Sébastien Broca on the Ideological Realignment of Big Tech and the Emergence of a New Phase of Digital Capitalism

Sébastien, thank you for joining us! Interest in “tech ideologies” has been growing at an exceptional rate, as evidenced by the many books and articles published about techno-fascism and the “ideologues” of the Tech-Right over the past two years. In your new book Pris dans la toile, published in French by Seuil, you situate your analysis of digital capitalism within a socio-historical perspective. Do you think certain approaches and concepts are more relevant than others for making sense of the “spirit” of contemporary capitalism?

There are indeed a lot of competing terms that seek to make sense of the centrality of the tech sector and of the broader ideological and economic transformations currently underway, like techno-fascism, techno-feudalism, or Muskism, to name just a few. Before we get to this discussion, I would like to stress that the old notions of ideology and myth, as they were developed by Marxist thinkers and critical theorists, remain relevant in many ways. Ideology for instance is still a useful notion, both despite and because of its polysemy. It highlights the different dimensions of the discourses at stake: the way that they legitimize and strengthen the existing social order, as well as the ways in which they conceal and obscure ongoing socio-economic transformations.

The notion of a “spirit of capitalism,” coined by Max Weber, is also useful. The way Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello redefine it in The New Spirit of Capitalism strikes me as a fruitful way of extending the earlier reflections on ideology, even though Boltanski and Chiapello have expressed their rejection of the Marxist view of ideology. I think their main contribution lies in the historicization of capitalist ideologies. They emphasize that each historical phase of capitalism’s development—or, to put it differently, each regime of accumulation—is closely associated with specific discursive and symbolic constructions. Their work therefore offers a way of articulating base and superstructure, to use the old Marxist vocabulary, without granting primacy to either one, instead examining their distinctive coupling within particular historical contexts.

Returning to the question of tech, the period that stretches from the mid-1990s to the 2020s (the period I analyze in Pris dans la toile) has seen digital capitalism gaining momentum. At the ideological level, this process was accompanied by mostly left-leaning, progressive discourses that were partly inherited from the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, as Fred Turner, among others, has persuasively demonstrated. In the last few years, and even more since Donald Trump’s second election, I think we have entered a new period of digital capitalism, both regarding its regime of accumulation and its ideology. This shift is obvious in the increasingly close entanglement of the American state and the tech sector and in the development of a new military-digital complex.

The issue you raise regarding the place of “intellectual production” and thinkers in the current ideological recomposition of the right seems to me one of the most pressing questions facing contemporary research on illiberalism and, more broadly, ideology studies. If we agree that “professional” or “academic” thinkers no longer play a central role in the construction and diffusion of contemporary ideologies, what analytical purchase does the study of political ideas and discourses still retain? Regarding “tech ideologies,” should we understand the authoritarian—and at times openly fascist—turn you identify within the tech sector as being driven primarily by an ideological shift, or is it better understood as a symptom of the growing incompatibility between the economic interests of digital capitalism and the structural requirements of liberal democracy?

As a social group, academics are steadily losing their influence, particularly in France. Yet the skills they possess remain indispensable in the current political context. Academics are not only producers of ideas; they also have the training and the independence required to critically examine the ideas that other social groups circulate in the public sphere. Social scientists, therefore, are well positioned to help resist the far-right wave we are currently experiencing. That is why there are violent attacks directed at them on both sides of the Atlantic. To give just a few examples, it is worth remembering that in 2021, at the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon), J.D. Vance titled his speech “The Universities Are the Enemy.” And Peter Thiel has, since 2011, offered fellowships encouraging students to leave university altogether! More broadly, generative AI can in many respects be understood as a technology aimed at dismantling academia: undermining academics’ ability to teach students how to read scholarly articles, construct arguments, and develop critical thinking. Turning to the second part of your question, it seems clear to me that the shift we have witnessed in the tech industry stems from the convergence of multiple factors. Far-right ideologies have, in fact, long been present in Silicon Valley. In 1997, for instance, the venture capitalist James Dale Davidson and the journalist William Rees-Mogg published The Sovereign Individual, a book that has had a lasting influence on people such as Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. The book envisions a hyper-mobile, exceptionally intelligent global elite (the “sovereign individuals”) who use digital technologies to free themselves from the constraints of democratic government. It already articulates a form of libertarian fantasy driven by technological progress: encrypted digital currencies, inviolable property rights, and so on. In Silicon Valley, these far-right ideologies have existed for decades, but they were long overshadowed or relegated to the margins by the more progressive strands of thinking that I mentioned earlier.

You mentioned Quinn Slobodian’s latest book and his term “Muskism.” Given the growing centrality of the tech industry in contemporary capitalism, we are seeing a striking proliferation of competing concepts and theories aimed at making sense of this political-economic transformation—”informational capitalism,” “platform capitalism,” “surveillance capitalism,” “techno-feudalism,” “rentier capitalism”—which you survey in an illuminating way in your other work. How do you think we should navigate this maze of overlapping concepts? What term, if any, do you prefer? Could you elaborate on what you see as the defining features of “digital” capitalism?

In the article you mention, which I wrote a few years ago, I proposed a number of conceptual guideposts to help navigate this crowded theoretical landscape. I first tried to distinguish between local theories and global theories of digital capitalism. Local theories focus on specific economic actors or mechanisms: the notion of “platform capitalism” focuses on digital intermediaries such as Uber and Airbnb, while “surveillance capitalism” is more concerned with the data monetization business models developed by Google and Meta. Global theories, on the other hand, aim to characterize a historical stage of capitalism, taken as a whole: “informational capitalism” or “cognitive capitalism” are more of this kind. The difficulty, however, is that this distinction is not always clear-cut in the writings of the theorists themselves. Shoshana Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism,” for instance, constantly oscillates between a local and a global theory. Is “surveillance capitalism” mostly a theory about Google and Meta, or about the state of capitalism as a whole? It is not always easy to tell.

Another analytical distinction I employ in that article concerned the conceptual tools through which contemporary capitalism is criticized. Indeed, most of the theories that we are discussing are not merely descriptive or analytical. They also put forward a critique—and often a forceful one—of the existing social order. But the critical standpoint differs sharply depending on whether you consider the defining feature of contemporary capitalism to be surveillance, rent extraction, the neo-feudal power of Big Tech leaders, or the neo-colonial exploitation of resources in the Global South. So, this constant intertwining of the descriptive and the normative adds a further layer of complexity, even though I regard this entanglement as rich and interesting—it is part of what has made the social sciences worthwhile since their emergence in the 19^th century!

To return to your question about digital capitalism, I would tend to define it rather broadly, both conceptually and historically. In my view, it refers to the historical phase of capitalism we have entered. Its defining characteristic is simply that digital technologies have become the infrastructure of economic, social, cultural, and political life. Within this broader phase, it seems heuristically useful to distinguish between different periods—even though periodizations are always debatable and tend to downplay continuities. As I suggested in response to your previous questions, I believe that we have recently entered a new period. Among its defining features are the centrality of the rivalry between the United States and China, the erosion of the neoliberal consensus, the rise of neo-imperialist dynamics, the growing entanglement of the state and the tech sector, both in the United States and in China, and the growing importance of far-right techno-authoritarian ideologies. Ilias Alami has proposed to name all this “imperial state capitalism,” a formulation that I find quite compelling. In my view, we are indeed living through the imperialist phase of digital capitalism.

Since the 2010s, Big Tech has faced mounting criticism—criticism that has at times extended to the wider technology and digital services industry, and even to the use of contemporary technologies themselves—to the point where commentators have begun speaking of a genuine “techlash.” How should we understand this shift? Are these social, liberal, and ecological critiques received differently on the left and the right, or have they been adopted by actors across the political spectrum?

You are right. For roughly the past decade, both in the United States and in Europe, there is clearly a growing public dissatisfaction with Big Tech, accompanied by increasing concern about the extent of its power. This critical dynamic seems to be intensifying today, particularly in the United States, in connection with the latest and frankly extraordinary wave of investment in AI. This trend is reflected in several recent opinion surveys showing that a majority of Americans, especially younger people and women, are far more concerned—rather than enthusiastic—about these technological developments. The dissatisfaction is also evident in the numerous local mobilizations opposing the construction of data centers across the country.

However, the ambivalence of these critiques is that, for the time being, they have done little to undermine the power of the tech industry and have not, at least on a large scale, altered the way people use these technologies. People may be critical of generative AI, but it has not prevented them from adopting the technology at a remarkably rapid pace, sometimes because they were forced to of course, but many have found some value in it.

From a political standpoint, criticism of Big Tech, and of technology more broadly, sometimes blurs the traditional left-right divide.

From a political standpoint, criticism of Big Tech, and of technology more broadly, sometimes blurs the traditional left-right divide. This is particularly apparent when you read the leading American intellectuals who have supported Trumpism, like the ones Laura Field studies in her excellent book Furious Minds. Some of these thinkers are accelerationists aligned with Silicon Valley’s maximalist agenda. But there are also post-liberal thinkers like Patrick Deneen who, by contrast, is heavily inspired by Catholic thought and anchors his arguments in the notion of limits: limits to technological development, to globalization, to migration, to diversity, etc. This wave of thinking on the right is explicitly critical of the tech oligarchy and thus some of its arguments may even closely resemble those put forward by the ecological left.

As you, Raphaël Demias-Morisset, argued recently, maybe this apparent antagonism between accelerationists and post-liberals ought not to be overstated. The proposals advanced by most conservative and post-liberal thinkers are often relatively modest: regulating tech to defend family values but without slowing down AI development and hindering American innovation in the context of the global “race” with China. That said, I believe the tech sector has become so destructive in many respects (socially, environmentally, politically and even anthropologically) that most conservatives cannot avoid articulating some form of criticism of Silicon Valley and of the tech oligarchy. I also think that the social coalition behind Trumpism is intrinsically unstable, as the very people the MAGA right is supposed to defend (the white working class) are likely among the ones who will painstakingly experience the irrationality of the current AI frenzy, for instance, through rising electricity bills.

In the conclusion of your book, you return to the thorny question—at least for researchers studying the ideological realignment of the right—of both discontinuities and historical continuities in the relationship between digital capitalism, authoritarianism, and democracy, particularly in the United States. How do you explain the fact that the myth of a libertarian and “progressive” Silicon Valley remained widely believed until the CEOs of the major tech companies rallied behind the second Trump administration?

Part of the answer, in my view, is closely related to what I have just described. For years, the left has been holding this naive belief that digital technologies are fundamentally tools of emancipation. On these premises, many came to believe in the possibility of an alliance with companies such as Google and considered them as a progressive faction within the capitalist class, one that might help, under certain conditions, to unlock and realize the emancipatory potential of digital technologies. From the 1990s through the 2010s, tech companies also devoted considerable effort to obscuring Silicon Valley’s military origins. Ironically, this is precisely what Alex Karp of Palantir criticizes them for today in his latest book The Technological Republic.

In the United States, it is also important to emphasize that the close relationship between the Democratic Party and Silicon Valley has been a longstanding feature of American politics, both during the Clinton years and Barack Obama’s two terms. This proximity accompanied broader ideological shifts within the Democratic Party and, for a long time (until Joe Biden’s presidency, as I mentioned earlier), likely benefited all the economic and politic actors involved.

Finally, and this is a point I develop at length in my book, it seems to me that major US digital rights organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have helped sustain the progressive image of the tech sector, even though they have occasionally criticized these companies. Until quite recently, many digital rights activists viewed government regulation of the internet, rather than its appropriation by a handful of corporations, as the primary obstacle to the emancipatory promise of digital technologies

In your joint review of Edward Snowden’s autobiography and Félix Tréguer’s book L’utopie déchue, you describe an “illiberal” turn on the internet, drawing attention to the contradiction between the techno-optimist celebrations of a decentralized, libertarian internet of the 1990s and 2000s, and the contemporary concentration of power in the hands of Big Tech companies, to whom we have entirely delegated the “regulation” of their own platforms, raising questions about access to information in contemporary democracies. Considering the development of AI and its deployment by major tech companies, does the “internet utopia” seem to you definitively finished? Is there still room to imagine the internet as a site of emancipation, or are digital rights movements condemned to advocating for state intervention to curb the autonomy of Big Tech and its move toward the far right?

That is an excellent question. If we are to move forward in the highly challenging context we face today, I believe, as I have suggested, that it is essential to abandon the cyber-libertarian agenda that has occupied far too much intellectual and political space and, in my view, has been granted far too much credibility. To that extent, and insofar as the internet utopia has been deeply intertwined with this vision, I think it is necessary to let it go.

This does not mean, of course, that digital technologies are going to disappear, nor that some of them cannot provide meaningful social benefits. For that reason, I would be reluctant to draw overly sharp distinctions between regulatory approaches, approaches centered on digital alternatives, and those based on (selective) de-digitalization. What we need, in my view, is a political agenda that brings these three dimensions together.

Regulation remains both indispensable and urgent across a wide range of domains, from personal data and online disinformation to the environmental footprint of digital technologies. At this point, the objective is quite simply one of damage control in the face of the many disastrous consequences of Big Tech’s monopolistic power.

Finally, I believe that our societies should not delay a broader and deeper reflection on digitalization itself, looking at the place digital technologies occupy in our everyday lives and the ways in which they often degrade both our personal and our professional relationships. Today, speaking of de-digitalization is no longer entirely taboo. In my view, that is also a positive development.

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Sébastien Broca is a professor at Paris 8 University. Drawing on sociology, political economy, and information and communication sciences, his research focuses on digitalization, particularly critiques of and alternatives to Big Tech. He is the author of Utopie du logiciel libre (Le Passager clandestin, 2013) and Pris dans la toile (Seuil, 2025).