Digitalisation & "AI"

Internet Machine © Timo Arnall


Digitalisation seems to have become an end in itself (Sadin, 2016). Hardware development has progressed from simple calculation devices to highly sophisticated computing machines with sensors and multiple interfaces that interact with and manipulate the non-digital world. The current push to digitalise more and more aspects of our work and private lives feeds into, and is fed by, neoliberal, anti-democratic policies and governance. Today’s major gatekeepers of the ‘digital’ have expanded into every single economic sector to extract data and generate profit from the ‘services’ they sell based on their gathering, storage, and processing. Scholars with a decolonial perspective have furthermore pointed to issues of “data colonialism” (Couldry & Mejias, 2019) and the “coloniality of data” (Benyera, 2021).

Pervasive metaphors of “network”, “cloud”, and “AI” evoke a sense of detachment from tangible, earthly realities, suggesting a move into immaterial, elevated spheres of knowledge and control. Yet the material footprint of digitalisation – encompassing the mining of raw materials, the massive energy and water flows required to manufacture devices and run global infrastructures such as data centres, undersea cables, and satellites – reveals a deeply embodied, extractive economy (Monserrate, 2022). The frantic construction of data centres around the world increases material and carbon footprints, pushing humanity ever closer to planetary boundaries and climate tipping points.

The military roots of the internet and mobile communication technologies are often seen a mere distant past of what the internet is. However, as investigative work has revealed (Levine, 2019): the digital means of connection has from the outset been a double bind: a means of relating to people around the world – and a means of surveilling not only military enemies but ordinary people’s lives (Zuboff 2019). The other side of the coin is the capacity of digital tools for behavioural influence and manipulation. Originally developed to serve advertising and to stimulate consumption, these tools increasingly exploit large‑scale behavioural data that render certain patterns of choice predictable.

Digitalisation and AI in their current technological forms are conducive to a specific mode of governing people. This mode of governance has been described in various terms in the academic literature, for example as “algorithmic governmentality” (Rouvroy, 2020), “machine learning political orders” (Amoore, 2023) or “digitocracy” (Ballesteros, 2020). In the language of “algorithmic governmentality”, the governance of societies increasingly moves away from traditional politics, law, and social institutions toward algorithmic processing and information inferred from large datasets, thereby “directing people’s attention towards certain things, in modifying the informational or physical environment so that behaviours are no longer obligatory but necessary” (Rouvroy, 2020).

What is commonly referred to as “artificial intelligence” encompasses diverse fields such as natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML) and associated large language models (LLM), and computer vision (CV). The widespread use of the term “artificial intelligence”, however, is not accidental: from the 1950s onward, it has been shaped as a “technological artifact with political features” – what Jasanoff & Kim (2015) call a “sociotechnical imaginary” – designed to “shift[ing] authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power”.

The ideology that informs narratives about the advent of an omnipotent artificial general intelligence (AGI) has recently been described as TESCREAL (Gebru & Torres, 2024): a belief system that bundles a range of related ‘-isms’ (transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism). These ideologies share a genealogical root in eugenics and elitist thought, a belief in optimization through (digital) technology, a “natural” hierarchy of humans, and the (often self‑appointed) right of a cognitive elite obsessed with IQ and “intelligence” to steer humanity’s destiny. Today, arguably TESCREAList ideologies drive the race towards AGI (Gebru & Torres, 2024).

“AI” and automation systems can be conceptualized as central mechanisms through which the capitalist class intensifies the extraction of value from labour. By encoding workers’ knowledge into automated processes, these systems enable corporations and public administrations to justify and implement the partial or complete replacement of human workers, thereby reducing labour costs (Egan 2025). Concurrently, the operation of “AI” and automation systems depends heavily on “ghost work” (Gray & Suri 2019) – forms of invisible human labour that sustain the illusion of machine “autonomy” and “intelligence”.

Digital technologies, such as AI systems, promise potent uses in warfare and are widely regarded as critical to geopolitical hegemony. The desire to gain a military and strategic advantage is one of the main drivers of the US corporate race towards AGI. However, this is no longer hypothetical: reports indicate that the Israeli military deployed AI-enabled systems during the war in Gaza (Abraham, 2023; 2024; Jones, 2026). Recent developments in AI systems have amplified the possibilities for 'cognitive warfare' (Deppe & Schaal, 2024, p. 1), a field of military research into mind-targeting and behaviour-shaping. This poses another major threat to democracy and peace around the globe.

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