The Algorithm Wears Combat Boots
Spotify, Helsing, and the Fascist Rot at Capitalism’s Core
Morning Comrades.
10 years ago, I was introduced to spotify and the idea of streaming music, through the fact that I had started working for Sonos at the time and the entire idea weirded me out a bit. As many of you know, music is the aspect of artistic craftsmanship and expression of creativity most dear to me and up until that point, I mostly bought vinyls, which just seemed the most natural way for me to do it. It took me a few months to get used to this abundance of access to music but was quickly sold, I believe the honey trap of access at low prices worked for most of us. Over the years I have made and shared 100s of playlists whilst the increasing criticism especially from the artist side was continued to subdued. I played a part in that by not listening enough and consequently accepting access to a massive library over artistic integrity. There is no denying that. I’ve grown more and more critical of Spotify over the years, but again, not as much as I have over the more visible side of weaponised tech from Meta, Google, Twitter and Palantir for example, again, I would say because it provided a product I enjoy. Over the last few years, Spotify’s CEO Daniel Elk has increasingly made headlines with his investments and statements regarding art that just as fascist as anything Peter Thiel would and has said, and this latest piece of information that came out over the weekend is beyond pale:
Obviously, it is important to connect the dots here before getting into the details of it all, and how it relates to the current events of liberation from occupation, capitalism and the movement towards an egalitarian society, and the connections are there. Whilst, on the surface, this is an indictment against Elk and Spotify, it’s also an indictment against capitalism, a militant one.
There is no neutral technology under capitalism. Every line of code written, every subscription clicked, every stream played under this system is tethered not to liberation, but to domination. The recent revelation that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has invested over €700 million into Helsing, a European AI military startup specialising in battlefield algorithms, strips away any remaining illusions: the tech industry is not here to uplift culture, it is here to militarise it, exploit it, and weaponise it for imperial profit. Ek joins a digital pantheon of sociopathic fascists in hoodies: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and others who masquerade as visionaries while constructing a techno-feudalist regime in service of capital accumulation and war.
What we are witnessing is not the corruption of a noble industry. It is the unveiling of its essence. Spotify has never been about supporting artists, it has been about turning sound into capital, attention into data, and culture into an instrument of capital's endless war. Now, with Ek’s deep investments into Helsing SE, whose software is already embedded in NATO-aligned militaries we see that even your music stream is a tributary to imperialism.
This is not new. Capitalism has always absorbed technological development into the logic of domination. What is new is its sophistication, its reach, and its totality. Herbert Marcuse warned us that technological progress under capitalism becomes a “system of domination over men and nature” that appears neutral only because it disguises its violence as necessity or innovation.¹ Tech, in its current form, is not a liberator but an imperial administrator. Spotify’s servers are now extensions of the war machine, and every stream is a micro-investment in militarized AI.
This is fascism with a UX interface.
From Factory to Algorithm: The Historical Machinery of Capitalist Violence
To understand Helsing as a product of Spotify’s surplus capital, one must trace the historical unity between capital and violence. Karl Marx’s Capital is clear: accumulation is not possible without dispossession and force. The so-called “primitive accumulation” that gave birth to capitalist modernity was nothing more than violent theft, land, labour, and life converted into private property.² The shift from industrial factories to cloud platforms does not negate this; it universalizes it.
Spotify and Helsing are modern expressions of this logic. Music, once a communal and insurgent form of human expression, is commodified by Spotify into monetizable data flows. Those flows, instead of compensating the creators, are funneled into Helsing, where AI systems are developed to enhance the targeting efficiency of drones, likely to be used in Europe’s militarised borders or imperial campaigns abroad.³ This is a straight line from art to annihilation.
Peter Thiel’s Palantir, Elon Musk’s Starlink, and now Daniel Ek’s Helsing investments are part of a larger structure of digital capital seeking to monopolise not only labour, but perception, emotion, and war. These are not anomalies. They are logical developments in what Guy Debord called the Spectacle, a society in which “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation,” and where life itself is administered through screens.⁴ Spotify turns music into product, and product into investment capital, which is finally transformed into militarised code. Culture is not only commercialised; it is mobilised as infrastructure for control.
The Militarisation of Culture: Art in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
When Daniel Ek claims to support the “defence” of Europe through Helsing, he is echoing the long-standing capitalist myth of “security” as a justification for expansion. Security for whom? Certainly not for artists, who are underpaid to the point of precarity.⁵ Not for listeners, whose data is harvested and repurposed for platform optimization and, increasingly, national security integration.⁶ Ek’s rhetoric is a smokescreen for a deeper truth: culture under capitalism is just another frontier of extraction.
Spotify's model is the textbook case of real subsumption, as described by Marx, where not only is labour absorbed into capital, but even its form and conditions are reshaped to better serve accumulation.⁷ Artists are forced to produce shorter songs to optimise for algorithmic virality. They are underpaid unless they conform to monetisable genres. Their labour is unpaid, unacknowledged, and finally used as a financial substrate for militarised start-ups like Helsing.
The digital platform economy, as Nick Srnicek has shown, functions not through manufacturing but through data extraction, where control over network effects, algorithms, and surveillance becomes a primary form of value.⁸ Helsing, which uses machine learning to assist European militaries in real-time combat data analysis, represents the militarized apex of this logic. When the algorithm becomes a weapon, and its funding source is cultural labour, we are deep into what Franco “Bifo” Berardi called “semiocapitalism”, where the psyche itself becomes a productive force, and a target for war.⁹
If classical fascism united the state, capital, and nationalism through militarised mass politics, techno-fascism unites capital, data, and automation through imperial militaries and transnational firms. Helsing’s stated mission is to give “democracies an advantage” by integrating AI into military strategy, an eerily familiar justification for aggression disguised as “defence.”¹⁰ What it really means is giving NATO states digital dominance, echoing the fascist fantasy of technological superiority fused with political exceptionalism.
The idea that tech moguls like Ek, Thiel, and Musk are “apolitical” or merely “pragmatic” is dangerous nonsense. Their wealth and power rests on maintaining a capitalist order of domination, and their tools, whether Spotify, X, or Palantir are instruments of that order. They are warlords in hoodies, building bunkers and bio-domes while the rest of the world burns.
Techno-feudalism, as theorized by Yanis Varoufakis, is not a metaphor. It describes a system where people no longer own property, produce value directly, or participate in democratic exchange, but are reduced to renters in a digital landscape controlled by a tiny elite.¹¹ Spotify users rent access to music. Workers rent housing they can’t afford. Artists rent space on platforms that exploit them. And all of it is funded by subscription fees that now finance Helsing’s weapons of algorithmic war.
This is the final stage of capital: total enclosure of life through code, where art and war blur into one system of domination.
Revolutionary Refusal: Towards a Communist Tech Horizon
The time for reformist fantasy is over. There is no “ethical Spotify.” There is no version of Helsing that protects life. There is no algorithm that liberates under capitalism. As long as tech is privately owned and directed by capital, it will serve capital’s primary goals: exploitation, extraction, and expansion, by violence if necessary.
As Marcuse warned in One-Dimensional Man, technological development under capitalism does not guarantee liberation, it integrates human beings deeper into systems of control, making domination appear natural and inevitable.¹² It is precisely this ideological capture that must be broken.
We must reject the fetish of innovation, refuse the logic of optimisation, and instead reclaim technology for emancipatory purposes. This means de-privatizing code. It means building platforms that are collectively governed. It means destroying monopolies, disrupting infrastructures, and redistributing the cloud itself.
Communist revolution is not a nostalgic return, it is the only future worth building.
In this new horizon, music will belong to the people. Platforms will serve communities, not markets. Data will not be extracted, but stewarded. And war will not be upgraded, it will be abolished. No more subscriptions funding slaughter. No more fascists with start-ups. No more futures built on surveillance and death.
Spotify is not just a music service. It is an engine of imperialism dressed in UX design. Helsing is not just a “defense” company. It is a capitalist death machine funded by cultural theft. And Daniel Ek is not an outlier, he is a symptom of the disease.
Capitalism will always turn art into artillery. It will always turn code into cages. It will always turn progress into profit, and profit into war.
So cancel your subscription, but do not stop there. Cancel the machine. Sabotage the algorithm. Organize the coders. Strike the server farms. Reclaim the culture. Wage war, not against each other but against the system that has convinced us that we must fund our own destruction.
The algorithm wears combat boots. It’s time to shoot out its servers and dance on its ashes.
Yours, warmly,
V.
Footnotes
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 156–157.
Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 873.
“Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Invests in Military AI Startup Helsing,” Middle East Eye, June 2025.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), §1–10.
United Musicians and Allied Workers, “Justice at Spotify,” https://www.unionofmusicians.org/justice-at-spotify
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 8–15.
Karl Marx, Capital, 1019–1025.
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 47–61.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 78–85.
“Helsing SE: Artificial Intelligence for Defence,” company website:
https://www.helsing.ai
Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (London: Bodley Head, 2023), 29–50.
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 41.