Three F-15s went down over Kuwait on Sunday. Friendly fire — the crews ejected safely. But the bill landed instantly: $291 million, gone in seconds. As Paul Krugman noted this week, modern American warfare is “extremely capital-intensive, deploying massive amounts of equipment while putting relatively few people in harm’s way.” The US chose this path deliberately, dating back to FDR’s decision to fight a machine-intensive, infantry-light war. Rational for a rich country that hates casualties.
But here’s what caught my attention: that same pattern — capital-heavy, labor-light — is quietly becoming the operating logic of everything else.
AI infrastructure is a capital game. The returns flow to whoever owns the compute: the data centers, the model weights, the cloud platforms. Workers using AI tools generate value, but the value compounds upward to infrastructure owners. Platform economics works the same way. Yanis Varoufakis, in Technofeudalism (2023), draws the distinction sharply: capitalism extracts profit through market competition. Feudalism extracts rent through ownership of the fief. When you pay Apple 30% to reach your customers, or route your business through AWS, that’s not competition — that’s a tollbooth on someone else’s land.
The conventional counterargument is that labor always adapts. Every industrial revolution displaced workers, and every time, new forms of leverage emerged. Weavers became machinists, farmhands became factory workers. The equilibrium shifts, but the relationship endures. Labor still matters; it just matters differently.
I think this misses something qualitative about where we are now.
Every previous revolution still needed human operators. The loom needed a weaver. The assembly line needed a worker. The server farm needed an engineer. That dependency gave labor its only real leverage — the ability to withhold. You could strike. You could organize. You could, in extremis, mutiny. Even medieval lords needed serfs to farm the land. The relationship was exploitative, but it was a relationship, with something to negotiate over.
Drones don’t unionize. AI models don’t strike. Autonomous weapons don’t mutiny. When capital can operate without labor, there’s nothing left to negotiate over. The social contract doesn’t erode gradually. It becomes structurally unnecessary.
This is sharpest in warfare, and that’s not a coincidence. Historically, states needed citizen soldiers to project force. That created an irreducible accountability loop: you cannot govern people you need to die for you without giving them something in return. Rights, franchise, welfare states — these weren’t gifts from enlightened rulers. They were concessions extracted because the state needed bodies. The draft was labor’s ultimate leverage over the state.
Capital-intensive warfare — drones, autonomous systems, contractor armies — breaks that loop. A state that can project force without citizen soldiers has no structural reason to maintain the bargain. Defense contractors become feudal vassals, supplying arms to the crown and capturing the rent from state violence, with no citizen obligation attached. The last mechanism that forced political accountability from capital to labor is being automated away.
Is this deliberate? Both yes and no. The structural forces are self-perpetuating — capital optimizes for capital, almost thermodynamically. It doesn’t need a conspiracy. But the specific choices — tax policy, regulatory capture, AI infrastructure procurement, weapons contracting — are made by people with aligned interests. The system doesn’t require a mastermind, but it has willing architects.
The uncomfortable part is the timing. This architecture is being built now, while we still think we’re in capitalism. Platform monopolies, autonomous weapons procurement, AI infrastructure ownership — the legal and technical scaffolding for feudal rent extraction is going up in real time. Once it’s locked in, reversing it becomes structurally very difficult. Not impossible, but the activation energy required goes up by orders of magnitude.
The question isn’t whether this is happening. It’s whether we’ll recognize it before the last lever is gone.