Big Tech’s Cybernetic Coup
If software is eating the world, then we are what’s on the menu.
The rise of the Cybernetic Circulation Complex (CCC), the vast digital infrastructure controlled by Big Tech, has transformed capitalism into an automated system of surveillance, financial speculation, and ecological destruction. Its logic is simple: faster capital, fewer workers, total control.
With Trump’s second term now underway and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) gutting the state, the CCC has broken free from the constraints of democracy altogether. What we are witnessing is not deregulation, it is a corporate coup. A cybernetic autocracy, where the digital oligarchy no longer lobbies for power but seizes it outright.
This is no longer about “platform capitalism.” This is about platform fascism.
This is not theory. This is now.
Circuits of Control
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Alessandra Mularoni’s Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis is not just a sharp theoretical intervention, it is a vital strategic text. With Trump’s second term fully underway and Elon Musk wielding his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to gut the state, the book reads less like an analysis and more like a field manual. It charts the fusion of digital capital, political reaction, and ecological collapse with chilling clarity, offering a materialist reading of Big Tech’s role in shaping our world, and how we might bring it to ruin.
“If software is indeed ‘eating the world’, then humans, and possibly humanity itself, are on the menu.”
Dyer-Witheford and Mularoni argue that the dominant form of capitalism today is no longer industrial or even financial, but cybernetic. The tech giants—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft—are not simply monopolies in the traditional sense, but something more sinister: an automated circulatory system for capital itself. The book terms this the Cybernetic Circulation Complex (CCC), a planetary infrastructure designed to accelerate accumulation at all costs, absorbing every aspect of social life into digital networks of exploitation, surveillance, and control.
Musk’s DOGE is merely the most explicit manifestation of this logic. The authors warn that tech capital is no longer content to operate as a lobbying force, it is becoming the state itself.
The Speculative Machine
Capitalism’s traditional focus has been on production, the factory, the worker, the commodity. But in the age of the CCC, the focus has shifted. Capital now expands through circulation, the speeding up of logistics, data, finance, and consumption. Amazon’s fulfilment centres, Google’s targeted ad empire, Apple’s stranglehold on digital infrastructure, these are not just corporations, but cybernetic machines designed to control and intensify capital’s movement through the world.
But the CCC is not just a logistical empire, it is a speculative machine, deeply tied to financialisation. The authors demonstrate how companies like Amazon and Tesla operate less like traditional firms and more like financial instruments, their value determined not by profit but by their ability to generate hype, attract venture capital, and create speculative bubbles.
“It is no longer clear that the Big Five digital corporations are, in any traditional sense, businesses. They resemble vast cybernetic engines for the control and acceleration of money, data, and human behaviour—extracting value through both technological dominance and financial speculation.”
Musk’s DOGE project fits squarely within this logic. He is not just cutting government bureaucracy, he is financialising governance itself, turning state functions into tradable assets, ripe for speculation.
The Triple Crisis
The book breaks down the current moment into three interlocking crises, all shaped by the rise of the CCC:
1. Economic Crisis: Automation as Labour Discipline
The authors trace how digital capitalism has intensified the contradictions of neoliberalism, driving mass precarisation, gigification, and labour discipline on an unprecedented scale. “[Amazon’s logistics empire functions] as a cybernetic command centre of automated circulation, where the labour of human beings is rendered increasingly redundant.”
But more than just replacing workers, automation is being used as a weapon against them. The book details how AI is deployed to track, manage, and discipline workers, from Amazon’s surveillance-driven warehouses to Uber’s algorithmic exploitation of gig workers.
“Automation is not merely about replacing human labour but about disciplining it—forcing compliance, fragmenting collectivity, and ensuring that no moment of social activity is free from the imperatives of capital.”
Under Musk’s DOGE, this logic has been taken to the state itself. Federal employees are not just being laid off, they are being algorithmically managed, their work to be replaced with AI-driven systems that cut costs while eliminating collective bargaining power.
2. Political Crisis: Platform Fascism and the Tech-Right Nexus
The authors trace the growing alliance between Big Tech and the far-right, exposing how Silicon Valley, despite its liberal veneer, has become a breeding ground for reactionary ideology. They highlight figures like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, whose “Techno-Optimist” and accelerationist ideologies reject democracy in favour of a corporate-run society.
“If software is eating the world, then the politics of Silicon Valley are shaping its digestion—chewing up democratic governance and excreting a new form of corporate autocracy.”
Musk’s role in DOGE is a perfect example of what they call corporate platform governance, where billionaire oligarchs not only influence the state but become the state.
“The digital oligarchy no longer lobbies for power—it seizes it, rewriting the rules of governance in the language of venture capital and cybernetic efficiency.”
DOGE is not just about deregulation. It is about corporate coup d’état.
3. Ecological Crisis: The Cybernetic Empire and Digital Extractivism
The authors demolish the myth that digital capitalism is immaterial, showing how the CCC relies on extractivism, carbon-heavy computation, and e-waste on a planetary scale.
“The smartphone supply chain is a cycle of hyper-exploitation and toxic accumulation, from lithium mines to landfill.”
But they push further, linking digital capitalism directly to neocolonialism. Big Tech is not just destroying the environment, it is actively restructuring global power in favour of Silicon Valley and against the Global South. The CCC is a planetary cybernetic system, one that mines African labour for AI data training, strips Latin America for lithium, and then dumps the toxic waste back onto the periphery.
This logic extends into Musk’s own techno-imperialist ambitions, from space colonisation to his recent moves in DOGE to roll back environmental protections.
“Space, for Musk, is not the final frontier of human exploration, but the next frontier of capitalist enclosure—an automated resource extraction system, designed to render Earth’s collapse irrelevant to the ruling class.”
Biocommunism or Extinction
Dyer-Witheford and Mularoni do not simply diagnose the problem, they offer a framework for attack.
“We do not bet on the inevitability of extinction, but rather on the possibility of averting that outcome. This depends on disconnecting digital networks from endless growth, and their radical repurposing for a new mode of social reproduction based on human equality and ecological sustainability.”
The future is not one of AI-driven post-scarcity or libertarian transhumanism. The only two choices left are biocommunism or extinction.
No More Waiting
The arrival of Trump’s second term and Musk’s DOGE initiative makes Cybernetic Circulation Complex required reading. This is not a book about the future, it is a book about right now.
“The remaking of networks will also entail a reinvention of the theory and practice of communism itself.”
Dyer-Witheford and Mularoni do not offer easy solutions, but they do offer a way forward. The struggle against the CCC is the struggle for the future itself. If we lose, it is not just history that will end, but the very possibility of history.
The battle is not in some distant horizon. It is here. It is now.
The only question left: What will you do?
