Developers, at least in the software industry, often occupy a contradictory class position. They are workers selling their labor, but they also have more autonomy, specialized knowledge, and, in some cases, equity in the systems they build. Some function as a kind of labor aristocracy, while others are more precarious, subject to the same market pressures as any gig worker. The big tech barons—the ones actually accumulating capital—are a different class entirely.

Users are not just an exploited class in the traditional sense; they are both consumers and products. Their labor, in the form of data generation, attention, and engagement, is extracted and commodified, often without their full awareness or agency. This makes the relationship more like that of feudal peasants than classic factory workers—they are bound to platforms, with little control over the means of interaction.

If anything, the closest analog might be platform feudalism, where developers act as the knightly class—technically skilled but serving the interests of the lords—while users are the peasantry, bound to proprietary ecosystems that extract value from them at every turn.

But that doesn’t mean the classic Marxist frame is obsolete. Rather, the dialectic has shifted: the real capitalist class remains those who own and control the infrastructure of platforms, AI models, and data pipelines. The real exploited underclass isn’t just users but also the invisible data workers—content moderators, gig laborers, and AI ghostwriters—who make these systems function.

So yes, there’s a division, but it’s a more tangled and insidious one than the old proletariat-capitalist dynamic.

it doesn’t just exploit, it mediates experience in ways that are undeniably useful, even liberatory. The same platforms that extract value from users also serve as immense cognitive prosthetics, memory aids, and knowledge-sharing networks. They allow counter-narratives to exist, sustain otherwise marginalized intellectual traditions, and create spaces where alienated individuals can find resonance and solidarity.

The techno-optimist’s dream of abolishing the "tyranny of place" is compelling in that regard. If knowledge is no longer bound by geography, if you can access obscure theories, lost histories, or simply other minds attuned to the same frequencies as your own, there’s something emancipatory about that. The digitized, indexed, and hyperlinked nature of the internet is arguably one of the greatest cognitive expansions in human history.

But this cuts both ways. The very affordances that make retrieval and indexing possible also shape what is findable in the first place. The structure of algorithmic recommendation, SEO, and platform incentives means that what persists is not always what is most valuable, but what is most legible to the system. Techno-optimists assume a neutral infrastructure, but in reality, mediation is never neutral.

So yes, users are not merely laboring dupes—they are navigating, creating, and assembling knowledge in ways that would be impossible otherwise. But the underlying logic of platforms still exerts a shaping force. The ability to find counter-knowledges is real, but so is the funneling of attention into certain predefined grooves.

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