Literary Hub " The Digital Economy is Destroying Our Lives and Our Planet—and AI is Only Going to Make It Worse

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The Digital Economy is Destroying Our Lives and Our Planet—and AI is Only Going to Make It Worse

Matthew Cole Raises the Alarm

Via Verso Books

Matthew Cole

May 28, 2026

Our world has been flooded by a deluge of digital platforms, their ceaseless flow submerging our daily lives. From the planetary infrastructures of Amazon, Meta, Google, Apple, WeChat, and Alibaba, to the on-demand labor of Uber, Didi, Upwork, and Deliveroo, we’ve become networked datums in digital portfolios. The infrastructures of capitalism now flow through cables and cloud servers that states have been slow and economically disincentivized to regulate. We are all paying rent in the internet of landlords. This is an evolving machinery in which datafication facilitates dispossession.<br>Article continues after advertisement

Many have attempted to name the current era: a "second machine age," the "fourth industrial revolution," "industry 4.0," "platform capitalism," or "technofeudalism," among others. The techno-optimism of the 2000s has evolved in increasingly dystopian directions. Today, environmentally destructive, data-thieving, "generative" AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek deskill human labor and undermine our very cognitive capacity. Transformations are occurring in nearly every sector and nearly every country, around the world. As platforms digitally colonize and commodify an ever-greater portion of our time, it becomes harder to find the cracks in capitalism where human culture can flourish and resistance can grow. To fight this techno-capitalist inertia, it is necessary to understand how paid and unpaid labor have changed through it.

Our current era contrasts with its historical antecedents: the post-war "golden age" of capitalism, known as the Fordist era (1945-75), which gave way to its undoing in the neoliberal, post-Fordist era (1975-2005). The Fordist era was characterized by robust manufacturing exports from rich countries alongside strong organized labor and institutions that redistributed wealth and protected social need from the excesses of capitalism in the West. The post-Fordist era saw deindustrialization in rich countries, the industrialization of many low- and middle-income countries, an erosion of social welfare and labor protections, and increasing inequality. Capital and its representatives became significantly more powerful.

Like the power looms, automated threshers, and robotic assembly lines before them, platform technologies are not neutral.

Financial markets were deregulated throughout the 1980s, supply chains were further internationalized, and public assets were privatized, hollowing out state capacity. Seventeen OECD countries witnessed a fall in the labor share of income from 75 per cent in the mid-1970s to 66 per cent in 2005, and it has only fallen further since. This Wild West of neoliberal globalization was the condition of possibility for platform capitalism to emerge as the hegemonic force it is today.

In the early 2000s, as home and mobile datafication provided computing and ICT capacity beyond specialized industrial applications, tech companies took aim at expanding their power through a wealth of networks. Online and offline machines congealed with natural life, as "Cyber-Physical Systems," or "the seamless integration of computation and physical components" grew into digital ecosystems. A surge of investment and innovation helped this emerging paradigm rise to dominance. Research shows a concentrated "open-ended burst" in technological development from 2006 to 2017, which corresponds to a rise in ICT investment from 2005 to 2015 among OECD countries, as well as the acceleration of AI-related patent-making since 2005. This decade also saw the acceleration of cloud connectivity, enabling web domain expansion and the expansive datafication necessary to train more powerful AI systems.<br>Article continues after advertisement

As technological access and capacity expanded, so too did use-cases. Platformization subsumed...