games is the ARPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (2025)—with the original game being released in 2006—, but at the same time the recreation of the 2006 version of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft Classic (2019) which restore the game’s early slow-paced world which contains castles, plague-ridden forests, alchemy, and gear rooted in melee weapons and plate.
Interestingly enough, Amazon has begun establishing its own game development studios, while Netflix acquired game studios to carve its path within the gaming industry, and Samsung has been building clouding and streaming platforms to host games, signifying an evolving desire to control worldbuilding. Even major publishers like Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft rely on Google Cloud infrastructure to host and distribute their games, embedding them further into technofeudal ecosystems.
But beneath this glossy, mass-market revival lies a parallel strain of neo-medievalism operating outside technofeudal circuits, one that refuses depoliticized nostalgia. Within the indie game scene, there is similarly a revival of retro first person role-playing dungeon crawler games that draw from early-PC grit and tabletop sensibilities while channeling DIY world-co-building, by using free and open-source softwares, but also relying on online community building with gamers, fans and creators supporting each other. Such examples could be traced back to the 2018 medieval dark fantasy FPS game Amid Evil, or the first-person wizard simulator Hand of Doom (2023). Another akin title is Hands of Necromancy (2022)—and its sequel Hands of Necromancy II (2024)—which shares aesthetic similarities to the 1996 ARPG The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall and was recreated within the Unity engine by Daggerfall Workshop (2023), supported by a rich modding community that elevates the game into contemporary standards. Other similar upcoming indie games include Necrofane (2026), Tenebyss (in development), Prison of Husks (in development), and Queen’s Domain (in development).
Many of these games incorporate dark ambient and electronic soundtracks that share many resemblances with dungeon synth music—a 90s subgenre of electronic music originated from Black metal characterized by medieval fantasy themes and lo-fi aesthetics—with a few exceptions where metal music can be perceived to be blended with electronics as well such as in Doom: The Dark Ages and Hand of Doom.
In recent years dungeon synth is being revived—especially in the UK—and there’s also an emergence of a new wave of black metal that traces back to the 2010s, as well as the blending of metal with electronics. What’s the most important aspect of these are the politics: these new directions are driven by musicians and artists, among whom identify as queer, non-binary, transgender and feminist, and labels and platforms that follow an anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist and degrowth stance. This direction produces an insurgent neo-medievalism that openly counters technofeudal bros and their adaptation of the white, heterosexual, cisgendered, and ablebodied, dominant medieval aesthetic canon that historically renders the other as generic, anonymous and expendable. Robert Houghton remarks in The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism (2024) that medieval worlds “almost always focus on heterosexual and cisgender men”:
“Where queer options exist in games, heterosexuality is usually the assumed norm: although a growing range of games permit homosexual relationships, including a notable range of pseudo-medieval fantasy roleplaying games, these are typically token efforts or resort to stereotypes. Non-binary identities and gender fluidity are almost inevitably ignored. These trends are particularly pronounced within historical games where women are frequently marginalized or erased, and where player spaces are often dominated by misogyny and homophobia to an even more extreme degree.”[4]
On the electronic music side of the spectrum examples include independent artists such as Ada Rook, Fire-Toolz, Cocojoey, Trust Fund Ozu, Drumcorps, and Lauren Bousfield who heavily combine black metal screams and blast beats with a wide range of electronics and ambiences. Some rely more on metal compositions executed with electronic flares, while others focus on electronics with metal elements introduced as passages or layers. These kinds of artists can be found on labels that specialize in experimental, and electronic releases—often reminiscent of video game music—such as Orange Milk Records, Hausu Mountain or Ingrown Records.
On the other side of the spectrum lies the new wave of black metal that features atmospheric and avant-garde compositions informed by other genres. Notable examples include Liturgy, formed by the transgender composer and musician Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the “queer antifascist black metal/doom duo” Ragana, the ecstatic black metal band Agriculture, and the feminist anti-fascist black metal band Feminazgûl founded by the transgender anarchist author Margaret Killjoy. Although such artists and bands mostly release on labels that do not necessarily identify as feminist, antifascist or vegan, such as The Flenser, Prosthetic Records and 20 Buck Spin, but there also are labels that do such as the An Out Recordings, Grime Stone Records LLC, and Fiadh Productions.
Staying within their adventurous and unconventional outfits, many of these artists and labels often equip memes and internet imagery for communication as seen with examples of Doom Trip Records and Fire-Toolz, promoting their releases via memes. On the other hand labels such as Crime Stone Records and Fiadh Productions have been wearing their cosplay outfits to match their musical releases in the forms of artworks that emphasize on medieval illustrations, gothic designs and fonts. Furthermore, Fiadh Productions’ Instagram profile is filled with cute animals wearing medieval armor—among other medieval feminist posts—with overlaying phrases reading “born to dilly daily, forced to fight fascists”, or “embracing the quest (rejecting bigotry)”, sharing resemblances with other pages that are solely dedicated to this kind of content—but less political—like @golden_frog_inn and @the_frog_mage, or @the_brainrot fairy which features queered version of knights doused in glitter, and caring phrases.
Even though many of these artists and labels maintain a potent online political presence, posting about trans rights, being vocal about animal abuse, the ongoing genocides and ecocides, while focusing on multicultural community building and tactical resistance, not everyone online is invested in weaponization; some just want to escape. The internet is saturated with magical and occultist content drawing inspiration from medieval-fantasy, functioning as templates for users to express their frustration with the hyper-capitalist turned technofeudalist mixed-extended and augmented cybertronic meatspace. Examples like the POV Holding Sword and Cigarette or This Is Where I Post From memes, and the Tiny Green Mall Wizard / Wizard Gnome character or tulpamancy embody this desire to step sideways from this gruesome material reality as a defense mechanism, as underlined by Valentina Tanni in Exit Reality: Vaporwave, Backrooms, Weirdcore, and Other Landscapes Beyond the Threshold (2024):
“The vast, multifaceted world of spiritual and magical trends online is usually interpreted as a form of escapism. This draws on the glaring, increasingly undeniable fact that, above all among the younger generations, increasingly extreme strategies of evading reality are emerging as a form of defense against a world on the brink of collapse.”[5]
Being chronically online can be overstimulating especially when bombarded with conspiracy theories, A.I. slop, and echo chambers, that cultivate the feeling as if “the truth” is constantly withheld. Within this context everything is subject to questioning and science slips into an occulted esoteric domain. Users drift into magical frameworks: studying sigils and magical circles, sharing occult memes, or fetishizing state-of-the-art scientific research as quasi-religious cults in an attempt to intuit the hidden machinery of technofeudal layout.
These practices within this game-like domain overlap with the game studies term “magic circle,” which originates from Johan Huizinga (1949), and describes games as temporary worlds we step into that are simultaneously real and imaginary[6]. Eugene Thacker, in In the Dust of This Planet (2011) claims that magical circles connect us with the concealed, occulted world when analyzing the Outer Limits episode The Borderland (1963), in which scientists attempt to open an interdimensional gateway while reciting instructions with ritualistic cadence. As Thacker writes, “If the lab is the circle, then the lab experiment is the magical ritual” and bleeding-edge science is “the new occultism.”[7]
Even though contemporary science hasn’t yet opened any “gateways to the fourth dimension,” esoteric scientific achievement news such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider successful transmutation of lead into gold, the creation of a Holographic Wormhole by a team of physicists in Harvard University or the successful quantum teleportation by scientists in China have been headlining around the internet empowering this escapist hype even further while dangerously mythologizing technocrats as contemporary medieval tech alchemists.
This romanticized imaginative tendency deliberately evades the realities of medieval historicity: rigid class stratification, extractive economies, religious fanaticism, and the gatekeeping of knowledge. In the actual Middle Ages, power was not an ambient atmosphere but a material regime: land-bound peasants tethered to lords, rents enforced through inherited jurisdiction, mobility restricted by custom and decree[8]. The late Middle Ages also saw the rise of proto-global colonial ventures and early bureaucratic institutions that tracked subjects through ledgers, censuses (feudal taxes), and tithes. Everyday life was highly militarized, from fortified towns to compulsory levies, while marginalized communities experienced varying manifestations of violence through regulations, surveillance and even expulsion depending on shifting political and religious agendas.[9]
What circulates within online and mainstream discourse instead is what Andrew B. R. Elliot calls as synchronism[10]; a free-floating amalgamation of “medieval aesthetics” that do not constitute a coherent historical style: Gothic verticality, Crusader militarism, and early Renaissance ornamentation, filtered through nineteenth-century Romanticism and revived again by Arthurian fantasy, Tolkienisms, and Dungeon & Dragons tropes. Such medieval aesthetics “periodically burst through the surface of modernity” not as history but as affect, functioning as an atmospheric style rather than a material memory.
Additionally, this Western European Middle Ages imaginary overshadows Eastern European medievalism, shaped by Byzantine and Orthodox iconography, and hybrid Islamic exchanges[11], but also subsumes West Asian histories under orientalist fantasy as underlined by Helen Young regarding Tolkien’s racialised depictions:
“Many peoples comprise Sauron’s armies in addition to the non-human trolls and orcs: “Easterlings with axes, and Variags of Kharad, Southrons in scarlet, and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues” all come to the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. They are effectively undifferentiated under the one – tellingly black – banner of evil, servants of Sauron, collected together within the single Othering category of non-European, non-White.”[12]
It furthermore gives little space of reference to any Eastern Asian Middle Ages such as the Chinese imperial dynasties, the Japanese feudalism, or the Mongol Empire, reinforcing Europe as the predominant historical and aesthetic reference point for the Middle Ages. Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen write in Defining the Global Middle Ages (2015):
“[…] conventional European periodisation markers, such as the ›Renaissance‹ and ›medieval‹, clearly do not travel well or easily into other cultures, such as those in China, the Islamic world or India.”[13]
Once medievalism is emptied of historical realism and reduced to a Disneyfied fantasy aesthetic, it becomes frictionlessly interoperable with the logics of platform rule: circulating as content, identity, and ambience that slide into a low-fi cyber-action role-playing doomscrolling game that mirrors the top to down technofeudal architecture itself.
Only when neo-medieval aesthetics reconnect with their material and global historicities can they fully challenge the technofeudal hive mind and its Disneyfied, Western-centric fantasy canon. However, the insurgent neo-medievalisms emerging from queer, anti-authoritarian, and independent scenes point to a different possibility: rather than recovering historical realism, they deliberately weaponize fantasy itself, producing counter-mythologies that disrupt the monopolized Western narratives of medievalism from within and expose their entanglements with the emerging “Dark Ages”.
References:
[1]. Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 2023, Penguin Random House, UK, p. 181.
[2]. Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 2017, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, p. 35.
[3]. https://ethicalspace.pubpub.org/pub/wuj8exjl/release/1
[4]. Robert Houghton, The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism, 2024, D. S. Brewer, Cambridge, UK, p. 20.
[5]. Valentina Tanni, Exit Reality: Vaporwave, Backrooms, Weirdcore, and Other Landscapes Beyond the Threshold, first published in Italian in 2023, first English edition: May 2024, translated by Anna Carruthers, Ljubljana, Aksioma, Rome: Nero, p. 197.
[6]. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, 1949, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, London, UK, p.10.
[7]. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 2011, Zero Books, John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach, Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK Cambridge, UK, p. 64.
[8]. Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, 1991, William Morrow and Company Inc, New York, p. 22.
[9]. Ibid p. 265.
[10]. B. R. Elliot, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century, 2017, D. S. Brewer, Cambridge, UK, p. 14.
[11]. Maria Alessia Rossi and Alice Isabella Sullivan, Eclecticism in Late Medieval Visual Culture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Traditions, 2022, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston, p. 50-51.
[12]. Helen Victoria Young, Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness, 2016, Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN, UK, p. 23.
[13]. Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen, Defining the Global Middle Ages, Medieval Worlds: Approaches to Comparison in Medieval Studies, 2015/06/30, p. 111.
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All illustrations are designed by the author. Here is the numogram: