AI exacerbates resource and capital extraction --- becomes the foundation for the birth of the Capitalocene – causes environmental collapse

That technology is disruptive is something that materialist critical theory has always understood as a break or breach inherent to the modern order. Historically, the school of the PEICC has tended to analyze the transfor-mations and reversals that the development of productive forces generates in the communication and culture industries and how this affects the capitalist mode of production. Nowadays, the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” has given rise to a new information regime focusing on the organization of algorithms and AI which strategically determines all social, economic, and political processes and, therefore, the logic of reproduction of culture that has such a huge impact on the natural en-vironment. But beyond the environmental impact of the energy con-sumption of AI and current expert systems – 1,500 times higher than that of analogue media – one of the strategic conceptual problems in this respect is to define the nature of the information and knowledge generated by the digital revolution and its effect on the habitat. One of the initial hypotheses is that AI only exacerbates the energy ex-traction process, optimizing the capitalist mode of production with the subsequent environmental impact. The colonization of the cloud by the FAANG (Meta [formerly Facebook], Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet [formerly Google]) has actually contributed to environmental degradation through the establishment of a dirty economy, exemplified by the growth of Big Oil and the consequent perpetuation of the practices of the fossil-fuel economy, to which reference is made in media studies in relation to pro-posals for a new materialism. In other words, automation, predictability, and planning in the cloud are the conditions of capitalism for progressing in the so-called “digital transition” to a green economy that, contrary to institutional advertising, ends up undermining the commons. Having come this far, nobody can deny that the artifice of our digital existence also conceals an energy demand that will account for 21 per cent of the global demand for electricity by 2030 and which will eclipse half of the greenhouse gas emissions from transport by 2040. (Cancela, 2023, p. 121) In this vein, it is necessary to question the “Capitalocene” by exploring the dilemmas that AI systems pose for communication and culture, and to define the theoretical and analytical categories of info-communication policymaking on GPGs, with special emphasis on the ethical and regula-tory debates on their treatment as contested commodities. As has been noted in previous studies (Monje, 2018; Monje et al., 2021), public goods constitute the doctrinal corpus of the economy. It is generally accepted that they possess elements that simultaneously display characteristics of non-rivalry in consumption and the inapplicability of the principle of exclusion. The advent of a new theory of GPGs is linked to the process of globalization that, together with other factors, has led to a transformation in the capacity for action of the public sector in the market economy. In the context of the PEICC, considering the evolution of the Internet there is “the need for supranational public intervention in most of the GPGs so as to guarantee their efficient provision” (García-Arias, 2004, p. 187). Indeed, in the AI era, it is evidently imperative to construct and protect the commons by creating “public platforms – platforms owned and con-trolled by the people. (And, importantly, independent of the surveillance state apparatus.) This would mean investing the state’s vast resources into the technology necessary to support these platforms and offering them as public utilities” (Srnicek, 2017, p. 70). Even more so considering that the management of data on social behavior facilitated by AI is unparalleled in human history and undoubtedly poses new threats, like the opacity of certain reproduction processes and the subsequent erosion of safeguards, mechanisms for redress, and the guarantee of rights.