24 x 18" oil painting on canvas.
Techno-feudalism describes an evolution of modern late-stage capitalism in which giant tech monopolies — Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta — function as feudal lords, amassing enormous power and extracting digital "rents" from users who are effectively reduced to modern-day serfs.
Directly inspired by John Gast's notorious 1872 painting, American Progress — an iconic allegory of Manifest Destiny and its racist ideology/colonial violence — Techno-Feudalism is a satirical, realistic reimagining set in 2026. In place of Gast's angelic figure floating westward, three billionaires — Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos — soar over the American landscape as a three-headed angel of oligarchy. Behind them: the gleaming monuments of Silicon Valley. Ahead: an OpenAI data center whose operations have blanketed the land in pollution.
As in the original painting, those most harmed are pushed to the margins. Black and brown communities are displaced from their homes. Native peoples continue to be forced from their territories — now not only by colonial violence, but by the environmental destruction wrought by unchecked technological greed.
The viewer is invited to sit with the chaos unfolding across the canvas: figures kneeling in worship before the billionaire angels, surveillance cameras embedded into the landscape, a military soldier offering a "friendly hand" to brown children, and much more.
24 x 18" oil painting on canvas.
Techno-feudalism describes an evolution of modern late-stage capitalism in which giant tech monopolies — Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta — function as feudal lords, amassing enormous power and extracting digital "rents" from users who are effectively reduced to modern-day serfs.
Directly inspired by John Gast's notorious 1872 painting, American Progress — an iconic allegory of Manifest Destiny and its racist ideology/colonial violence — Techno-Feudalism is a satirical, realistic reimagining set in 2026. In place of Gast's angelic figure floating westward, three billionaires — Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos — soar over the American landscape as a three-headed angel of oligarchy. Behind them: the gleaming monuments of Silicon Valley. Ahead: an OpenAI data center whose operations have blanketed the land in pollution.
As in the original painting, those most harmed are pushed to the margins. Black and brown communities are displaced from their homes. Native peoples continue to be forced from their territories — now not only by colonial violence, but by the environmental destruction wrought by unchecked technological greed.
The viewer is invited to sit with the chaos unfolding across the canvas: figures kneeling in worship before the billionaire angels, surveillance cameras embedded into the landscape, a military soldier offering a "friendly hand" to brown children, and much more.