On Martin Luther King Day, we honor a prophet who guided a nation toward its conscience. Yet, part of honoring Dr. King requires heeding his most unsettling warning. Reflecting on the civil rights movement’s goal of integration, he said, “We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win. But I’ve come to believe we’re integrating into a burning house.”

Today, that house is not only burning from the old flames of racism and materialism he identified, but from a new, digitally-fueled fire: the transformation of our economy and democracy into a system of technofeudalism, powered by corporate personhood and artificial intelligence. This Martin Luther King Day, we must confront how the legal fiction of the corporate “person” has merged with the algorithmic power of AI to create a new frontier of injustice.

Dr. King’s later work, the Poor People’s Campaign, recognized that justice is economic. He fought against a “triple evil” of racism, poverty, and militarism, all often orchestrated by powerful, unaccountable institutions. In his day, the threat was overt: discriminatory laws, exploitative employers, and a military-industrial complex. Today, the threat is often encoded—in laws granting corporations the rights of people, and in algorithms that govern our lives.

If King were to write us a letter today as he did from the Birmingham it would be  “A Letter from the Digital Jail” stating: 

In any nonviolent campaign, we must first collect the facts. Let us see the hard, brutal reality:

Our democracy has been usurped by a legal fiction. The corporation, an artificial entity, has been crowned a “person” with rights exceeding your own and mine—it enjoys immortality, limited liability, and the sanctified right to pour vast wealth into our elections, drowning out the voices of human citizens. Having achieved this, it has now birthed a new order. As the thinker Yanis Varoufakis warns, we no longer live under capitalism, but under technofeudalism. The lords of the digital cloud—Amazon, Google, Meta—have built their fiefdoms. We are their serfs, generating the data that becomes their “cloud capital,” while their algorithms, inscrutable and unaccountable, shape our desires, curate our realities, and dictate our economic fortunes.

This is the new segregation. It does not post signs reading “White” and “Colored”; it writes code that sorts us into categories of “profitable” and “disposable.” It does not deny a seat at a lunch counter; it denies a living wage, affordable medicine, and a planet fit for habitation in the pursuit of cloud rent. It is a system designed to create a false, stable reality for its beneficiaries, while extracting every ounce of value from the rest of us. (Adaptation of the  1963 “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”)

The doctrine of corporate personhood, born from a reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment (an amendment meant to protect emancipated slaves), has created a paradoxical world. It grants immortal, amassing entities the speech rights of citizens (Citizens United) and the legal shields of individuals, without their humanity, accountability, or mortality. 

Pointing to a cognitive psychological case study shared by Author and Professor Melissa Harris-Perry from her book Sister Citizen, she described scientists studying how people orient themselves in space and where after placing subjects in a tilted chair in a room where all the angles were crooked they asked them to position themselves upright. Some people were able to locate themselves vertically in space despite the misleading cues in the room, but others were only able to orient themselves based on their warped surroundings, standing at up to a 35 degree angle and claiming to be completely straight. Perry uses the case study to orient her description of envisioning the world upright while constantly bombarded with distorted, damaging as well as warped external signals. Though many may not know it, we are situated  in a “crooked room,” to borrow Professor Melissa Harris-Perry’s analogy. In such a room, it becomes hard to stand upright, to see clearly that political power is now vastly tilted toward corporate interests, not human needs.

Now, enter the next stage: Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Capital. Economist Yanis Varoufakis argues we are exiting capitalism and entering “technofeudalism.” In this system, giants like Amazon, Google, and Meta are not mere companies; they are digital feudal lords. Their “cloud capital”—the vast networks and AIs built on our data—has replaced factories as the core economic asset. We, the users, are “cloud serfs.” We labor for them by generating behavioral data, which their AIs refine to modify our desires, predict our actions, and consolidate their power.

This is where Dr. King’s burning house meets our digital reality. The corporate “persons” with superior rights now possess god-like AIs. This combination is lethal to justice:

1. Exploitation is Automated & Opaque: Algorithmic management decides wages, credit, and job opportunities, often embedding historical biases (redlining, wage discrimination) into a black box. The “corporate person” is shielded by trade secrecy, while the AI executes a new, digital form of economic oppression Dr. King decried.

2. Wealth is Hyper-Concentrated: Cloud capital generates “cloud rent”—profits extracted by controlling the digital space itself. A tiny oligarchy captures wealth created by the collective activity of billions, exacerbating the “gulf between the haves and the have-nots” that King called “the great tragedy of modern society.”

3. Democratic Discourse is Hijacked: Corporate “persons” use their “speech” (money and data) to influence politics. Their AIs then manipulate the public square—social media feeds, search results—to serve their interests, undermining the collective dialogue essential for a “Beloved Community.”

We are not just integrating into a burning house; we are being assigned a plot on a digital plantation, where we toil for data, governed by algorithmic overseers owned by masters with the legal standing of persons.

So, what is the path Dr. King’s legacy demands?

Are we going to “Wait?” “Wait for the next election.” “Wait for the innovation to trickle down.” “Wait, and do not disrupt the market.” This “Wait” almost always means “Never.” We must come to see that justice too long delayed is justice denied in the digital age just as surely as it was at the Woolworth’s counter.(Adaptation of the  1963 “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”)

First, revoke the illegitimate personhood. We must legally dismantle the notion that corporations are people with inalienable rights. Their charter to exist must come from We the People, with the condition that they serve the public good, not subvert it.

Second, seize the algorithmic means of participation. Dr. King organized marches on Washington and boycotts in Montgomery. Today, we must organize for democratic control over the digital public square and our own data. This means strict regulation of algorithmic manipulation, antitrust action to break cloud fiefdoms, and asserting that data generated by the public is a collective resource, not private property.

Finally, recalibrate our moral compass. Dr. King called for a “revolution of values” against the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” To that list, we must now add unaccountable technocratic power. We must see AI not as a neutral tool, but as a political force that must be bent toward justice, equity, and human dignity.

On this Martin Luther King Day, let us remember his vision was not merely about entering existing systems, but about transforming them into houses of justice. The current house, warped by corporate power and digital feudalism, is aflame. Our task is not to find a better seat inside it, but to put out the fire, rebuild the foundation on truth, and reclaim the digital landscape as common ground for the Beloved Community. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it will not bend toward justice in the hands of an algorithm owned by a corporate “person.” It will only bend in our hands, when we grasp it together.

Works Cited

Harris-Perry, Melissa V. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. Yale UP, 2011.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. Why We Can’t Wait. Harper & Row, 1964. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 16 Apr. 1963. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/letter-birmingham-jail.

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. Supreme Court of the United States. 118 U.S. 394. 1886. Justia, supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/118/394/.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Supreme Court of the United States. 558 U.S. 310. 2010. Justia, supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/.

Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Bodley Head, 2023.