Leading Big Tech companies are worth more than the entire annual GDP of most countries. This is not only a reflection of their economic power, but also a reminder of the growing degree of algorithmic control that Big Tech tools and infrastructures exert over the inequalities that sustain the capitalist metabolism. If cities, where over half of the world’s more than 8 billion people now live, are to become the platforms for the global revolution we need today to end the global hegemony of capitalism – an endeavor that seems more urgent than ever in the face of the climate catastrophe caused by capitalism – then we need to rethink the relationship between Big Tech and urban revolt, argues Michael Kwet in his article for the “Kin City” series.
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As we move into 2025, the environmental emergency has reached fevered pitch. And it’s not going to get any less intense from here. The planet breached 1.5°C across twelve consecutive months for the first time (in large part provoked by the El Niño jet stream), and on average (across several years), we’re probably at 1.3°C above the pre-industrial level. As we hit 1.5°C, which will likely occur around 2030, the prospect of triggering several catastrophic tipping points will move from ‘possible’ to ‘likely.’ If we thaw the permafrost, shutdown the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), trigger Amazon rainforest dieback, collapse of major ice sheets, initiate monsoon shifts, and kill off the coral reefs, which house ¼ of all ocean life, we will usher in a categorically worse situation that we cannot reverse, even if we can find a way to bring the temperature back down. Added to this, biodiversity loss and habitat destruction is increasing at an alarming pace, ushering in what scientists call the ‘Sixth Mass Extinction.’ Pollution and waste is also wrecking havoc. Several million people die each year from outdoor and indoor air pollution, while trash microplastics are littering the seas, imperiling ocean life and ecosystems. As the United Nations puts it, we now face a triple planetary crisis: climate change, nature loss, and pollution and waste.
Within this context, a growing body of degrowth science and political ecology scholarship has challenged the notion that we can ‘save the planet’ if we continue to grow the economy. In order to arrest the triple crisis and prevent a permanent nightmare, we need to reduce and cap global material resource use – about 100 billion tons per year – by as much as one half. This is wholly incompatible with capitalism, an exponential growth machine that, at a 3% annual growth rate, doubles every 23 years upon all accumulated growth over time. In the past six years, we have consumed almost as many material resources as was consumed during the entire 20th century. With just 30% of global energy derived from renewable sources, which took decades to reach, the exponential growth of the economy requires ever-more resource consumption from fossil fuels, preventing us from mitigating climate change fast enough to stay within safe limits. All of this economic activity is the primary driver of biodiversity loss, habitat loss, resource waste, pollution, and climate change. For this reason, a 2023 survey found 73% of nearly 800 environmental scientists, ecological economists, and policy experts held that global growth is incompatible with environmental sustainability.
The political economy of Big Tech
The objective of degrowth, then, sets the context for all human activity on earth, including the digital revolution. In fact, in terms of market cap, the digital economy is now the most lucrative part of the global economy, with the top Big Tech corporations worth more than the entire annual GDP of most countries. What’s more, digital technologies offer more than vast wealth to their main beneficiaries; they offer multiple forms of power and control over the masses, whether through the surveillance of workers and activists, the control of online communications, or the integration of Big Tech and startups into modern militaries. At the center is the United States, which exercises unipolar dominance over the global digital economy. As I tabulated in my book “Digital Degrowth: Technology in the Age of Survival” (2024), of the top 1,000 tech corporations, the US holds 55% of the companies, 77% of the market cap, and 59% of the revenue (compared to China’s 6%, 6%, and 11%, respectively). It also dominates the finance, startups, intellectual property, and core products and services, including semiconductors, cloud computing, search engines, social media networks, email, business networking, streaming entertainment, and more. It is the leading force in the digitalization of capitalism, including e-commerce, fast fashion, industrial agriculture, oil exploration and production, and e-waste. Through the process of digital colonialism, the US reinforces the ecologically unequal exchange between the core and periphery, thereby promoting the further development of the US empire.
Unfortunately, degrowth scholarship has failed to address the digital economy, while digital studies scholars and journalists have erased the US empire and ignored degrowth. Therefore, I believe it is high time to (1) bring the two together into a single, coherent framework, and in doing so (2) fill a major gap in understanding the state of the environment, without which digital politics is simply meaningless. To give one example: Continuing the racist-imperialist tradition of US-Eurocentrism, the leading influencers are pushing for mild reforms like the racist-imperialist antitrust legal apparatus. A system premised on ‘fair’ and ‘competitive’ capitalism, the evidence refutes the claim that antitrust reduces in industry concentration. Mild capitalist reforms like antitrust are thus wildly out of step with the urgent changes needed to build a just and sustainable future.
Over the past two years, the tech pseudo-left has turned its attention to the environment, but in ways that are misleading the public. Specifically, the current obsession with data center/AI contributions to carbon emissions, energy use, and water use is wildly overstated. As of 2020, the ICT sector as a whole accounted for just 4% of global energy use and 1.4%-3.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with data centers a small percentage for each (24% and 16% respectively) within the ICT sector itself. The recent problems from the AI boom, now and in the future, are most acute at the local and, in a few rare cases, national levels, but not at the global level, where the ICT sector is a very small contributor to climate change by comparison to fossil fuels (responsible for 68% of global GHG emissions) and the food system (responsible for one third). In truth, data centers and AI do not have sizable environmental footprints at the global scale. The popular narrative is propounded by mostly environmentally illiterate academics and journalists stuck in an energy and water ‘tunnel vision’ that comes at the expense of the central issue: digital degrowth.
Degrowthing ‘smart’ cities
Degrowth requires a paradigm shift in how we think about the digital society, including in urban spaces where ‘safe’ and ‘smart’ cities are being developed. For starters, a reversal of aggregate growth must take place within the space of a single generation if we’re to avoid breaching temperatures well beyond 1.5°C. The global population is now 8 billion and the per capita GDP $20,000. While it’s true that GDP is a poor measure of actual and possible living standards, it’s clear that there’s not a ton of wealth to go around even before we reduce global material resource use. If we’re to go above the problematic ‘decent living standards’ (DLS) championed by degrowth scholars – which does not cover basic forms of consumption and is set at a level of poverty in the Global North – and deliver a Westernized middle class standard of living to all 8 billion people, then there would be effectively no room for class. Thus, a just degrowth transition requires the end of material inequality between and within countries – i.e. universal class abolition based on an ecosocialist restructuring of all societies that produces equality in harmony with nature by its very mechanics. Given that this has to happen within a very short time frame, degrowth effectively requires worldwide revolution.
To address this issue, we must recognize that there are four major problems within urban space. The first problem is that most ‘smart’ cities projects envision internet of things and CCTV cameras. This usually starts with so-called ‘safe’ cities projects that install surveillance equipment, IoT sensors, and other infrastructure which can then marshal technologies like video analytics and big data analytics to administer services like people and traffic counts, waste refusal, energy efficiency, and other resource management via city services. These user devices contribute to energy use and carbon emissions. In South Africa, to pick one example, the Premier of the Gauteng province, Panyaza Lesufi, has announced his intention to place cameras with facial recognition on ‘every street,’ coupled to surveillance drones and other devices that will pipe data into a soccer stadium-sized command and control center. While this is typical political grandstanding by Lesufi and unlikely to be administered any time soon, over the past few years, companies like Vumacam have installed over 18,000 cameras stitched together into a massive wide area network. The cameras cover Johannesburg and the company intends to extend its network throughout South Africa and other African countries. This would increase the use of energy, carbon emissions, and, potentially, water use via data centers, which may strain local resources – though to what extent is unclear.
Second, digital rollouts of surveillance equipment will likely reinforce segregation. Cities have embedded highly unequal housing and workplace arrangements, with wealthy people enjoying more lavish and spacious homes and offices while poor people languish in dilapidated houses, shacks, shantytowns, and workplaces. While we can replace the latter, it’s not clear what we should do with the upper-class infrastructure, as this arrangement is inherently unjust and it’s impossible to build these kinds of ultra-high quality spacious homes. Thus, the status quo of unequal housing landscapes can only be maintained through force. In South Africa, where apartheid-era residential segregation remains entrenched, ‘smart’ camera networks are proliferating as a means to police poor black ‘beggars’ and reinforce spatial segregation.
Third, ‘smart’ and ‘safe’ cities projects are cash cows for tech transnationals. This will only reinforce economically and ecologically unequal exchange, with the US transnational tech corporations the primary beneficiary vis-a-vis AI and cloud infrastructure and services. For most countries, other foreign corporations are set to reap the benefits, from China and Europe to Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. This exacerbates the ecologically unequal exchange precluding a just degrowth transition.
Fourth, ‘smart’ camera networks equipped with facial recognition, video analytics, and license plate readers; advanced police patrol vehicle technologies like Microsoft MAPP; biometrics; acoustic microphones; aerial and ground drones; surveillance gear like grabbers and stingrays; social media surveillance software; and police body cams – all coupled to artificial intelligence and big data analytics pooled into data centers for big data analytics – are rapidly expanding the eyes, ears, and intelligence capabilities of national security, border patrol, and law enforcement agencies. In times of civil unrest, especially in large cities, the military, spies, and police use every tool at their disposal to put down urban rebellions. Students, immigrants, unions, striking workers, environmental defenders, and activists have been historically targeted by these technologies. Throughout history, those attempting to abolish capitalism and replace the state with worker and communal self-governance have experienced assassination, torture, assault, imprisonment, infiltration, entrapment, firing, blacklisting, and public slandering. We can expect that movements for a just degrowth transition, if they materialize, will face the same – this time with advanced digital tools of repression. At the most brutal end of the spectrum, national liberation movements will have to face down high-tech militaries led by the likes of the United States and its allies, as well as lesser powers like Russia and, perhaps, China, who will intervene to forcefully crush national liberation movements committed to degrowth.
It’s within this context that we should understand how digital degrowth relates to ‘smart’ cities and the urban context. Understanding the challenges ahead, in the short run, the left, along with concerned citizens in general, should press to ban ‘smart’ camera networks, real-time crime centers, and other carceral technologies, as well as the use of technology for border patrol and so-called ‘national security’ agencies.
The only solution left: Building a revolution
Beyond this, however, the left needs a strong vision for a radically different digital ecosystem that comports with degrowth. I’ve suggested a 10-point Digital Tech Deal (DTD) designed to break down the root causes of digital colonialism and capitalism in alignment with ecosocialist degrowth. In place of the current system, the DTD would offer a People’s Tech vision for society that places the means of computation and knowledge into the hands of communities. It also includes the abolition of surveillance and carceral tech central to most ‘safe’ and ‘smart’ city projects.
The DTD draws inspiration from historical social justice movements, such as the South African anti-apartheid movement, as well as ecosocialist green proposals like the Cochabamba Agreement, Max Ajl’s “People’s Green New Deal” (2021), and the Red Nation’s proposal for a “Red Deal” (2021). Of course, the proposal offers a starting point for a just degrowth transition that needs be worked out by societies for their own local contexts. To implement the DTD, we need a mass-awakening of society. This, I believe, begins with a simple proposition: we need to stop normalizing domination of each other and nature, the core thread that unifies the social and environmental domains of life. Through popular education, we can push for a society based on full political, economic, and social equality in harmony with nature. We would also need a movement that uses forceful action for change, as there is no chance that elites will relinquish their wealth and power voluntary through persuasion. Having ‘science on our side’ will not be enough.
In the domain of education, we need to immediately reorient our thinking about digital tech to a degrowth context. Unfortunately, the US-European centered tech pseudo-left has a framework problem that ignores degrowth and the centrality of US empire to the digital society. Instead, they hold fast to a 20th century mindset ill-equipped to handle 21st century dynamics. The fact that we cannot stave off a permanent environmental catastrophe without reducing and capping global material resource use, which in turn requires creating global equality via revolution, is perhaps the most important development in human history. It’s no mistake that the elite circuit of hegemonic tech influencers receiving paychecks from multi-billion dollar institutions – from Big Tech and the Big Foundations to elite universities and rich media – also champion mild capitalist ‘solutions’ like antitrust and the unionization of modern-day East India companies. By trading in this and other donor-friendly narratives acceptable to their ultra-rich paymasters, these ladder-climbers are awarded several hundred thousand dollar paychecks to advocate rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, in service to the US empire.
The challenge is daunting, to say the least. If we’re honest, the solutions we need may not be available in the time frame necessary to avert catastrophe. We’re in the 11th hour, and a revolution based on economic, political, and social equality is needed. The next generation will determine if it’s going to happen, and if and how cities, where around 60% of the world’s population lives, will be at the center of it. Challenging the ‘smart’ city would be only one of the possible beginnings.
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