Tech Power’s Violence

As the lament swells around democratic crisis and the rise of the right with populist moped-riders sweeping elections¹⁾ and traditional political parties left “shocked”²⁾, attention increasingly turns to the actual processes and spaces of political deliberation and their corrosion through social media and artificial intelligence (AI). Contentions around “too much screen time”, however, fall short of addressing both the significant place that social media holds in democratic/populist life and the long-coming transformation of public-private relations. Consequently, big tech companies are being propelled into positions of power over communication, service providing and control over collecting and handling sensitive data such as in countries’ police services relying on Palantir’s digital surveillance infrastructure³⁾ – albeit in a starkly uneven, “patchwork” landscape of regulatory prerogatives for policing.⁴⁾ We may choose to scandalise authority positions and the takeover of essentially public functions by private corporations along with abhorrent images of nameless “techies” stealing social security data under the auspices of a unique and uniquely illegitimate agency Frankenstein called Doge. But we shouldn’t act surprised: “Muskism” is not a natural disaster but the emblem of a long-continuing delegation of public power⁵⁾ and resources to an industry that remains successful in eluding public scrutiny and, worse, any effective, democratic control.⁶⁾

Critical data scholars have excavated the continuities between long lines of exclusionary discrimination and racialising in the administration and suppression of unwanted “aliens” in the offline and online world.⁷⁾ This and insightful scholarship studying political economy and law underscore the role of law, legal instruments and legal reality framings in constituting and enabling the sprawling AI infrastructure and its related shift of power from public to private, deeply entwined with the financialization of the economy and neoliberal state transformation.⁸⁾

How did we get here?

Ernest Renan, speaking at the Sorbonne in March 1882, tried to explore what constitutes a nation.⁹⁾ For this “delicate” task he proposed a “vivisection” during which the living should be treated like the dead, subjected to the cold and with absolute impartiality. The key to the successful life of a nation, he posited, lay in the “plébiscite de tous les jours”, just like “the individual’s existence is the perpetual affirmation of life.”

Especially Renan’s appropriation of shared memories – “la possession en commun d’un riche legs de souvenirs” – strikes the wrong tone today, as we have learned that “we” is not a given, but a violent imposition and mostly unacknowledged inheritance of suppression. So, what about the idea itself of an everyday vote for a communal life in freedom? Is the formula practicable in today’s democracies under duress? How much fragmentation and polarisation can the plébiscite deal with? And where do the voting and voicing, the protesting and participating, occur today? In election booths, referenda, court rooms, on the street, online? Moreover, what makes a voter, and how do today’s voters make informed, political decisions?

Glued to Screens but Blind

According to media and internet scholars, a growing portion of people rely on their social media “feed” as their primary source of information and news – that is if they make any effort to inform themselves about current events.¹⁰⁾ The spread of misinformation, hate speech and forms of discrimination through social media has reportedly been shaping political processes including elections in concrete, consequential ways. Concerns about the subversion of online political “debate” have remained virulent in the landmark United States presidential elections since 2016, throughout election campaigns in Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina and, these days, in Germany with the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) on a seemingly unstoppable rise.

Meanwhile, subscriptions to major newspapers decline as people find the constant flow of information overwhelming, especially but not just for often younger readers/“viewers” who rely almost exclusively on social media for information. Therefore, the reported increase in anxiety and depression due partly to “doom scrolling”, the resigned and perpetual consumption of “bad news”, has a debilitating effect on people’s ability to make informed decisions on existential, pressing issues.¹¹⁾ Even as we spend much of our time in AI-generated echo chambers online, we only think we see what we choose to see and exercise agency over – while that has long become a grand delusion. In his remarkable, prize-winning study of AI and the New Fascism, Rainer Mühlhoff provides a compelling and utterly sobering anatomy of how citizens’ democratic agency has been morphed into blind, uninformed consumerism of algorithmically designed feeds.¹²⁾ In this anatomy, it is not just our pathetic, hamster-esque lives that appear in sharp relief, but what emerges in its scary immensity are the outermost contours of the material, legally constituted and long-time coming infrastructure of big tech power, keeping us captive, glued to our screens, going where Zuckerberg, Amodei and Altman lead us.

Behind the fleeting images on Facebook, TikTok or Instagram of domestic partners pulling pranks on one another in the virally exposed intimacy of their home, cats reading books, cars somersaulting off bridges, or youths performing elaborate dance routines lie different worlds of industrially organised extraction and self/exploitation, corporate-controlled infrastructures of data collection, processing and dissemination as well as opaque, uncontrollable, automated selection and decision-making processes. Together, this triad of modern, hidden slavery, corporate data extractivism culminating in the insatiable “cloud” and algorithmic governance makes up today’s DNA of democracies’ political economy.

Slavery Behind the Screen

What remains hidden is the subjection of countless humans who “screen” the endless feeds under ambiguous mandates of “appropriateness”, “decency” or “legality”. Because most incessant “online content moderation” occurs in slave labour-ish “tech centres” in South-East Asia and Africa, it rarely enters public debate in the West.¹³⁾ Meanwhile, Western and European regulatory attention¹⁴⁾ is increasingly turning to protecting minors from “unhealthy”, addictive cell phone use – hitting, however, neither at the evil heart of invasive and manipulative social media and their destructive impact on everyone nor at the spider-web economic logic of “targeted ads” and “one-click-purchases”.

The human and environmental costs of disseminated and deleted images online remain in a lawless space of opacity and agnosticism. The unsung lives spent by thousands of content moderators scrolling through devastating images of child abuse, pornography and other violence demonstrate the exploitation and waste of human labour in the service of fleeting and utterly pointless and simultaneously harmful entertainment. Our 24/7 exposure to a never-ending stream of “funny” or “serious”, yet ultimately random, pictures numbs us against anything or anyone behind those images, we don’t see them.¹⁵⁾

Equally invisible to us, willingly or unwillingly, remains the scope of environmental destruction caused by the energy- and water-devouring “cloud”. Eating up hundreds of acres and consuming water and electricity supplies of metropolitan cities, data centres constitute the real-world infrastructure of AI – but we still think about the cloud as something ephemeral, “up there.”¹⁶⁾ The cloud is instrumental in this usurpation of the public and ever more of its communication and governance functions. Materialised in big data processing centres of humungous physical dimension, it becomes the epicentre of our online world. Deluding ourselves that we are inhabiting an actual, “real-world” space of so-called social, political or professional communication when we grab our iPhone to share a video or send a text, it is a publicly licensed but privately owned, operated and controlled body which houses these very means of interpersonal exchange, with undersea fiber-optic cables and satellite networks – again under private ownership and control – complementing the digital infrastructure of democratic life.

Generative AI, Digital Sovereignty and Political Economy

A June 2026 report by the United Nations University (UNU) concludes that the acceleration of AI applications requires the construction of data centers which will need the water supply otherwise needed by 1.3 billion people while consuming over 800 terawatt-hours of electricity, “nearly triple the combined annual electricity use of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria”, collectively home to more than 650 million.¹⁷⁾ While staggering, these numbers are almost inconceivable for the layperson. So are the numbers on the mindboggling pace of expansion of generative AI use.

A key to understanding the predicament we find ourselves in when trying to answer to or even begin to resist the private, big-tech takeover of sovereign public functions lies in the transformation of state-market relations for decades. Kicking into high gear with the election of Thatcher and Reagan and fuelled by the imaginaries dreamt up by Hayek, Rand and Friedman, the political economy of public and private, the relations between government and market, shifted profoundly. The level of “capture” of public interest issues along with public services and authority by private corporate power has deepened over decades of neoliberal privatization and delegation so that a reversal seems improbable, short of pursuing radical nationalization policies. The latter, meanwhile, seem mired in conflicting assessments of the lessons learned from breaking up large corporate monopolies in early twentieth century.¹⁸⁾ As Barry Lynn writes in 2024,

“It is Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple that today enjoy the power to create and destroy, to censor and punish, to ‘make and unmake’ who they will. It is these corporations that – even as we fear consolidation of power in the public state – have erected a private state over us.”¹⁹⁾

Reflecting such dilemma, remedies to re-democratise sensitive, privatised and financialised governance areas are being sought by some through calls for “more regulation” – as if the current constellations were not the outcome of decades-long regulatory programming – and by others in the recreation of idealised market spaces of democratic deliberation²⁰⁾ or the reinvigoration of human rights concepts that were already sorely tested at the height of the Washington Consensus and neoliberal global “development” politics.²¹⁾

What is required to grasp the challenges that confront democratic politics both offline and online is to thoroughly engage in an unpacking of the political economy of today’s “platform” and “digital” capitalism. As the staggering usurpation and assumption of control of private data and public functions in Apple’s or Amazon’s clouds illustrate, the seriously skewed imbalance between public and private power continues to deepen. But it is not merely the quantity of physical infrastructure and money spent on it, it is what the buildings, cables, computers are used for. What has come under the control of companies such as Meta, formerly Facebook or Alphabet (Google’s parent company), as well as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, is nearly unfathomable against how we ordinarily understand the tasks carried out by governments and bureaucratic agencies. The “services” provided by private technology titans to – paying – government agencies span from data collection and processing for the purposes of border securitisation, welfare service provision, tax administration, emergency and disaster responses, carceral management, policy elaboration but also the identification of enemy “targets” as in Gaza with software programs such as Lavender, The Gospel or, Where’s Daddy?. Notably, Lavender has been assisting the Israel Defense Force to establish mass surveillance programs based on facial recognition without Gazans’ consent or knowledge.²²⁾ Google and Amazon have provided the Israeli government and military with cloud infrastructure and machine learning capabilities under the umbrella of Project Nimbus.²³⁾

How must we re-assess this interpenetration of public authority and private power, competence and control to possibly transform or scale it back? The expansion of political fragmentation and the increase in numbers of authoritarian governments must be appreciated against the background of this shift of public functions into private market control. The corrupted democratic discourses that form the environment in which populism prevails result not only from prolonged neglect of meaningful, structural reform of the financial system but also the private takeover to which we have for decades been willing accomplices.