DIGITAL LIFE

Big tech, AI, and digital colonialism: from the fable of progress to the nightmare of global inequality

If the Third Industrial Revolution, in the second half of the 20th century, represented the advent of the Internet and computers, the Fourth would be characterized by the virtually borderless projection of the Internet and the establishment of Artificial Intelligence. Big Tech is the clearest expression of the so-called Industry 4.0 – a revolutionary stage that, being so recent, we are still understanding and learning to deal with. Once again, the fable that has been told to us is very much related to the one about the technological revolution and globalization presented by Milton Santos. Industry 4.0 is presented to us as the pinnacle of human progress and technological neutrality, as well as a tool for emancipation and freedom. It thus erases the representation of technology as the result of social relations with political and economic purposes to maintain a capitalist structure, while replacing living labor with objectified labor, distancing the worker, more and more, from the appropriation of the fruits of their labor.

“Outsourcing, for example, prevalent in 18th and 19th century England, whereby the working class labored at home, outside the factory space, without any rights and under conditions of unlimited exploitation, has now become the pompous crowdsourcing, also devoid of protective legislation, adulterating the arduous global history of work.”

Big Tech companies have a close link to political power in the United States and serve as a tool for maintaining that country's hegemony. Far from the technical neutrality that the fable of the Fourth Industrial Revolution portrays, they play an important role in preserving the class system and in the (neo)colonial dominance of the United States in the periphery. As expected, they prospered from public resources while privatizing the profits. The US government was the first major investor in Silicon Valley during the Cold War, in an attempt to contain Soviet technological advancement. The Department of Defense was responsible for research and the production of the Internet, computers, and GPS. The Trump administration merely made explicit the public-private relationship with Big Tech. In his 2024 election campaign, he received substantial resources from these companies, which were promptly reciprocated in grants for the technological modernization of government institutions, such as the Pentagon itself.

It was within this intricate relationship between the public and private sectors that OpenAI donated US$1 million to the Trump administration. One of the world's most valuable companies, when created in 2015, spread the tech fable that predicted the use of Artificial Intelligence and technological advances for the benefit of all humanity. In a document presented on March 13, 2025, to the Trump administration, however, the fable is unveiled by demonstrating the use of this same technology to maintain US hegemony and leadership.

It may seem strange that a technology giant would defend the use of this same technology for political, economic, and even military purposes. In fact, we are witnessing, simultaneously, the modernization of US defense technology and the militarization of Big Tech companies in service of the former. Meta, Google, and OpenAI have removed clauses from their corporate policies that prohibited the use of Artificial Intelligence in weaponry. In April 2025, an executive order from Trump established a technological modernization plan for the Defense sector (for example, drone technology) with an investment of US$1 billion—largely directed to Silicon Valley. 

In August 2025, in Virginia, executives from Meta, OpenAI, Thinking Machines Lab, Palantir, among others, were appointed lieutenant colonels of the newly created Technical Innovation Unit (Detachment 201) of the Army. As lieutenant colonels, they swore allegiance to the USA in a formal ceremony. Then, in September 2025, the CEOs of Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI participated in a dinner with Trump, where the US$1 trillion investment in the US by Trump was agreed upon.