2026-04-12 –, Seminar room 2 Language: English
This talk will cover recent shifts in the political economy and business strategies of the US tech sector, tracing how the 'AI arms race' and the investment conditions leading up to it have fostered a mutual alliance between large ICT companies, fossil fuel energy interests, and the far-right.
This talk will cover recent shifts in the political economy and business strategies of the US tech sector, tracing how the 'AI arms race' and the investment conditions leading up to it have fostered a mutual alliance between large ICT companies, fossil fuel energy interests, and the far-right. With an emphasis on accessibility and anti-capitalist critique, the aim will be to better understand how the pursuit of profit can lead even the leaders of 'corporate sustainability' into coalitions that are antithetical to climate action. It will argue that the AI/Energy/Fascism nexus is not a temporary, or additive coalition, but one that is instead fundamentally reforming the tech sector's vision for a good society. The talk will end with a few thoughts on what this means for developing theories of 'techno-feudalism' and 'techno-fascism,' when we locate more and more of these tendencies within the political allies of tech companies, rather than (only) within the platforms themselves.
Anne Pasek is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture, and the Environment at Trent University. She studies the political ecology of the tech industry, the cultural politics of climate change, and low-tech experiments in sustainable networks.