TECH

Big tech and total war 

With this title, one of the most important Brazilian intellectuals, Sergio Amadeu da Silveira, competently and courageously tackles one of the most prominent new challenges facing critical thinking.

His book addresses the change in the management and infrastructure of contemporary warfare, as he announces at the beginning of the work. He investigates the data economy and its main organizations, the big tech companies. Analyzing the contracts of these organizations, he encounters military contracts.

Sergio Amadeu defends the thesis that "data are high value-added assets. That the digital age has not eliminated class struggle, and therefore "Marxist thought remains indispensable for understanding these phenomena." "Digital technology does not eliminate class struggle." On the contrary, datafied digital systems, driven by the voracity of the capitalist system, have reconfigured it on new foundations. Data has become a specific type of capital.

"The need for gigantic infrastructures and increasing computing power has led to the dominance of computer science itself by big tech companies." The most significant machine learning models are no longer being developed by universities, but by industry.

Big tech companies accumulate and monetize data on a global scale, dominating sectors such as entertainment, agriculture, logistics, and even public services. The cloud, despite being presented as a deterritorialized service, is deeply linked to geopolitical issues, concentration of power, and technological dependence.

Artificial intelligence is dependent on complex infrastructures, dominated by technological oligopolies, which makes it distant from democratic control, as well as accessible to a few powerful actors.

Knowledge is reduced to quantifiable data processed by algorithms, resulting in a "systemic colonialism" that concentrates power in the hands of big tech companies. "Vectorization and information compression are presented as methods that transform language and knowledge into mathematical representations, distancing themselves from human experience and contextual understanding."

The ethical and operational transformations in warfare highlight the shift from the "ethic of the warrior" to the "ethic of the hunter." There are systems like those used by the Israeli forces to identify targets in Gaza, which dehumanize the enemy and reduce human responsibility in lethal decisions. “The rise of algorithmic war management is eroding ethical boundaries, which demands global regulation in the face of technologies that can perpetuate cycles of extermination.”

From the 21st century onwards, the military-industrial complex has transformed into a “datafied military-industrial complex,” in which big tech companies have come to play a central role. Big tech has a neocolonial role; by controlling digital infrastructures and global data, it reinforces the hegemony of the United States and its geopolitical interests, transforming war into an increasingly technological and less transparent undertaking. “Big tech has entered the United States headquarters and been brought into the command room.” No nation-state possesses as much data on the planet's populations as American big tech companies.

Sergio Amadeu poses a major challenge: “When data used to create profiles for marketing purposes also serves to identify military targets or disseminate disinformation on a massive scale with the aim of domination, we need to discuss whether this is acceptable.” And he invites people to consider “whether it is not time to stop this enormous power of surveillance and control that is being built.”

This brief review of a book that I found very useful aims to encourage you to read Sergio Amadeu's book as an indispensable work, among the many readings available to us today.

EMIR SADER---Emir Sader is a sociologist, political scientist, and has worked as a professor at USP, Unicamp, Uerj, and as a researcher at the Center for Socioeconomic Studies at the University of Chile, in addition to being the author of several works on the subject.

by Emir Sader