By TIMOTHY ERIK STRÖM*
The exponential expansion of cybernetic technologies and the alienating abstractions they have caused are a catastrophe
The latest tech company to reach the upper echelons of cyber capitalism is Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units (GPUs), a component of computing machines that has become dominant in training AI models. Founded in 1993, Nvidia is the only tech titan to be named after an actual Titan; Invidia is the Roman name for the Greek deity Nemesis, the personification of envy, hence the green 'evil eye' that is the corporation's logo.
Nvidia is currently the world’s second most valuable corporation, with a market capitalization of $3,54 trillion, behind Apple and above Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet. Its market value has increased nearly tenfold since the end of 2022. The AI bubble is the latest development in the rampant financialization that began more than half a century ago, when cybernetics began to reshape global capitalism—and was intensified by quantitative easing in the wake of the global financial crisis.
Nvidia has spent most of its 32-year history building GPUs for gaming computers. The AI boom has transformed its business model: from having many customers before, it now has a few very large customers. Its recent quarterly regulatory filing noted: “We have experienced periods in which we have derived a significant amount of our revenue from a limited number of customers, and this trend may continue.”
That’s putting it mildly: The same document shows that four unnamed corporations account for nearly half of its revenue. These four anonymous individuals (almost certainly the other titans of cutting-edge technology) are buying up vast numbers of Nvidia GPUs to stack in vast data centers, connecting thousands of these powerful computing machines to further advance AI research.
They’ve already pre-sold the entire 2025 production run of their soon-to-be-released Blackwell GPUs, each priced at around $40.000. As with the other tech titans, Nvidia’s market leadership relies on being at the forefront of technosciences, with its power coming from cybernetic research and development. Nvidia has increased its R&D budget by nearly 50% in 2024.
One can get a cross-sectional view of the cutting edge of cyber capitalism by considering the fate of the GPUs that have made Nvidia fabulously wealthy. These devices are central to the computations that allow AI to fold protein models, automate labor costs, create death lists for the IDF genocide, plagiarize essays, engage in financial speculation, create deepfakes of dead dictators, and all the other wonders of Artificial Intelligence.
After that, these computing machines will succumb to their built-in obsolescence and realize their long-term fate of becoming toxic electronic waste. This is the dark side of Moore’s Law, which projects that the number of transistors that can be packed onto a computer chip will double roughly every two years: the exponential increase in computing power goes hand in hand with the exponential increase in waste.
According to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, 62 million tonnes of e-waste were generated in 2022, double the amount produced in 2010. As its recent report describes, this is “equal to the weight of 107.000 of the world’s largest (853 seats) and heaviest (575 tons) passenger aircraft – enough to form an uninterrupted line from New York to Athens, Nairobi to Hanoi or Hong Kong to Anchorage.”
As with computing machines in general, the precise material composition of a GPU is difficult to discern, hidden as it is behind byzantine supply lines, intellectual property law, and the “black box” nature of technoscience.
Suffice it to say that they are composed of an extremely complex array of chemicals, including various rare earth minerals (tantalum, palladium, boron, cobalt, tungsten, hafnium, etc.), heavy metals (lead, chromium, cadmium, mercury, etc.), complex plastics (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, polymethyl methacrylate, etc.), and synthetic substances (tetrabrombisphenyl-A, tetrafluorocyclohexanes, etc.). For comparison: a human body comprises about 30 of the 118 elements in the periodic table; an iPhone contains 75 elements.
All of these raw materials must be extracted from the earth, refined, recombined, and highly processed, producing a number of toxic byproducts—not to mention the health effects of workers in these supply lines. The extended apparatus of cyber capitalism operates with a striking lack of public interest or environmental regulation.
One aspect of the colossal waste generated by cyber capitalism that is finally beginning to attract some attention from the mainstream is the amount of electricity that networked computing machines consume. The International Energy Agency notes that between 2022 and 2026 data centers are likely to double their electricity consumption, to about 1.000 terawatt-hours. That increase is roughly equivalent to adding together the entire electricity use of another Germany.
Collectively, data centers’ energy demand is greater than that of every country except China, the US and India. And data centers are just one part of the global infrastructure of networked computing machines – which currently consists of some 30 billion internet-connected devices. Furthermore, these consumption figures do not take into account the energy used to extract and refine the vast quantities of raw materials to produce the machinery itself, and they certainly do not take into account any toxic “externalities”.
As cybernetics has overwhelmed capitalism’s industrial capacities, it has created vast amounts of toxic waste that spreads through supply chains and accumulates in food chains. A famous example is PFAS (polyfluoroalkyl substances), or “forever chemicals”—a group of about 15.000 different synthetic organofluoride compounds that do not break down naturally.
First discovered in the 1950s, these toxic chemicals—found in every computer machine, among many, many other household products—are now commonly detected in human bodies, with accumulation beginning in the placenta before birth. They are strongly linked to increased chances of cancer, declining sperm count, inflammatory bowel disease, cognitive impairments, birth defects, kidney disease, thyroid problems, and liver problems. According to the Lancet Commission on pollution and health, environmental pollution already causes one in six premature deaths, a number that is expected to worsen as production and bioaccumulation continue to intensify.
Chemical pollution also affects other species and, therefore, the ecological relationships, systems and processes that make up the web of life. Indeed, the massive production of unnatural chemicals is a key marker of the new epoch that began with the first atomic explosions in 1945, at the dazzling dawn of the Anthropocene.
In 2019, global sales of synthetic chemicals – excluding pharmaceuticals – were estimated to be worth around US$4,363 trillion. The magnitude of industrial chemical release is staggering; a conservative estimate puts it at around 220 billion tonnes per year, of which greenhouse gases account for only about 20%.
Shockingly little attention is paid to the ramifications. For example, of the 23.000 chemicals registered in 2020 through the EU’s world-leading regulation, the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), around 80% have not yet undergone a safety assessment – not to mention the more than 300 synthetic chemicals in production worldwide that are not on its list.
And safety assessments are narrowly defined, excluding cocktail effects and ecological entanglements. A comprehensive study concluded that chemical pollution “poses a potentially catastrophic risk to the human future and deserves global scientific scrutiny on the same scale and urgency as the effort devoted to climate change.”
The scale of cyber waste is hard to fathom. One insightful study found that at the beginning of the 3th century, the mass of man-made objects – concrete, bricks, asphalt, metals, plastics and so on – was equal to about XNUMX% of the world’s total “biomass”, the combined weight of the web of life: all the plants, bacteria, fungi, archaea, protists and animals. It revealed that the mass of anthropogenic materials has doubled every twenty years over the past century.
At this rate, 2020 was the year that human-made mass reached 1,1 teratons, exceeding the total global biomass. The things we have made, in other words, now outweigh the web of life. The weight of the entire animal kingdom—every cow, coral, and krill, every person, pigeon, and all 350.000 different species of beetle—is about 0,5 percent of Earth’s biomass, or about 4 gigatons of life. In 2020, humans produced 8 gigatons of plastics. By 2040, it will be twice that.
Exponential curves like these are wreaking havoc on finite nature. Yet few on the radical left engage in a holistic analysis that would attempt to answer Langdon Winner’s pertinent question: “Where and how did innovations in science and technology begin to alter the very conditions of life itself?” It is common for radical commentators to succumb to the illusion that the machinery of computation is weightless.
A handful of recent headlines from Jacobin – The problem with AI is about power, not technology; The problem with AI is the problem with capitalism; “Automation could liberate us – if we didn’t live under capitalism” – evidence this “instrumental” view of technology, which sees the advanced machinery of cybernetic capitalism as unproblematic, reserving criticism for the bosses’ control over it.
Many on the left suggest, implicitly or explicitly, that the solution is to “collectivize the platforms”: get rid of the bosses, get rid of the problem. This risks “worker-washing” the toxic apparatus of cyber capitalism, imagining that replacing the CEO of Nvidia with a workers’ council, say, would be enough to bring about a sustainable socialist future.
Of course we need workers’ councils – many of them across the social sphere. Nor will we probably want to do without some of the powerful computing machines and synthetic chemicals that cybernetic capitalism has produced. But we need to consider what their place should be in a world in which meaningful and prosperous lives can be lived within ecological limits.
The exponential expansion of cybernetic technologies and the alienating abstractions they have brought about is a catastrophe. It is urgently necessary that we develop a materialist critique of such technology with the aim of bringing about a radically different politics, one that takes a broader view, considering not only relations of power and property, but the material production of cybernetic capitalism and its transformation of the conditions of life itself. The magnitude of the crisis demands nothing less.
*Timothy Erik Ström, journalist, is editor of the Arena online website.
Translation: Eleutério FS Prado.
Originally published on the website Sidecar da New Left Review.
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