Sacramento (LL)  The future is here, and it is, literally, medieval.  Californians voted strongly in favour of Proposition 22 in their recent election, giving the existing Lords of service-mediating platforms freedom to continue their mastery of the world, through their tenants. 

 

Serfdom--our American Cousins have reminded us--was  was a condition in  Europe in which a tenant farmer was bound to the will of his landlord, and it was most recently voted into the dustbin of history by Bolsheviks, without college degree, in 1918.

 

The vast majority of serfs in medieval Europe obtained their subsistence by cultivating a plot of land that was owned by a lord.  The serfs are believed to have found this to be more convenient for the petite bourgeois in town who might need turnips between scheduled market days. That is a hard fact based on reliable oral tradition since serfs were systemically illiterate and innumerate.  But they surely enjoyed the freedom to work their plots late into the night and on saints' days (so long as they attended the early mass).  A kopek here and there was useful during plague years.

 

Under the terms of the landlord-serf 'contract', the serf provided his own food, clothing, tools, children, and labour from his own productive efforts.  So he (or she) always felt 'at home' while they were working their plot of left-over land deemed unsuitable for significant agriculture.  They could work in pajamas, if they chose, and many would work without shoes.

 

A substantial proportion of the grain the serf grew on his holding had to be given to his lord--but this was understandable, because the Lord's wealth was factual proof of God's providence.  As Honoré de Balzac has taught us, God would never permit a great fortune to be the result of a crime that was properly executed.   That harmony of wealth and God's will is why the Lord could also compel the serf to cultivate any portion of the Lord’s land that was not held by other tenants (called demesne land).  It was simple efficiency, and the lord who created the universe in 6 days, is all about efficiency.

 

So congratulations American voters of all stripes.  A model to us all.