When Your Fire Department Becomes a Serf: How Technofeudalism Extracts Rent from Everything

the Institute
5 days ago
11 min read

In Norfolk, Connecticut, the volunteer fire department operates on $132,000 per year—barely enough for aging trucks, unpaid crew training, and keeping the station lights on. Then the software company they relied on for incident tracking got acquired by a private equity firm. The new owner announced the platform would shut down. Alternative software? That would be $5,000 per year instead of $795. The department scrambled for options. They found a cheaper system. Then the same private equity firm bought that one too.

"We don't have a big tax base," said Assistant Fire Chief Matthew Ludwig. "We have to watch our pennies."

This isn't a story about software pricing. It's a story about feudalism returning to American infrastructure—not with land and peasants, but with cloud platforms and captive users.

The Medieval Pattern Repeats

In medieval Europe, lords controlled land. Peasants farmed it, paid rents, and had no alternative—the lord owned the territory they occupied. The relationship wasn't voluntary exchange in an open market. It was structural dependency: you lived on the lord's land, you paid the lord's rents, you followed the lord's rules, or you left (if you could).

Technofeudalism—a term economist Yanis Varoufakis uses to describe the modern digital economy—argues that something structurally similar has emerged with digital platforms. Tech companies don't compete in markets; they own the markets. Amazon doesn't just sell products; it controls the marketplace where third-party sellers must operate, extracting rent from every transaction. Google doesn't just provide search; it owns the infrastructure through which websites become visible, charging for access to attention. Facebook doesn't facilitate social connection; it owns the social graph, deciding what you see and who sees you.

The Norfolk fire department's predicament reveals how this feudal pattern extends beyond consumer platforms into the infrastructure that communities depend on to survive. Emergency response software—created by firefighters who felt a calling to keep costs low—got consolidated into private equity portfolios where steady tax revenue becomes extractable rent.

The Consolidation Machine

ESO Solutions, backed by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, now serves roughly 20,000 of America's 30,000 fire departments. Vista manages some $100 billion in assets, led by billionaire Robert F. Smith, who in 2021 settled what became one of the largest tax evasion cases in U.S. history for $139 million. With Vista's backing, ESO embarked on an acquisition spree: trauma data vendors, station equipment trackers, firefighter scheduling systems, incident management platforms.

The most significant acquisition was Emergency Reporting, serving 7,500 fire and EMS agencies across North America. Co-founder Adrian Mintz—himself a longtime firefighter and EMT—had built the company on a deliberate principle: "We were all aware that volunteer organizations were not going to have a lot of money to spend. We deliberately kept prices down."

After ESO acquired Emergency Reporting, the company announced it would shut the platform down. Departments that had spent years integrating the software into their operations, that had trained volunteers on the system, that had built protocols around its features—all of them would need to migrate. To ESO's more expensive alternative. Or find another vendor.

Except the other vendors were also owned by private equity: ImageTrend and First Due, the two other major players, both backed by private equity firms. Three companies, all funded by Wall Street capital, controlling software infrastructure for departments that respond when your house catches fire.

The Mesilla Fire Department in New Mexico switched from Emergency Reporting at $4,000 per year to First Due at $12,000 per year. Chief Greg Whited compared ESO's treatment of his department to "an abusive relationship"—describing how he refused to return "with sunglasses on, covering a black eye." In Goshen, New York, officials had invested over $100,000 in communications equipment that ESO acquired and promptly discontinued. The replacement system cost more.

This is the technofeudal extraction mechanism: acquire the platforms users depend on, eliminate alternatives through further acquisitions, raise prices because users have nowhere else to go, extract maximum rent from captive populations.

Science Fiction Saw It Coming

Frank Herbert understood this pattern sixty years ago. His Dune series, begun in 1965, imagined a far-future where feudal houses control entire planets, where the most valuable resource—the spice melange—flows through structures of hereditary power, where emperors grant and revoke planetary fiefs, where economic extraction operates through explicit feudal relationships rather than market competition.

Person in a hat walking on a vast, sunlit sand dune. The landscape is barren and striking with deep shadows, creating a serene mood.

Director Denis Villeneuve's film adaptations present Herbert's universe in stunning visual splendor—sweeping desert vistas, monumental architecture, ships that move like cathedrals through space. The cinematography makes feudalism beautiful. Vast stone halls where houses negotiate. Ornate costumes signaling rank and allegiance. Technology so advanced it appears as ritual and ceremony.

But beneath the aesthetic grandeur, the conflicts Herbert depicts are brutally primitive: House Atreides and House Harkonnen locked in generational blood feuds, entire populations enslaved to spice harvesting, assassination and betrayal as standard political tools, religious manipulation of populations, and ultimately, war over planetary control. The technology advanced to near-magical capabilities, yet the social structures regressed to medieval violence.

This is the warning Herbert embedded in his world-building: technological advancement doesn't automatically produce social progress. Feudalism can return with starships and force fields, with advanced technology serving hereditary power rather than distributing it. The Spacing Guild controls all interstellar travel—a literal monopoly on connectivity that parallels modern platform power. The spice must flow through the channels the powerful control, and those who need it have no choice but to pay the price demanded.

We're building Herbert's universe, just with cloud platforms instead of planetary fiefs. The conflicts may not yet involve family atomics and personal shields, but they're structurally primitive: monopolists capturing essential infrastructure, extractive rent from captive populations, consolidation of power that eliminates alternatives. We've wrapped feudalism in beautiful user interfaces and seamless cloud services, but the underlying relationship—lords extracting value from those who have no choice but to participate—remains as crude as medieval serfdom.

The fire departments paying escalating fees to access their own data are House Atreides discovering that House Harkonnen controls the spice. The technology is sophisticated. The exploitation is ancient.

From Land to Cloud: The Structural Shift

Varoufakis argues in his 2023 book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism that we're witnessing not just corporate consolidation but a fundamental transformation in how economic power operates. Traditional capitalism involved competition in markets—multiple companies producing similar goods, with prices determined by supply and demand. Profits came from innovation, efficiency, and winning customers.

Platform capitalism changed the equation. Platforms don't compete in markets; they become the markets. Amazon sellers must use Amazon's fulfillment services, accept Amazon's terms, pay Amazon's fees—or remain invisible to customers who shop primarily through Amazon. App developers must distribute through Apple's App Store and Google Play, paying 15-30% commissions, following their guidelines, accepting their approval processes—or reach almost no one.

The shift from competition to feudal extraction happens through network effects: the more users a platform has, the more valuable it becomes, which attracts more users, which increases the value, in a compounding loop. Once a platform achieves dominance, alternatives can't compete even if they offer better features or lower prices, because the users and the infrastructure are already locked into the dominant platform.

Every click becomes labor that enriches the platform. Varoufakis describes this as "cloud capital"—the digital infrastructure that mediates economic activity and extracts rent from every interaction. You don't own your social connections on Facebook; Facebook does. You don't own your seller reputation on Amazon; Amazon does. You don't own your ride history on Uber; Uber does. And fire departments don't own their incident records in ESO's cloud; ESO does.

When Norfolk's fire department decided to leave ESO and requested a copy of their own data—information about fires they responded to, injuries they treated, resources they deployed—ESO quoted $1,200 to release the records before the contract ended. The department's own information held hostage for ransom.

Rent Without Land: How Digital Feudalism Works

Medieval lords extracted rent from land because land was scarce and immobile. You couldn't move your farm to another estate. Digital platforms extract rent from infrastructure that's artificially scarce—made scarce through network effects, vendor lock-in, and strategic acquisition.

The pattern repeats across sectors:

Fire departments: Private equity consolidates emergency software, eliminating affordable alternatives, extracting rent from tax-funded public safety budgets. Fire engines, emergency radios, and fire retardant have followed similar trajectories—essential products consolidated under private equity ownership, with prices rising as competition vanishes.

Healthcare: Electronic health records systems became dominated by a few vendors who charge hospitals and clinics subscription fees to access patient data those providers generated. The information flows through proprietary channels, with integration between systems deliberately limited to maintain platform lock-in.

Agriculture: Four companies control grain price data, selling access back to farmers whose harvest information created the data in the first place. Equipment manufacturers like John Deere use proprietary software to prevent farmers from repairing their own tractors, turning ownership into a subscription to manufacturer-controlled maintenance.

Housing: Property management software consolidates under private equity ownership, with some systems allegedly facilitating coordinated rent increases across multiple landlords. The platforms mediate between landlords and tenants, extracting fees from both sides while allegedly enabling price coordination that would be illegal if done directly.

Education: Learning management systems, student information platforms, and educational software increasingly operate on subscription models where schools pay annually for access to systems containing their own student data and educational materials.

In every case, the pattern is identical: essential infrastructure gets consolidated under extractive ownership, users become structurally dependent with no viable alternatives, prices rise as rent replaces competitive pricing, and the platform owner captures value created by the users themselves.

The AGPL-3 Alternative: Preventing Digital Feudalism

The Norfolk fire department's predicament wasn't inevitable. It resulted from architectural choices embedded in proprietary software licensing.

Emergency Reporting's founder Adrian Mintz built software to help volunteer fire departments. He kept prices low deliberately. But when he brought in venture capital investors in 2019, accepting a minority stake, he ceded control over the company's future trajectory. The venture firm later sold to ESO. ESO shut down the platform Mintz had built. The users who had invested years in the system had no recourse—they didn't own the software, couldn't fork the codebase, couldn't maintain their own instance.

AGPL-3 licensing prevents this exact scenario. The GNU Affero General Public License extends copyleft principles to network services: if you run AGPL-3 software as a service (like cloud-based fire department management systems), you must share the source code with users. Any improvements you make must be released back to the commons.

This creates a fundamentally different power dynamic:

Corporate proprietary software: Company owns code → Users rent access → Company acquires competitors → Alternatives disappear → Prices rise → Users become serfs

AGPL-3 commons: Community owns code → Users run instances → Company improves software → Improvements flow back to community → Users can fork if company becomes extractive → Platform cannot capture users as serfs

With AGPL-3, Norfolk's fire department could have maintained their own instance when ESO acquired Emergency Reporting. Other developers could have forked the codebase and continued supporting volunteer departments. The software would remain a commons—improved by commercial vendors but owned by no one, available to everyone.

The Network State Defense

Private equity's consolidation of fire department software succeeds because fire departments operate independently with limited coordination. Each department negotiates separately with vendors, lacking collective bargaining power. They can't collectively fund software development because they lack the infrastructure for coordination at scale.

This is where NTARI's work becomes relevant. Cooperative digital infrastructure enables communities to coordinate complex work without corporate intermediaries. Fire departments—or farmers, or municipalities, or any group facing platform consolidation—can pool resources, jointly fund development, collectively own the infrastructure, and prevent any single entity from capturing the commons through acquisition.

The technical architecture already exists: federated systems where each organization runs their own instance while interoperating through open protocols, mesh networks where infrastructure distributes across participants rather than centralizing in corporate data centers, distributed version control where no single entity controls the canonical version.

What's missing is the organizational infrastructure to build and maintain these systems at scale. This is precisely what NTARI develops: the governance frameworks, legal structures, and technical patterns that enable cooperative ownership of digital infrastructure.

The Broader Warning

The fire department software story is a microcosm. Every essential service that moves to digital platforms faces the same trajectory: idealistic builders create affordable tools, venture capital funds growth, private equity consolidates the sector, prices skyrocket as monopolies form, users become serfs.

We're watching it happen to:

Municipal broadband networks, where private ISPs lobby to ban public alternatives
Electronic health records, where interoperability standards get undermined by dominant vendors
Smart city infrastructure, where Cisco, IBM, and other giants position themselves as gatekeepers to urban data
Digital education platforms, where student data becomes a revenue stream
Agricultural data systems, where equipment manufacturers and grain traders control information farmers generate

Varoufakis warns that technofeudalism represents "the greatest current threat to the liberal individual, to our efforts to avert climate catastrophe—and to democracy itself." When essential infrastructure operates as extractive platforms rather than public goods or competitive markets, communities lose sovereignty. Pricing isn't determined by cost or competition but by how much rent captive users can be forced to pay.

The fire department in Norfolk, Connecticut, with its $132,000 budget and volunteer crews, exemplifies the problem. They're trying to keep a community safe. They need software to track incidents, manage equipment, coordinate responses. The software shouldn't cost $5,000 per year when developers like Adrian Mintz proved it could be built affordably. The price increase isn't about development costs. It's about rent extraction from captive users after market consolidation.

Building the Alternative

The solution isn't nostalgia for pre-digital systems or market regulation alone (though antitrust enforcement helps). The solution is building infrastructure that structurally prevents feudal capture.

AGPL-3 licensing ensures software remains commons even when run as commercial services. Cooperative ownership structures ensure users collectively control platforms rather than being controlled by them. Federation protocols ensure no single operator can capture users through network effects. Municipal ownership of broadband infrastructure ensures internet access operates as a utility, not an extraction mechanism.

Every time a community builds cooperative infrastructure instead of renting from platforms, they prevent one more instance of technofeudal capture. Every AGPL-3 project that remains in the commons is territory that private equity cannot enclose. Every federated system that interoperates through open protocols is a market that cannot become a monopoly.

This is not utopian vision. This is practical infrastructure development informed by historical pattern recognition. Feudalism emerged when those who controlled essential resources could extract rents from those who needed them. Capitalism replaced feudalism when competitive markets and property rights distributed economic opportunity more widely. Technofeudalism emerges when platform monopolies re-create structural dependency.

Cooperative digital infrastructure replaces structural dependency with collective ownership. Not as ideological preference, but as architectural necessity.

What You Can Do

If you're reading this and thinking about how your community, organization, or sector faces similar consolidation pressures—you're right. The pattern repeats everywhere that essential services digitize under proprietary ownership.

The question is whether we build alternatives before consolidation completes, or whether we accept feudal extraction as the permanent structure of digital life.

NTARI develops the technical specifications, governance frameworks, and cooperative infrastructure patterns that enable communities to build and maintain their own digital commons. We need developers who understand the stakes, researchers who can document the patterns, and organizers who can help communities implement alternatives.

Join the technical discussions and collaborative development in NTARI's Slack workspace: https://join.slack.com/t/ntari/shared_invite/zt-39injdzvr-a7jY2FVU00fYPopG7gyP4w

If you'd rather support the mission financially—funding the research, development, and advocacy that makes cooperative infrastructure viable—contribute at https://ntari.org/#give

For press inquiries, partnership opportunities, or questions about how these patterns affect your sector, contact us at info@ntari.org.

The fire departments in Norfolk, Mesilla, and Goshen didn't choose to become digital serfs. They just needed software to save lives. The architecture of that software determined their sovereignty. That's the choice we face everywhere: build infrastructure that serves communities, or rent from lords who extract maximum value from structural dependency.

Frank Herbert imagined a future where feudalism returned wrapped in advanced technology. Denis Villeneuve made that future visually stunning. But Herbert's warning was never about the aesthetics—it was about the primitive brutality of feudal power dressed in technological sophistication. We don't have to build that future. We have the protocols, the licenses, and the organizational patterns to choose differently.

The internet doesn't have to operate as a feudal estate. But it won't transform itself.

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