A sense of disorientation characterises our relationship to technology today. Everywhere we look, we find newspapers and magazines saturated with forecasts of how technology will shape society; governments are scrambling to assert national digital sovereignty; attempts to “quit social media” are a minor cultural phenomenon; and pop culture’s imaginary is overrun by visions of technological dystopia. In academic and intellectual circles, efforts to make sense of technocapitalism’s encroachment over all aspects of our lives have birthed an expansive inventory of frameworks — surveillance capitalism, data capitalism, technofeudalism, cognitive capitalism, etc.

Such confusion is hardly surprising, given our near-total dependence on technological systems over which we have little to no control — from telecom networks and algorithmic marketplaces to dating apps and streaming platforms. Where we are powerless, tech firms today wield extraordinary influence. They undertake colossal infrastructural projects, including power grids, communication hubs, and water-guzzling data centres. Downstream of these infrastructures, we find the tools of ubiquitous surveillance and, increasingly, the weapons of war. Simultaneously, these corporations have assumed a central position in global markets through their ownership of vast pools of assets, both material and immaterial.¹ With nine of the world’s ten largest corporations belonging to the tech sector, they play a decisive role in coordinating the global economy.

Technology has, of course, always been essential to the capitalist exigencies of increasing productivity and maintaining the rate of profit. Whether by enabling the mechanisation of labour or by allowing tighter surveillance and control over the workforce, it has given capitalists the tools to squeeze more out of workers.² Further outside the office and the factory, communication technologies have also been crucial to the commodification of culture, as the advertising and entertainment industries fold more and more of society into the circuits of capital.³ By manufacturing desires, shaping perceptions, and distracting away from dissent, they work to secure capital’s dominance over the social sphere, smoothening the production and circulation of commodities.

These accounts of technology as an instrument of domination both inside and outside the workplace are largely complementary. Both rest on the idea that technological systems developed within capitalist social relations tend to reinforce those relations almost by design. Yet, it is inadequate to stop here, with a vision of technological capitalism as an all-powerful, closed system — an iron cage. Such an analysis would mean that any form of opposition or resistance is ultimately futile, dovetailing neatly with the narrative that the ruling elite have long sought to establish — that there is no alternative. Without the ability to imagine an existence beyond capitalism and a credible political horizon to coalesce around, we remain fragmented, each engaging in ineffectual forms of dissent. Whether we turn to scepticism, withdrawal, or to purely abstract critique, we remain unable to seize or build upon the moments when radical political contestation becomes possible.

Any effective emancipatory project, insofar as the technology question is concerned, must address the following three problems.

First, it must emphasise the need for a materialist analysis of the contemporary technological landscape. Certainly, it is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which the infrastructures used to propagate information, produce knowledge, and shape worldviews are steered by the interests of a small cadre of capitalists. Simultaneously, workers are rendered the objects of monitoring systems that funnel data into algorithmic management processes, mirroring the closed feedback loops imagined by early cyberneticians. Worse yet, surplus populations — excluded from formal wage labour — are faced with even more violent techniques of surveillance, discipline, and outright elimination. Mainstream narratives around technology have been adept at masking these realities, peddling technofuturist utopias that only billionaire visionaries — the sole custodians of humanity’s destiny — can deliver.⁴ Analysis that breaks through these layers of discursive obfuscation is crucial for understanding the balance of power at different nodes in this landscape and building political projects capable of articulating a coherent transformative vision.

Second, this analysis cannot be divorced from the movements and struggles already unfolding around us. These include worker organising within the tech industry, such as unionisation drives, and attempts to campaign against aiding Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They also include broader social movements, such as those mobilising against data centre expansions, and against the deportation/border control infrastructure constructed by ICE and Palantir. It is critical to re-think theory with and through these movements — to understand the fracture-points that their actions expose, and to harness the libidinal energy that animates them towards increasingly radical ends.

Finally, it is crucial to adopt an internationalist worldview. Capitalism is a global system, with its origins rooted in what Marx called primitive accumulation — the imperialist plunder of the periphery. This remains true in the contemporary economy, the digital manifestations of which are propped up by rigidly disciplined workforces in China and India, and the extraction of critical minerals in the Congo and Latin America.⁵ As such, we cannot pretend that technocapitalist hegemony can be seriously contested within the confines of the nation-state. Nor can we pretend that there is a single idealised worker, capable of seizing the means of production and bringing the system to an end. To organise ourselves in this conjuncture, our points of departure must be multiple. We must strive to synthesise convergences between the causes of workers around the world, struggles around social reproduction, and the plight of so-called surplus populations.⁶ In doing so, we must keep the specificity of each movement in sight and reckon with the historic failures of internationalist solidarity.

Taken together, these concerns shape Disjunctions as a space for a rigorous critique of technology committed to emancipatory ends. Disjunctions will serve as a home for theoretically rich analyses of technocapitalism’s many contingencies; for studies of concrete manifestations of technocapitalist power; for reckonings with the resistances that emerge in response; and for finding common ground and building alliances between struggles around the world.