Especially the technological innovations in AI. It’s rarely beautiful. Required for training large AI models A huge amount of energyIt is often drawn out Carbon Intensive Gridand depends Global Extraction Infrastructure.
The digital economy is not material. that’s right Hyper-material. The transition to “green” capitalism is often meaningful Outsourcing Emissions, waste, and extractive extraction harm peripheral regions while maintaining the illusion of sustainability in the core economy.
Technology-driven green transition strategies often expand informal economies that strengthen workers-strapped systems, especially in the southern part of the world Access to labor protection, environmental regulations and welfare.
community
Most of the so-called green jobs are not manufacturing jobs, but rather installation jobs for the construction or installation of components produced under harsh conditions in factories in Southeast Asia to be assembled or installed in the global north.
This shift risks entrenching the dual economy. This divides both nationally and internationally into a small number of safe, professional roles and a majority of unstable, unregulated, disposable contract employment.
Just as BigTech mines the attention and actions of data that can be used to sell and train advertising spaces, the green industry expands through the extraction and enclosure process.
Each of the hundreds of new mines, mainly across the global South, needed to expand green technology, promotes violent evacuation, restraint and enclosure.
Across the Global North, both green industry advocates and MAGA politicians target environmental protests and community campaigns Make sure that “Nimbies” and “Ecoterrorists” like XR and soulèvements de la terre cannot block “green” progress.
Discipline
Despite the rhetoric of green transformation intensifies, the global extractivist economy expands. Clean energy infrastructure remains dependent on colonial supply chains. Carbon offsets replace Indigenous communities. Increased throughput of cyclical economy rhetoric mask material. The growth of “green” continues to drive the climate crisis.
What makes green capitalism clear today is its fusion with digital technology. Smart grids, Ai-Optimized agriculture, and behavioral capabilities are all presented as efficient and sustainable tools. However, what is embedded in this vision is the increasing reliance on monitoring and algorithmic governance.
A new capitalism is emerging – profits are no longer driven by the management of anxiety, risk and control.
This formation isAuthoritarianism – Financial Complex” This links digital surveillance and financial speculation with forced governance.
Within this system, technologies such as AI, predictive analytics, and biometrics are deployed to not only extract value from behavior and data, but also to manage populations through automated surveillance and discipline.
disaster
Our resistance and protests become an opportunity for private safety and fintech to change tidy profits. This dynamic becomes more and more noticeable with green transitions.
New digital technologies are mobilised in anti-democratic ways along two sides. The first is to accelerate and strengthen the anti-protest and security industry in a similar way to how they look at, from automated surveillance to preemptive surveillance. Already deployed against anti-genoside protesters and immigration activists in the US.
It is also used by private security to monitor and disrupt community groups and grassroots campaigns.
The second aspect is due to its use within the financial system. AI is already used to effectively separate several areas and demographics as insured or unbankable Removes the entire territory and the entire community From access to finance, banking and insurance.
Automation of critical services, including welfare and social services, risks creating stronger access barriers for vulnerable communities at a time when people are already struggling to access financial relief after a disaster. Combined, new digital technologies will help “derisk” green capitalism from public demands and rejections.
transition
The rise of authoritarian populism presents a real threat. But so is the soft and perhaps progressive authoritarianism of green capitalism. Both offer versions of control: one through denial and the other through technocratic reconciliation. It openly burns the planet. The other does so behind the curtains of innovation and inclusion.
You must reject this fake binary. By deepening surveillance, empowering businesses, and maintaining a global system of looting, we cannot achieve climate change at all, whether or not those systems are painted green.
The choice is not between populist denial and technocratic greenwash. The real choice is during deep transformation or ecological and social disruption.
If you want to avoid it Something worsewe must build power from underneath, challenge the logic of accumulation, and reclaim climate action as a project of liberation. It’s not control.
Around the world, the grassroots movement is already challenging the false solutions to green capitalism. from Indigenous land advocates In Climate debt resistancefrom Renewable Energy Community In DeGrowth Campaignthese moves reveal the failure of an elite-led transition and demand structural changes.
conversion
They reject an approach to simply “manage” emissions through the market and seek an end to fossil extraction. Rather than optimizing consumption through the app, we want to collectively rethink what constitutes a good life. Instead of relying on Technical fixesthey emphasize care, repair, and redistribution.
This matches Eco-Socialismclaims that ecological resolution is not possible within a system built on profits and hierarchy. The logic of capitalism – meaningless growth, accumulation, and the commodification of nature deepen both inequality and environmental collapse in an impossible way.
Green reforms tinker around the edges, maintaining the very structure fueled by crisis.
Ecosocialism calls for deeper change: collective ownership, democratic control, shift from extraction to care, competition to solidarity. In this view, sustainability is not a market outcome, but a political struggle in a fair and livable world.
These authors
Dr. Nicholas Behrette is a lecturer at the University of Essex and studies the politics and political economy of climate change and green transition. His book or Worse: Why we NEED to disrupt the climate transition I went out at Verso in September 2025.
Professor Peter Bloom is a professor of business administration at the University of Essex. His research critically explores the radical possibilities of technology to redefine and transform modern work and society. He is also co-director of the Center for Commons, where he values equality and resilience (cover).
