Technological innovations, especially in AI, are rarely clean. The training of large-scale AI models requires vast amounts of energy, often drawn from carbon-intensive grids, and relies on an infrastructure of global extraction.
The digital economy is not post-material; it is hyper-material. The transition to “green” capitalism often means outsourcing emissions, waste, and extractive harms to peripheral regions while maintaining the illusion of sustainability in core economies.
Tech-driven green transition strategies are often expand the informal economy, particularly in the Global South, reinforcing systems where workers lack labour protections, environmental regulations, and access to welfare.
Community
The majority of so-called green jobs are not manufacturing jobs, but installation jobs where components produced under harsh conditions in factories across Southeast Asia are assembled or installed in the Global North.
This shift risks entrenching a dual economy, one divided both nationally and internationally into a minority of secure, professional roles and the majority-work of precarious, unregulated, and disposable contract jobs.
Just as BigTech mines our attention and behaviour for data that can be used to sell ad space or train AI, green industries also expand through processes of extraction and enclosure.
Each of the hundreds of new mines, largely across the Global South, required for the expansion of green technologies will fuel violent displacement, repression and enclosure.
Across the Global North both green industry advocates and MAGA politicians are targeting environmental protest and community campaigns to ensure ‘NIMBYs’ and ‘eco-terrorists’ such as XR or Soulèvements de la Terre cannot block ‘green’ progress.
Discipline
Even as the rhetoric of green transformation intensifies, the global extractivist economy expands. Clean energy infrastructure still depends on colonial supply chains. Carbon offsets displace Indigenous communities. Circular economy rhetoric masks rising material throughput. “Green” growth continues to fuel the climate crisis.
What makes today’s green capitalism distinct is its fusion with digital technology. Smart grids, AI-optimized agriculture, and behavioral nudges are all presented as efficient and sustainable tools. But embedded in this vision is a growing reliance on surveillance and algorithmic governance.
A new capitalism is emerging – one in which profit is no longer driven primarily by production or even consumption, but by the management of insecurity, risk, and control.
This formation can be understood as an “authoritarian–financial complex” that brings together digital surveillance and financial speculation with coercive governance.
Within this system, technologies such as AI, predictive analytics, and biometrics are deployed not only to extract value from behaviour and data but also to govern populations through automated monitoring and discipline.
Disasters
Our resistance and protest become an opportunity for private security and fintech to turn a tidy profit, all while crushing dissent. This dynamic is increasingly visible in the green transition.
New digital technologies are being mobilized in anti-democratic fashion along two fronts. The first is to accelerate and intensify anti-protest and security industries, from automated surveillance to pre-emptive policing, in a similar way to how they are already being deployed in the USA against anti-genocide protestors and migrant activists.
It is also being used by private security to monitor and disrupt community groups and grassroots campaigns, as well as automating disinformation and sowing conspiratorial dissent.
The second aspect is through their use within financial systems. AI is already being used to delimit some areas and demographics as uninsurable or unbankable, effectively excising whole territories and communities from access to finance, banking and insurance.
The automation of crucial services, including welfare and social services, risks creating even stronger access barriers for vulnerable communities, in a period where people already struggle to access financial relief after disasters. Combined, new digital technologies serve to ‘derisk’ green capitalism from public demands and refusals.
Transitions
The rise of authoritarian populism presents a real threat. But so too does the soft and supposedly progressive authoritarianism of green capitalism. Both offer versions of control: one through denial, the other through technocratic pacification. One burns the planet openly; the other does so behind a curtain of innovation and inclusion.
We must refuse this false binary. A just climate transition cannot be achieved by deepening surveillance, empowering corporations, or maintaining systems of global plunder—regardless of whether those systems are painted green.
The choice is not between populist denial and technocratic greenwash. The real choice is between deep transformation or ecological and social collapse.
If we want to avoid something worse, we must build power from below, challenge the logic of accumulation, and reclaim climate action as a project of emancipation—not control.
Across the world, grassroots movements are already challenging the false solutions of green capitalism. From indigenous land defenders to climate debt resistance, from renewable energy communities to degrowth campaigns, these movements expose the failure of elite-led transitions and demand structural change.
Transformation
They reject the approach of simply “managing” emissions through markets and call for an end to fossil extraction. Rather than optimizing consumption through apps, they call for collective rethinking of what constitutes a good life. Rather than relying on technological fixes, they emphasize care, repair, and redistribution.
This aligns with eco-socialism, which argues that no ecological resolution is possible within a system built on profit and hierarchy. Capitalism’s logic—endless growth, accumulation, and the commodification of nature—inevitably deepens both inequality and environmental collapse.
Green reforms tinker at the edges while preserving the very structures that fuel crisis.
Eco-socialism calls for a deeper transformation: collective ownership, democratic control, and a shift from extraction to care, from competition to solidarity. Sustainability, in this view, is not a market outcome but a political struggle for a just and livable world.
These Authors
Dr Nicholas Beuret is a lecturer at the University of Essex researching the politics and political economy of climate change and the green transition. His book Or Something Worse: Why we ned to disrupt the climate transition is out with Verso in September 2025.
Professor Peter Bloom is a professor of management at the University of Essex. His research critically explores the radical possibilities of technology for redefining and transforming contemporary work and society. He is also the co-director of Centre for Commons Organising, Values Equalities and Resilience (COVER).