So the thesis is basically that you have to be an influencer to get material wealth in the new economy? I think I'll kill myself if I live to see that.

Fortunately, I think the thesis is half-baked. The analogy of serfdom is not that great, because it's not as if money didn't exist during the middle ages. It's that the average person was locked out of attaining it. The Black Plague helped usher in some forms of technological advance (via labor shortages) that freed people to do other things (like think about stuff, for example), which led to a positive feedback loop of innovation.

In the best case scenario, our current trend of automation will do the same. It's scary, because we don't know what happens when a doctor no longer needs to think about what the diagnosis/therapy/prognosis of the patient is, since Watson or whatever can do it with less error in a fraction of the time. But that doesn't mean we haven't seen this movie before.

I actually think the opposite of this article is more likely to come to pass. I think we're in the digital equivalent of Oliver Twist. Eventually the skies of London cleared so air was breathable and children didn't have to work 60 hr weeks in the factory. Laws catch up. They will catch up with Facebook and Google, too, because no one wants to live in a world where corporations make you suffer. Again, we've seen that movie and it sucked the first time around. I won't make any predictions about how fast the laws will catch up...the industrial revolution wasn't quick, after all. But they will. Eventually.