The adjustments we face are structural and generate a brand new systemic articulation inside society as a complete. Here, we put the items collectively, and the result’s greater than worrying. We face the immaterial financial system: bits, limitless inventory, velocity of sunshine, connectivity, and a networked society. Search and evaluation capabilities, synthetic intelligence. Knowledge accessible on-line and limitless, communicable, and able to international collaboration. Change in company decision-making (absentee homeowners). Immaterial cash, non-public rentier appropriation. Maximization of rentierism, consideration as a supply of earnings, and behavioral advertising and marketing. New class division. Political advertising and marketing and appropriation of the general public sphere. Corresponding laws, patents, copyrights. Disastrous affect when it comes to inequality and environmental destruction.
And we’ve data, science, and know-how as social constructs, the potential for collaboration, so we are able to search the democratic reappropriation of the digital revolution. We have adequate assets; we all know what wants to be finished in social and environmental phrases. It’s about redirecting assets, applied sciences, and insurance policies in convergent efforts to handle important challenges. It’s not simply fragments of change; it is a paradigm shift, and we should put the items collectively. In this paper on the digital revolution, we focus on the structural change, and can proceed the evaluation within the subsequent paper.
Scientific foundation
The data financial system and the digital revolution are a part of the identical motion: data is the first issue of manufacturing, and the digital revolution is a vector for structural transformation in society. Boolean algebra, defining two states: “true” (1) and “false” (0), paved the best way for logical operations and data building with the binary system, with a single variation being adequate to categorical data basically.
Alan Turing anchored the system within the computerized evaluation course of, decoding Enigma, Germany’s navy communication code, throughout World War II. In an more and more accelerated evolution, the computing capability for info storage was generated, and throughout the framework of American navy initiatives (DARPA), got here the web, the connectivity of indicators and customers. Successive advances have given us the person laptop, the cellphone, the smartphone, and synthetic intelligence—an interactive social course of that transforms the world by inserting info and data on the middle of societal transformation. Scientists, public companies, navy analysis initiatives, and personal initiatives—all collectively, a broad course of accurately characterised as social building. It’s a typical good.
(Gar Alperovitz e Lew Daly, Unjust Deserts; Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State; Lawrence Lessig, Remix).
The digital revolution
The ongoing transformation constitutes the digital revolution, as broad as the commercial revolution was two and a half centuries in the past. Demis Hassabis, a Nobel Prize winner in science, believes that what we’re experiencing “will be 10 times bigger than the industrial revolution, and possibly 10 times faster.” In an age when financial advances basically end result from scientific and technological advances, throughout the framework of the data society, the flexibility to retailer data nearly with out limits, releasing it from materials helps and making it accessible with out vital further prices, adjustments all the financial context.
To this we should add planetary connectivity, one other revolution that enables us all—throughout the limits of the digital divide—to entry data wherever, in actual time, throughout the planetary interactive system. When Mustafa Suleyman factors out that we are able to entry all of the collected data on the earth with just some keystrokes, he demonstrates the depth of this twin transformation that characterizes the digital revolution: a planet of immaterial info and data within the “cloud” in infinite volumes, immediately accessible by anybody, opening house for international networked interplay and collaboration.
(Manuel Castells, Democracy within the Age of the Internet; André Gorz, L’immatériel; Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas; Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave).
Transformative data
The transformation constitutes a revolution throughout the revolution, because the methods developed characterize a metamorphosis of the very capability to broaden data. Just as power (steam, electrical energy, combustion, nuclear, photo voltaic) was a transformative vector throughout the industrial revolution, electronics utilized to data generated our huge capability to broaden the digital revolution itself. In addition to the flexibility to generate and retailer data and make it accessible to all the planet immediately, it additionally remodeled our capability to entry it intelligently, enabling search, choice, and arranged presentation based mostly on targets.
This is the evolution of software program, culminating within the present growth of synthetic intelligence capabilities. We subsequently reside in an age of nearly limitless on-line data, communicable, and able to international collaboration. When data turns into crucial issue of manufacturing within the productive processes of the true financial system—in trade, agriculture, and numerous varieties of companies, together with well being and schooling—all the system is remodeled. It is a brand new mode of manufacturing, maybe higher referred to as a brand new mode of exploitation.
(Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons; Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar)
The extractive decision-making course of
The digital revolution has radically shifted the decision-making course of of enormous firms. In the standard framework of business capitalism, a manufacturing facility proprietor was the recognized chief of the corporate, the proprietor of a manufacturing asset, and generated earnings by paying staff lower than their productive contribution. But to exploit staff, he wanted to create jobs, promote helpful merchandise available on the market, and pay taxes. In the brand new system that has emerged, thanks to digital cash and international connectivity, a brand new decision-making course of emerges, with absentee homeowners who applicable the excess produced by way of shareholder management. The dividends demanded by the controlling shareholders of firms worldwide represent rentierism, based mostly on finance (monetary investments, even when referred to as simply “investments”, completely different from productive investments) with out corresponding technology of merchandise and jobs.
Financial traders, and the funds that handle shareholders’ pursuits, though initially financing productive investments, have step by step grow to be internet extractors, breaking the coherence between the monetary financial system and the true financial system. Financial earnings that exploit the productive base represent rentierism, a step above capitalism. Instead of appropriation or better management by the bottom of society, we’ve rentier appropriation on the prime, throughout the framework of financialization.
(Thomas Piketty, Capital within the twenty first Century; Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, The Triumph of Injustice; Peter Phillips, The Titans of Capital; Marjorie Kelly, Wealth Supremacy; Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State).
Financial rentierism
The rentier appropriation of social surplus quantities to roughly 30% of GDP, sterilizing the capability to broaden productive funding. In Brazil, an excessive instance of financialization, the essential knowledge are hanging. With the general public debt fundamental rate of interest at 15% in September 2025, on a public debt of roughly R$7 trillion, the drain is equal to practically 10% of GDP. These pursuits are paid by society and transferred to monetary traders, the richest 10%, as an alternative of being invested in social insurance policies and infrastructure. The usury utilized to family credit score, a median of 55% per yr, represents one other 10% drain, weakening family consumption and mixture demand within the financial system. The usury on company credit score, a median of 25%, represents a drain of roughly 4% of GDP, weakening productive funding.
Tax evasion, practiced by the richest 10%, quantities to roughly 6% of GDP, and tax breaks characterize one other 6%. Tax exemptions on distributed earnings and dividends (since 1995), on major and semi-primary items destined for export (since 1996), the non-levying of wealth tax (regardless of being enshrined within the Constitution), and the low inheritance tax charge imply that in Brazil, the sterilization of economic assets by unproductive rentierism represents greater than the 30% Marjorie Kelly estimates globally. A profound change, when it comes to the political financial system of the digital revolution, is that we’d like to go far past exploitation by way of low wages—the extraction of surplus worth—and broaden our imaginative and prescient alongside the traces of analyzing built-in monetary flows: the types of appropriation of social surplus have expanded and diversified, with curiosity extraction, tax evasion, deformation of tax methods, tariffs of probably the most various varieties permitted by the fluidity of digital forex, and its potential for exploitation on a worldwide degree.
(BCB, Estatísticas Monetárias e de Crédito; Marjorie Kelly, The Divine Right of Capital; Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, The Triumph of Injustice; Ladislau Dowbor, The Financial Drain; Joseph Stiglitz, Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy; Brett Christophers, Rentier Capitalism).
Intercorporate management community
In the rentier energy pyramid of economic platforms, algorithms are programmed to maximize returns, disregarding social and environmental impacts, that are even dismissed as “externalities.” The governance system is revolutionary and profoundly remodeled. At the highest of the pyramid, or somewhat, on the central node of the intercorporate management community, are the asset administration teams, analyzed by ETH (2012) and Peter Phillips (2024). Ten teams on the prime handle the equal of fifty% of worldwide GDP in monetary property, in flip controlling 1000’s of firms worldwide, with vital stakes in, for instance, Banco Itaú, Bradesco, Vale, and numerous different teams in Brazil.
The decision-making course of within the ten teams talked about (BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and so on.) is managed by administrators who’re additionally members of one another’s boards of administrators, producing an interdependent and supportive system of most dividend extraction, with little to do with free markets. This permits for the maximization of economic returns with out worry of competitors. The managers of those monetary platforms are additionally members of the boards of administrators of quite a few teams past the biggest talked about. It is an articulated system, with maximization managed by algorithms. It will not be market competitors, however somewhat an intercorporate community of management.
(J. Glattfelder, The Network of Global Corporate Control; Peter Phillips, Titans of Capital; Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit).
Taken collectively, these structural adjustments go far past being new sides of what we knew as industrial capitalism. They are deep sufficient to represent a metamorphosis of the system itself. The entire world is being linked in a worldwide internet, and structural change is being pressed on by a community of worldwide firms. Big cash is made not by producers, however by those that management them, controlling the producers, by way of dividends, rates of interest, patents, and different mechanisms. The materials financial system is there, however management has shifted to computer systems, algorithms, and platforms.