The times we are currently living in are marked by historic moments that will shape the future of our species and all those who inhabit the planet. We are at a decisive moment in the struggle between life and death, hope and destruction, which brings with it great challenges for the peoples and movements of the world who are seeking alternatives to the destruction wrought by the capitalist leviathan, which constantly threatens to put our existence at risk. The leader of the Kurdish Freedom Movement, Abdullah Öcalan, tells us that the main target of the system’s attack is society, which it seeks to systematically weaken through multiple methods that break community ties, the relationship with nature, and the role of women in life. In his words, we are experiencing sociocide: “We are not only living in the most problematic societies to date but in societies that offer nothing to individuals. Our societies have not only lost their moral and political fabric, their very existence is under threat. Our societies are not just experiencing some random problem; they face the threat of destruction. If the problems of our age continue to grow and become more profound and cancerous, despite the effectiveness of science, societycide is not just a hypothesis—it is a real danger.”1
In the following article-interview, we will address a strategic pillar of the attack that society across the globe is experiencing. We will talk about the role that new technologies, digital networks, and artificial intelligence play in capitalist modernity today. We consider this to be a relevant topic to explore in depth. In his reflections, Abdullah Öcalan is constantly concerned with these discussions, as science today does not fulfill its social duty, since it is used for the profit of monopolies, thus evidencing that science today is hijacked and serving the objectives of capital and the state: “The severing of all ties between science and morality and politics threw the door wide open for war, conflicts, battles, and all types of exploitation. (…) The role cast to science was now to focus on inventing the perfect instruments of war to ensure victory. The rapid increase in the production of instruments of war resulted in a nuclear arms race. In a society where the rules of moral and political society were still intact, never mind nuclear weapons, there would be no reason to even invent a popgun, and if one were invented it would never be used against society. The collapse of morality is the most important factor for the onset of war. The severing of the ties between science and morality provided the foundation for the invention of all sorts of destructive instruments.”2
With the insights provided by Professor Silvia Ribeiro in the following interview, we can delve into cutting-edge discussions that we must analyze the anti-systemic forces of the world, because the challenges that lie ahead must lead us to build alternatives, forms of resistance, and ways to protect sociability. We must not forget that in order to realize a free life, we must imagine and create alternatives in all aspects of existence, and debates and reflections on virtuality are fundamental today, because as Abdullah Öcalan comments: “The virtual world is another important tool for domination in capitalism’s intellectual hegemony, mostly enforced by the media. The virtualization of life is indeed analytical intelligence reaching the edge of its limits. Virtually presenting something as terrifying as war can, on its own, demolish morals. Any life that has not been experienced by the human body and mind has always been seen as false, a “fake” life. Calling something “virtual” does not alter what that life is: a fake. I am not criticizing the technical developments that made virtual life possible: I am criticizing its abusive aspect and thus the paralysis of the individual’s mind.
Unrestrained use of technology is a unit dangerous weapon. The fundamental factor compelling virtual life is capitalism’s domination of technology and its desire to control billions. Life is no longer lived as before; increasingly, it is becoming virtual – like being dead while standing on your feet. The most concrete form of virtual life is the simulacrum. Simulating past events, relations or monuments does not make one more knowledgeable –to the contrary, it stupefies us. No development can be achieved by imitating the monuments of civilization. Differentiation, which is at the essence of life, is never based on repetition. (Even history does not repeat itself!) Indeed, imitation is the negation of development. But still, the imitation culture has become hegemonic. Everyone imitates everyone to the degree that they resemble each other and flocks are successfully formed. 3
Below is the full interview we conducted with Professor Silvia Ribeiro at the Academy of Democratic Modernity. Silvia Ribeiro has been following issues related to the impact of new technologies for more than 30 years, and also works on issues related to biodiversity, food, and patents. She is currently collaborating with the Biodiversity Alliance and the Don’t Mess with Mother Earth Alliance, which addresses issues related to geoengineering.
1. One characteristic of the system of domination is that it forms monopolies of power. We see how this monopoly of power is clearly unfolding in the field of new technologies as large technology companies, mostly US-American, accumulate scientific knowledge, communication nodes, and data, all extracted from people who rely on the services of these companies or who work for them. How would you explain the relationship between technology companies and monopolies of power?
We are currently witnessing a reconfiguration of capitalist companies, changing their pattern of the last 100 years. Previously, the largest companies, in terms of revenue and market capitalization, were oil companies, accompanied by some financial institutions and car manufacturers. There were also some pharmaceutical and agribusiness companies. In the last 20 years, the world’s largest company in terms of revenue has been Walmart.
Now, a new technological oligarchy has developed, where there are a few huge companies in the technology sector that have grown significantly in terms of both market capitalization and revenue. In terms of revenue, Amazon is currently the second-largest company in the world, Apple is third, Alphabet (parent company of Google and YouTube) is 17th, Microsoft is 26th, and Meta is 66th. This is significant because just a few years ago, these companies were not on the list of the world’s highest-revenue companies. What we can now clearly see is that Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia (manufacturer of artificial intelligence chips, software, and hardware), and Tesla are the seven companies with the highest market capitalization, meaning they have the highest stock value in the world. All of them are technology companies and have a large amount of money to speculate financially.
All of these companies are currently worth more than a trillion dollars and together are worth around $17 trillion, representing 15% of global GDP. The largest technology companies, the so-called “tech titans” (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Meta), originate in the United States, and each of them has revenues that exceed those of most countries in the world. In turn, the owners and founders of these companies are men, and of the 10 richest people in the world, 8 are men from technology companies: Elon Musk (Tesla, X, SpaceX, among others), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Ellison (Oracle Corporation), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), Larry Page (Google), and Sergey Brin (Google). This means that in addition to being the highest-revenue companies in the world, they create enormous personal fortunes.
Now we must ask ourselves, how did they develop and reach this position of wealth and power? On what basis did they develop this? And what do they do with this power? What these companies are actually doing is consolidating a real global accumulation of power based on changes in the technological pattern of the rest of the global industry. Today, they have a key place in the industry with digitalization, and from this, they control industries without needing to become their owners.
Having achieved the advancement of digital integration in industries, they have consolidated a monopoly of power in multiple aspects. They currently have the majority of device production (computers, phones, or any other), as well as control of most of the submarine cables that connect and allow communication through the internet. They also use and benefit from the telecommunications infrastructure built with public resources. A key point in all this is that three companies (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google) own 66 percent of the cloud computing market. This creates a bottleneck where the amount of information generated by digital use and the datafication of industries and communications of all kinds (health, education, network use) is put into cloud computing, which operates on the basis of data centers. These data centers are actually tens of thousands of hyper-data centers that accumulate information and are capable of managing it and cross-referencing it with other information to then sell it to companies that pay to obtain data from society.
So these companies do business in communication itself, but also in data accumulation and the sale of services. These three companies, which own more than two-thirds of the world’s data clouds, host information not only from private companies but also from governments, whose data is stored in one of the clouds of these three corporations. When it comes to connectivity, Meta owns 70% of the submarine cables. This means that it is the largest owner of internet connections in the world at the surface level, whether submarine or terrestrial. If we add Apple to this picture, then they have 70 to 80% of digital platforms, which is the interaction that exists with industries. So, through all this control of the different steps, in addition to selling the extrapolation of information they make according to who buys it, this is where they derive extraordinary profits on which they also do not pay taxes because they are transnational corporations.
On this point, it is necessary to say that before 2023, it was agreed for the first time at the global level—although it was not a global consensus—that transnational corporations and technology companies should pay a minimum of 15% tax. But this never materialized and now this is over. When the United States tried to add 3% in taxes, it was not possible to implement it. They did not even accept it and it was prevented, so in most of the world they are corporations with large tax evasion.
What I mean then is that they have control because of the amount of capital they accumulate, but also because of their management of information and their control of communications. It is worth noting that all of the companies we have mentioned above, but especially IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, and Elon Musk, are making huge investments in colonizing low Earth orbit to put their own private satellites in place, which will give them most of the control over global communication channels. This is what is happening right now with Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite company.
2. In our environment, we are increasingly seeing how social relationships are shaped through digital networks that are in the hands of billionaires, or how technologies are even replacing real-life interactions. All kinds of activities that we would normally do with friends or family are being absorbed by these new technologies, which mimic human intelligence and behavior. Mark Zuckerberg is now even talking openly about normalizing AI friends, supposedly to respond to the growing sense of loneliness in societies, which these technologies have created in the first place. How do you see this attack on the social fabric and sociability?
I think it’s a key issue that, in addition to being an attack on the social fabric and sociability, is important in several ways. The first is that when we replace direct communication, or direct interaction between people, we are immediately told that it has advantages. For example, the medium we are talking about is an advantage because it is a form of digital communication that can have some benefits, but in general, everything in this technology must be analyzed deeply in the overall context, in terms of what it means and the cost it has. The cost of this is that there is a great fragmentation of people and, therefore, the interpretation of relationships is mediated by technology, which in turn has a series of impacts, mainly on marketing, where we constantly receive different forms of direct or indirect advertising, in addition to a huge amount of fake or distorted news (half-truths).
The fact that human relationships have been mediated is another of the fundamental bases of profit for technological multinationals. They can now detect who we are through our interactions, as the digital information they have about us is very varied. And this is not only about what we say or exchange on the internet, but our interactions also describe the world in which each of us is involved, where we speak from, in which part of the world, what things we privilege and what things we do not, who we talk to, among other things that allow them to create networks that are used for one of the most lucrative industries of the moment, called “hypernudging,” which is an industry designed to convince people to do certain things. This is no longer convincing through talking or subliminal propaganda, but rather a general bombardment through all the digital platforms we use.
Every time we talk, every search, every purchase, every like we give in any way, everything is recorded and then configured in such a way that we are sent direct advertising for things to buy or things to do, but also ways to convince us to go to certain places. For example, the Pokémon game, which required you to leave your house and search for Pokémon in the streets, was an experiment to see if it was possible not only to get people to buy things from home, but also to get them to go out and change their physical behavior to take them to a certain place.
This entire industry exists and is based on the fact that most of our communications are mediated. This is an enormously lucrative industry, and these types of mechanisms are, for example, what was used in the case of Cambridge Analytica, which is the best-known case of manipulation to influence election results. Although it was a scandal and the company was shut down, they had already sold the service to 33 countries, 32 of which had managed to influence the outcome of the elections. One of those who used this was Trump in his first presidential election, using a type of persuasion specifically configured for the three states that would determine whether he became president or not. What was done was a bombardment by digital media, where certain types of people received certain types of messages they wanted to hear through bots or propaganda. They had detected these people’s dissatisfaction and bombarded them with information about one candidate or another, regardless of whether it was true. The truth no longer matters. What matters is that people believe what they want to hear is happening.
This is the case with political elections. But this industry is an industry of manipulation of all the choices we make. The industry will tell us how to change people’s preferences. It is a booming industry, based on our voice, our writing, and most worryingly, biometric data. Now, in addition to interactions, the use of cameras and recognition responds to a parallel industry, which is the decoding of micro-expressions. An example: when you are looking at the camera and they put a cat or something else in front of you, they see the person’s expression, and this becomes extremely important information to influence all our choices, what we buy, do, and consume.
Ultimately, this entire industry of decoding signals, micro-signals, or micro-expressions is the industry of persuasion. These are parallel industries to everything that has to do with the digital inter-mediation of relationships. Now there is something else that I don’t know if it’s worse, but it’s closely related, which is the social isolation it produces. Perhaps because of the generation I belong to, I am very concerned about this isolation that we see in young people, the so-called digital natives, who consider this form of mediated communication to be the most abundant form of communication, even more so than direct interaction.
This has an emotional impact, but it also has a cerebral impact. There is an atrophy of certain parts of the brain that are not used, because the decoding that takes place in front of a screen is completely different and less than the decoding that the brain does when facing a person. An example of this is the fatigue caused by online meetings, as they are only two-dimensional spaces, while our brain is used to decoding everything in at least three dimensions, in addition to decoding other signals that can only be seen in person. So these online meetings are so tiring because the brain makes an enormous effort to try to pick up other signals, but ultimately fails to do so because they are not on the screen, and when you are on social media all the time, fewer and fewer parts of the brain are used.
The MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Media Lab published a study in June 2025 on people who use ChatGPT and those who use traditional search engines. They divided the people into three groups: people who had to write an essay on whatever they wanted using ChatGPT4; others who did so using traditional search engines such as Google or others; and others who wrote without digital tools but could use any tools such as books, phone calls, and consultations.
All the people had electrodes placed on their heads while they were writing the compositions and were then asked questions about what they were doing. What they discovered was that the people in group one had much lower brain performance. The parts of the brain involved were minimal compared to the third group, which used practically the entire brain. So in group one, there was much less use of the brain. Imagine that the brain were a muscle. This is like only using one hand and not the rest of the body, which leads to the atrophy of all the muscles that are not used.
Then, when the people in group one had to recount and talk about what they had done, it was found that they had much poorer memory and understanding of the subject they had written about. They could not remember many things and had not really understood them, and they also had less neural connectivity. They also performed much worse in terms of linguistic quality, because their language was much poorer, and language is not just a problem of education, it is also a problem of imagination. This also showed changes in behavior. In other words, they had no training in social interaction, which means that along with the digital environment come other things that are not only what they take advantage of in terms of data to make unimaginable amounts of profit, but also everything we are losing in terms of our capacity as human beings.
Finally, I would like to say that in addition to the use we make of digital interactions and how they influence us, and the impact this has on our ability to reason, there is an extremely important point, which is that using social media as our main means of communication exposes us to a lot of fake news, and so many of the things we see are not even real. In this sense, ChatGPT invents many things that are not real, and now it does not even provide any real sources. It now has the ability to provide quotes and sources that do not necessarily exist; in fact, it is estimated that a quarter of the quotes are invented. There are examples where ChatGPT is asked if it invented the sources and it responds that it did. What I mean is that a lot of information is also beginning to circulate that is very confusing and there is less contrast, because it is not something that is really being discussed, but rather accepted by society as if it were real. The end result of all this is that there is much less cognitive capacity, interaction, and critical analysis.
We must not forget that all artificial intelligence is based on the past, because all the algorithms that have fed it are things that have already happened and are based on the mainstream media, so one of the main criticisms of artificial intelligence is precisely that it is based on the same misogynistic, sexist, and racist biases that exist in all these commercial information networks, which are what they call the digital ecosystem, where, for example, they get information from Wikipedia and Reddit, where the majority of writers are men with enormous biases, as they are generally white, of a certain age, heterosexual, and write in English. The sum of all these biases means that artificial intelligence cannot imagine anything different, a different world; it is conservative in itself, because it is always based on the reality that feeds it, which is mostly the dominant system.
3. In the context of World War III, the development of new technologies in general, and AI in particular, is already playing a central role in the competition for power and influence in the new multi-polar world order. This is true in the field of weapons, but also more generally, as the US and China in particular compete to lead the race. What role do new technologies play in this competition between capitalist nation-states?
If we follow what we have been saying about the AI industry and its conservative and manipulative role in mediating human relationships, which, beyond delving into interpersonal relationships, has become the main source of business worldwide, this naturally leads to it becoming one of the main areas of competition in global capitalism.
So far, we have mainly talked about US transnational corporations, which are the ones I know best, but of course there are others such as Alibaba, Tencent, and other extremely large Chinese transnational corporations. There is undoubtedly a global dispute between China and the United States over control of everything we are talking about, and at this moment, China is assumed to have superiority in technological terms, which is one of the biggest factors of dispute at this time.
In the case of China, the main difference is that the companies are state-owned or parastatal, so they have a slightly different logic, which is more focused not so much on commercial propaganda, but on controlling behavior by other means. But they have also surpassed their competitors, for example, in making production methods cheaper, as well as in the development of renewable energies, a crucial issue that we will touch on later, as the environmental impacts of these industries are catastrophic.
One aspect that I think is important at this time of geopolitical dispute, which is very worrying and relevant, is the role that Artificial Intelligence is playing in armed conflicts, along with the control of telecommunications. On the one hand, there is the role that Starlink plays and will continue to play in places where it has significant development. For example, we know of the role it played in the Israel-Palestine conflict, favoring Israel by intervening and manipulating access to Starlink communication technologies from the Gaza side. But it also did the same in the Ukraine-Russia case, where it cut communications in Ukraine to favor Russia.
We must be clear that although there are clear ideological positions at times (such as Elon Musk and his fascist views), what ultimately prevails in all this is the pursuit of profit, because this is the basis of capitalism. Therefore, in the case of favoring Russia, it was done because Starlink was trying to secure a contract to develop its activities in Russia, which is a very large market.
Likewise, the involvement of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Alphabet, among others, in developing weapons based on artificial intelligence and digitalization is extremely worrying in this competition. There is a research article by the Associated Press that was published in February of this year [2025], which shows how OpenAI (the company that created ChatGPT) and Microsoft are collaborating with the Israeli army to use ChatGPT for bombings and persecution in Palestine. There were already other programs being used to make bombing more “efficient,” and all of the tech companies have collaborated in different ways with the Israeli army, some with AI programs for bombing, where the AI determines where to bomb based on criteria provided by the military about where Hamas is located, i.e., the type of buildings and population to attack. The Israeli army itself admits this and says how they were able to increase the frequency of bombings 50 times with greater precision. Now there is not even human intervention, but rather a machine that tells them where to bomb, and what they say is that this is automated, meaning that there does not even have to be approval.
In addition to this scenario, there is all the biometric data tracking, satellite surveillance, and, crucially, cloud hosting, which shows that Microsoft and Google already had military contracts with the Israeli army, because otherwise they would not have been able to use this type of technological tool directly in the war. Everything I am saying is also mentioned in the report by the United Nations rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, who showed the companies that have profited from the war, where technology companies stand out alongside arms and construction companies. So we are not only experiencing competition at the market or economic level, but also subjugation through terrible and warlike means, which have to do with the use of AI and robot and drone technology designed for war.
4. In the world of technology itself, there is a great awareness of the threats that technological changes pose to our social life, our collective health, and our security. At the same time, self-defense mechanisms and popular alternatives are being developed. In your opinion, what are some inspiring examples emerging from the world of democratic technology or hacker communities?
Although social media has a huge impact on humanity, I think there are a lot of alternatives. The problem is that they rely on us to use them. There is a relatively recent alternative called the Fediverse, which is a series of alternatives to search engines and platforms. In other words, there are a number of initiatives that are non-commercial, open source, meaning they have different decentralized servers, do not retain user data (or can retain it in other ways), and try to operate on different networks. There are also alternatives for more local internet networks, which are used for more local communication.
These networks are a little slower, but that’s another myth that says we need high speed and a large amount of data to communicate, and that’s not true. That speed is mainly needed for industrial exploitation, or for example for autonomous vehicles or drones, which we don’t want to lose connection because they could cause some kind of accident. But in reality, for communication in society in general, these levels of speed are not necessary. Everything related to digital technology is based on speed and the value of speed, but this is not really that important; if there is an interruption or a slight delay, it will not cause anything extraordinary.
There are other alternatives that are not within the Fediverse (which has networks that use a specific communication protocol so that they can be interchangeable between different platforms) and that work. I think one of the keys is that it’s not about creating a single network or a single platform, or a single way of communicating, but rather that there is diversity. However, we must look for ways of communicating that are interchangeable and can be managed from different nodes. In other words, the codes by which they operate must be understandable and available, visible and not closed, so that they can be adapted and understood.
All of this is important and is under development. Perhaps the most successful experience in terms of number of users is Mastodon, which emerged as an alternative to X. But there are many other networks, and they all exist and are very good as a form of communication. The issue is to get out of the global networks, because in general what happens is that there is a hook, that is, we are currently in the global networks. So the effort made outside these networks comes from collective organization, where there is an individual decision to participate, but above all there is a collective organization that must be nurtured by using them.
I think that hacker communities and those who think about technology in other ways are very important. But at the same time, we must not forget that those in big tech were also hackers in the beginning. So it is not enough to be small initiatives, but above all it is about maintaining a collective, organizational relationship so that this type of communication does not become a commercial source, but rather involves the participation of the people so that it is an option that is at the service and control of the people who use it. Alternatives can never be individual, they must be based on collective organization.
5. The narrative of big capitalists maintains that current technological and scientific developments were made possible by their own efforts and knowledge, disconnecting advances in human knowledge and developments as a common good of humanity. How can life on the planet benefit from science and technology? Is it possible and necessary to build a science and technology of the peoples who are fighting for another world?
Yes, of course it is possible. To this end, I believe it is very important that we constantly remind ourselves that most technologies, including digital ones, were developed in the public sector and that the innovative role of the private sector has always been extremely limited. For example, all digital technologies today are based on the internet, which was developed by the US military, a public institution. Google is based on the methods developed by DARPA, which is a US public agency, and GPS was developed by the US Navy, which is also public. Touchscreens were developed through advances made by the CIA and DARPA. We may not like these institutions, but they are public.
In reality, it is the public sector that makes innovative developments in technology, and it is private companies that appropriate them, privatize them, turn them into profit, and take ownership of society’s knowledge. This reality can be seen in many other fields, such as the pharmaceutical industry, where we are led to believe that they invent many drugs and that pharmaceutical research is therefore necessary, but there are many documents that show that this is not true. There is an experience from the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment that conducted a study in the late 1990s, where they talk about pharmaceutical innovation and find that of the 1,300 new products on the market, 97 percent were copies of existing products that had undergone minor modifications in order to extend the life of the patent, because patents last 20 years. So they took an existing drug, added some new variation to it, and re-patented it for another 20 years.
The other 3 percent of products that did not come from private companies but from public ones were the only ones that could really be considered innovative, because half of the things that private companies had approved as innovative had to be discarded because they did not work. This is a concrete example from the pharmaceutical industry. What happened after this report was published was that the US Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), which had reported this information, was closed down.
This shows that the private sector does not want this reality to be known, but it is a reality that is repeated in all industries. So key technological developments are the product of public, not private, effort. Another example of this is in the biotechnology industry, where more than 50 percent of so-called technological innovations are made in public universities. It is assumed that contracts are made whereby public universities will learn from industry, but in reality it is the other way around, because the resources, brains, and training of the people in those countries are being used, and then private industry patents and privatizes the advances that are achieved.
In reality, what we have is a privatization of society’s knowledge in science and technology. We must also ask ourselves: Why does the public sector have a more innovative aspect in the field of science and technology? Because the public sector, despite everything, is not pursuing a specific result but is investigating a technology, or is asking questions that are not theoretically for individual profit, so the research is not so closed. Furthermore, this research is based on collective collaboration.
This is a paradoxical aspect of the “open source” issue that I have seen especially in the area of digital seed sequences. I say it is paradoxical because knowledge about seeds has always been a collective development of humanity, but at the same time, with new sequencing technologies, such a large and complex amount of information is put into digital sequences on the internet that it serves for immense studies, perspectives, interpretations, and research, but then when specific uses are found for all this knowledge, it is patented and privatized. So it is put in an open space, but at the same time, within the system we are in, it is privatized again.
When people ask me if we can live with science and technology that is not produced under the logic of the system, I can say yes. We have already done so throughout our history. There are beautiful and important examples of this. The main one, I would say, is the whole issue of community livelihoods: livelihoods in food, shelter, resource management, and water management. All of this is much more effective and really important. For example, in the case of food, the industry has patented roughly 100,000 varieties of seeds of various types, most of them ornamental (flowers and plants), whereas it is estimated that communities produce two million varieties of seeds per year. This does not stop. People are constantly working in different ways. This is the basis of global food production, this diversity that still exists and is based on dialogue and the many ways in which rural, but also urban, communities are constantly experimenting and developing seed varieties.
The same is true for water management. There are extraordinarily sophisticated water management practices in rural communities around the world, where people know how to manage water so that it continues to exist, but also how to share it among communities. We are talking about highly sophisticated knowledge that is not recognized as technology, but it is. The same is true of energy, construction, disease, health management, medicinal herbs, etc. I mean that everything that has to do with the sustenance of communities, in a decentralized and diverse way, is much greater than what will ever exist in industrial and patented technology.
We must recognize that it is not all about inventing something new and making an enormous effort to rebuild the world from scratch, but that there is already a large material base that has to do with the sustenance of communities throughout their history. Therefore, we must understand that there is already a management and organization of human life outside the system.
6. What are the environmental costs of capitalist science and technology developments?
Although this is a topic that we could explore in more depth in another article, I can say in general that the most important thing to understand is that when we talk about digital technology and artificial intelligence, we are talking about an extraordinarily heavy industry that is based on an enormous infrastructure. An author named Benjamin Bratton argues that the current internet infrastructure is the largest accidental international industrial infrastructure, because there was never a meeting of governments to plan and define the construction of this global infrastructure; rather, it was built in pieces, and although much of it is public, it has already been appropriated privately.
It is important to understand that cables, data centers, satellites, communication towers, devices, among other things, are based on enormous amounts of material resources related to mining and certain products in particular, such as cobalt, graphite, lithium, coltan, and everything that has been called rare earths.
Furthermore, this industry requires enormous amounts of energy (fossil fuels) and water. At present, it is estimated that data centers alone, which are the physical part of the cloud, i.e., these centers that can have tens of thousands of computers connected to each other, require enormous amounts of water to maintain a regular temperature, as the machines produce large amounts of heat. Industries use pure, potable water to maintain their pipes, thus creating a current scenario of dispute over water among communities living near these industrial centers.
The same is true in all places that already suffer the impacts of mining, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo with cobalt, or Rwanda with coltan, where there has been a veritable massacre and unlimited exploitation to obtain these particular resources. Additionally, we must recognize that this industry emits a significant amount of greenhouse gases due to the large amount of energy it consumes. For example, data centers currently emit more than 3 percent of global greenhouse gases, which is comparable to all global aviation travel. To provide another point of comparison, Latin America as a whole emits between 5 and 8 percent of global greenhouse gases.
Finally, this industry produces an enormous amount of toxic waste, partly due to the planned obsolescence of devices, as well as the products used to make semiconductors and chips, which use so many chemicals that we don’t even know what they are. However, according to a United Nations report from last year [2024], these chemicals are causing a number of diseases in women and children in countries that are beginning to import electronic waste. This waste is so dangerous, toxic, and polluting that industries decided to export it to poor countries, where they also have huge toxic waste dumps, where women and children open phones and remove cables. The UN report talks about the number of miscarriages, neonatal malformations, and diseases of different types resulting from toxic waste. Therefore, talking about these issues is not only about the manipulation of social relations or the control of industries, but also about an enormous climate, environmental, and health footprint.
7. Outside the world of technology, what do you think is the best way to protect sociability and, ultimately, our humanity, as monopolized technologies attempt to penetrate all aspects of society?
Terrible things are happening in the world right now, and we are facing very big challenges, as we were before already. I believe that when we look at how real revolutionary changes have taken place, they have almost always come from the organization of communities that seemed marginal. I think that’s where the keys lie today, because these experiences have managed to maintain levels of communication, organization, and mutual recognition within a community. Contrary to what we are led to believe, that because you have 5,000 friends on a social network, you have many more friends, in reality you have far fewer friends because you don’t know them. On social media, I can be an avatar, I can lie, I can make up anything, but that’s not having friends. In a human community, on the other hand, there is real knowledge of people and a mirror of who each person is. There can be true recognition of others, of seeing oneself in the eyes of others.
But this is not only at the individual level; all the different forms of organization that have been able to bring about important, civilizing, large-scale changes have to do with the organizational capacity of those communities. I think there is a key in collective organization, in community organization, and in the practice of self-management of both decisions and of the resources we need to live. This should not be based solely on resistance, but on the creation, construction, and prefiguration of other ways of life. I believe that at this moment, speaking in person in a community where you can truly exercise all your qualities, not only of speech or knowledge, but also of empathy and gestures, that is, using your whole brain and all your functions when you are with someone or with many others in a collective space, that, in addition to building us in a different way and preserving brain functions and increasing health, is increasingly revolutionary, because it allows us to break free from these forms of control that we talked about before.
Of course, this requires work, and precisely when we talk about what science and technology we need, I think that one myth that must be dispelled is that everything must be the same, that there will be a great organization that will tell us everything and save us. This is very similar to what already happens in capitalism, that is, a centralized apparatus of putting ourselves at the disposal of whoever has power, whether through persuasion, weapons, suggestion, dependence, etc. We can undo this with more decentralized forms, although we do need forms of international communication, which we can develop, but I believe that for long-term construction we must base ourselves on collective and more community-based organization where we can really get to know and recognize each other.
Without a doubt, debates and reflections on these issues must continue to make their way into the discussions of the anti-systemic forces of the world. At the Academy of Democratic Modernity, we hope to delve deeper into these issues. It is necessary and urgent, as we are faced with the task of building alternatives as peoples for a free life, where we can delve deeper into the science and technology of the democratic modernity of the peoples of the world. A science outside of capitalist modernity is possible, and as Abdullah Öcalan says: “Therefore, if we do not step outside this paradigm, the nation-state point of view, we cannot begin to obtain correct science, and therefore the chance to make right decisions and relations. All indicators show that a democratic atmosphere creates the most fertile ground for scientific revolution. (…) The perspective of democratic civilization provides a tremendous opportunity for scientific production. The need for new science can only be satisfied under the presence of a democratic society paradigm. This is especially so where there is an atmosphere of crisis and chaos which needs to be transcended.”5
1(Öcalan, Sociology of Freedom, p. 87).
2(Öcalan, Sociology of Freedom, p. 323-324)
3(Öcalan, Capitalism: The Age of Unmasked Gods and Naked Kings, p. 56-57)
4Understood as what is called generative artificial intelligence, which differs from conventional AI in that it is capable of “inventing” new elements from the data it has: sounds, texts, images, and music. The difference from traditional search engines, which also used the internet through their search engines, is that they provided a series of guidelines for composing or creating.
5(Öcalan, Capitalism: The Age of Unmasked Gods and Naked Kings, p. 237-238)