The Forever War
Digital Capitalism and the Infrastructure of Imperial Violence
Morning Comrades.
The contemporary artificial intelligence boom cannot be understood as an isolated technological revolution, but only as the latest phase in the historical development of imperial capitalism. Beneath the (bullshit) utopian language of innovation, efficiency, and digital progress lies an immense material infrastructure sustained through extractive mining, ecological devastation, hyper-exploited labour, mass surveillance, and militarised state power. The economic logic of large-scale AI systems renders them inseparable from military contracts, intelligence integration, and the expanding architecture of global control and far from representing a neutral tool for human advancement, AI emerges as a strategic instrument within a capitalist system increasingly dependent upon permanent war, behavioural manipulation, and planetary domination in order to sustain profitability amidst systemic crisis. Importantly, none of this is happening in a (historical) vacuum and that’s where we are going with this today.
Situating contemporary Silicon Valley within the longer historical trajectory of colonialism, fascism, and neoliberal imperialism, we can further examine the intimate relationship between corporate power and organised violence. From the chartered monopolies of the British Empire, to the industrial corporations that enabled fascism, to the defence and energy conglomerates that profited from the destruction of Iraq, capital has repeatedly demonstrated that its true allegiance is neither national nor moral, but exclusively to accumulation itself. We, therefore, reject all liberal narratives that isolate political violence within states or individual leaders while obscuring the structural role played by corporations, financial institutions, and technological monopolies in reproducing global systems of exploitation. In doing so, we can present contemporary AI capitalism not as a rupture from history, but as the continuation and intensification of an imperial order whose survival increasingly depends upon surveillance, endless war, and the management of social consciousness itself.
Capital today no longer bothers to conceal the relationship between technological development, imperial violence, and accumulation. The illusion that the digital economy represented a departure from the brutalities of industrial capitalism has collapsed under the sheer material weight of its infrastructure. The cloud was never a cloud, it was copper, lithium, cobalt, silicon, oil, shipping lanes, military logistics, undersea cables, intelligence networks, and planetary extraction organised on a scale unprecedented in human history. Beneath every supposedly frictionless digital interaction lies an immense architecture of mines, container ports, power stations, warehouses, and data centres whose existence depends upon the coercive management of labour and the violent subordination of the Global South. So called Artificial Intelligence merely intensifies these contradictions. What Silicon Valley markets as innovation is, in reality, the latest historical mutation of imperial capital.
The mythology surrounding contemporary AI rests upon the fantasy that these systems emerged primarily to improve human life through productivity, convenience, or creativity. Yet even the most superficial examination of the economics involved reveals the absurdity of this narrative. The infrastructure sustaining large-scale machine learning systems consumes staggering quantities of energy and capital. Entire regions are being reshaped around hyperscale data centres requiring vast cooling systems, uninterrupted electricity supplies, and constant hardware replacement cycles. The semiconductor supply chain alone demands rare-earth extraction on a scale inseparable from ecological devastation and neo-colonial dependency. One cannot maintain this industrial apparatus through subscription services and novelty applications alone. The economics simply do not support the mythology being sold to the public.
Historically, technologies requiring such immense investment have only achieved long-term profitability through military integration and state-backed coercion. Railways expanded through empire, aviation was transformed through war and nuclear energy developed through military research. The internet itself emerged from Cold War defence infrastructure. There is therefore nothing exceptional about AI’s trajectory towards militarisation; what is exceptional is merely the speed and openness with which it is occurring. The contemporary technology sector survives not because consumers genuinely require infinite chatbot interactions or algorithmic image generators, but because states increasingly require systems capable of surveillance, predictive policing, battlefield automation, behavioural modelling, and information dominance. The future profitability of AI does not lie primarily in consumer markets but it most certainly lies in military contracts, intelligence integration, border enforcement, and the automation of imperial administration.
This should not surprise anyone familiar with the historical relationship between capitalism and war. Capitalism has never been simply a system of markets peacefully exchanging commodities. From its inception it relied upon organised violence to secure labour, resources, and territory. Colonial conquest, slavery, enclosure, and genocide were not unfortunate by-products of capitalist development; they were constitutive of it. Marx himself understood that capital enters the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” Contemporary liberal narratives attempt to isolate violence within the actions of states or dictators while treating corporations as politically neutral economic actors. Yet this distinction collapses under even minimal historical scrutiny.
