The word imperialism has once again become descriptively relevant. The exercise of power over territories, which originally defined the term, now shifts toward the mediations that make such power conceivable. The international press senses it: it speaks of the return of spheres of influence, the struggle between the United States and China, control over strategic minerals, or the geopolitics of data. Yet, only rarely does it refer to the most insidious form that this power takes. Headlines show the visible surface of conflict; we must descend into its subterranean logic. What is at stake is not only the distribution of global power but the reconfiguration of the very conditions of our existence: the transformation of human life into a universal field of extraction and calculation.

The 19th century was the era of industrial imperialism; the 20th, of financial imperialism; ours, of algorithmic imperialism. On the surface, powers no longer compete for colonies but for markets and information flows. In reality, new empires—Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta— increasingly control states through the appropriation of their structural intelligence, reproducing the same domination matrix that once legitimized conquest and exploitation, only in a subtler form: technological dependence and attention capture. Whoever controls algorithms controls the possibilities and limits of the world: deciding what is seen, said, or ignored. Domination no longer operates by force but by design.

This reading extends, in a contemporary key, the debate Néstor Kohan (2022) collected in Theories of Imperialism and Dependency from the Global South. There, David Harvey (2003) and John Smith (2016) confront two ways of thinking about capital expansion: accumulation by dispossession, which expropriates commons and commodifies the vital, and superexploitation of labor, which transfers value from the Global South to the North by systematically degrading living conditions. In the digital world, both processes converge: platforms strip users of their data and Southern workers of their time and bodies. The cloud, celebrated as a metaphor of progress, rests on a subsoil of extraction, precariousness, and waste.

What is emerging, therefore, is not techno-feudalism, as Varoufakis (2023) proposes, but an intensification of capitalism under rentier and digital forms. We are not witnessing the return of the fief; we are seeing the expansion of capital beyond its classical limits. As Morozov (2022) warns in Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason, talking about digital feudalism risks obscuring the historical continuity of capital, which has not been abolished but reconfigured in its accumulation mode and technological infrastructure. Every online interaction is a covert transaction; every gesture, an involuntary contribution to the machinery of value. Platforms no longer produce goods—they mediatize meaning production. Life itself becomes a source of rent. Labor, reduced to data, becomes invisible; domination, disguised as connection, is naturalized.

In this context, Nancy Fraser’s critique (2022) becomes particularly resonant. In Cannibal Capitalism, she argues that capitalism devours the conditions of its own existence: nature, care, and legitimacy. But her diagnosis, though insightful, remains incomplete if it does not recognize that such voracity takes a structurally imperial form. What she calls cannibal capitalism is, geopolitically, Northern imperialism over the South, and cognitively, digital mediation imperialism over life. Capital expansion not only crosses borders but erases the differences that gave the world meaning.

Therefore, any theoretical framework in philosophy and social sciences that reproduces, explicitly or implicitly, the biased structure of cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence—heirs of cybernetics—requires the utmost caution. In such frameworks, knowledge appears confused with control and calculation principles that organized 20th-century technical thought. What presents itself as a theory of knowing is, in reality, the epistemic extension of a cultural artifact of dominance, whose function is to model our self-interpretation as agents—individual and collective—according to efficiency and adaptation parameters (Cincunegui, 2026).

From Latin America, liberation philosophy has thought this phenomenon with distinct radicality. Enrique Dussel (1974, 1998, 2007) taught that every totality is founded on exclusion, and the starting point of thought cannot be the system but the wound it produces in the flesh of the world: the lives denied and sacrificed in the name of autonomy. In this sense, imperialism—industrial, financial, or algorithmic—is not merely an economic structure but a form of ontological negation. The Other is not recognized as interlocutor but absorbed as resource. Thinking from the exteriority restores the dignity of those without voice.

Franz Hinkelammert (1984, 1995) described market idolatry as a new inhuman theology. Today, one could speak of algorithmic idolatry: a power promising to reorder the world and reobjectify it, legitimizing calculation as the ontological form of commodities. In the name of abstract efficiency, life is sacrificed; in the name of inanimate progress, memory and life itself are destroyed; in the name of innovation, the possibility of another world is closed.

From this perspective, the South is not merely a geographical place but an ethical-political standpoint. It reveals the lie of technological neutrality and the continuation of the cruel domination of centers over peripheries. The South is not an identity claim but an existential rebellion against expropriation of the very meaning of dignity and material conditions. Contemporary imperialism is not just the appropriation of resources but the expropriation of reality itself. The struggle today is philosophical and political: to unmask the secular theology of algorithms and restore life’s primacy against a power presenting itself as systemic harmony.

References

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Cincunegui, J. M. (2019). Planned misery: Human rights and neoliberalism. Dado Ediciones.

Cincunegui, J. M. (2024). Mind and politics: Dialectics and realism from a philosophy of liberation perspective. Dado Ediciones.

Cincunegui, J. M. (2026). Life in history: Beyond biology, phenomenology, and cognitive sciences (in press).

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Levinas, E. (1971). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. Martinus Nijhoff.

Morozov, E. (2022). Critique of techno-feudal reason. New Left Review, 133–134, 67–98.

Smith, J. (2016). Imperialism in the twenty-first century: Globalization, super-exploitation, and capitalism’s final crisis. Monthly Review Press.

Varoufakis, Y. (2023). Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism. The Bodley Head.

© 2025 Juan Manuel Cincunegui
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