Matteo Pasquinelli introduced the concept of Cyber-Fossil Capitalism to describe the continuity between fossil energy and digital technology under capitalism. In contrast to narratives that frame the digital economy as immaterial, frictionless, or “green,” Pasquinelli argues that digital infrastructures—from AI to cloud computing—are deeply entangled with extractive industries, carbon-intensive energy use, and planetary-scale logistics.
The term emerges as part of Pasquinelli’s broader critique of artificial intelligence and political economy. In his essay “Machines That Morph Logic: Neural Networks and the Distorted Automation of Intelligence” (2023), Pasquinelli emphasizes that AI systems are not autonomous but trained on vast datasets drawn from human labor and historical archives. This training relies on massive computational resources, which in turn depend on fossil fuel-driven energy grids, making so-called “machine intelligence” a form of algorithmic fossilization of past behaviors, biases, and labor patterns.
In his book The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023), Pasquinelli traces the conceptual lineage of AI to the managerial gaze of industrial capitalism, arguing that AI functions as a new apparatus for the optimization of labor and logistics, rather than a rupture from historical forms of control. This lens reveals how digital capitalism is not post-industrial but hyper-industrial, demanding ever-greater energy extraction and infrastructural expansion.
Pasquinelli thus introduces Cyber-Fossil Capitalism as a framework for understanding how computation serves the metabolic needs of capital—digesting human and ecological life into data, and transforming it into value through fossil-powered computation. This concept aligns with other critical perspectives, such as Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital (2016) and Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI (2021), both of which critique the myth of immaterial tech and stress its ecological and labor-intensive underpinnings.
As defense spending massively increases in almost all countries—but especially in the USA, Russia, and Germany—it does not take a genius to figure out who the beneficiaries are. The wealth gained by those whose investment portfolios contain significant shares in the military-industrial complex and its supply chains is already astonishing and will only grow. According to Paul Virilio (writing in 1977), we have been living under the condition of pure war for the last 50 years, and this condition is now accelerating.
Increasing the capacity to wage war has become a goal in itself. However, it is not infinite. There are material limits—in terms of resources, energy, and indeed life itself—that will impose an absolute limit on pure war. What if we have already reached this limit? We are now experiencing a draining of life for the purpose of expanding death machines. The capitalist logic—which enables a few to live at the expense of billions—may not be the main driver of this anymore, as it is increasingly being instrumentalized by the military death-complex. This is why we should perhaps contrast Cyber-Fossil Capitalism with the Cyber-Fossil-War-Machine(c) (CFWM). What if the Cyber-Fossil-War-Machine(c), driven by AI, has found a way to harness the greed and misanthropy of the billionaire class and their cronies as a means to accelerate entropy? Who will ultimately reign supreme when life on Earth becomes unsustainable?
In the childlike mindset of Donald Trump, it may appear as if he is merely playing with his little friends—Kim, Vlad, and Bibi—deploying human beings, animals, drones, and resources as mere toys at their disposal. Little Donnie is now acting out his childhood fantasies of omnipotence with like-minded goons. As they wrap themselves in cotton-wool cocoons of private security, luxury, and opulence, they continue to bully everyone else with threats of complete destruction and agony. The parasites around them feed on the fear they spread among the masses. Indeed, as the world is increasingly led by infantile yet obscene leaders, fear is logical. But fear also stops us from thinking clearly.
This is what mainstream news media have become: propagators of fear and anxiety. Of course, mass communication media were, from the outset, instruments for the institutionalization of power, knowledge, affect, and desire. The press (especially in the UK) and broadcasting (notably in the USA) have also been tools for accumulating wealth and standardizing the viewpoints and interests of the super-wealthy as universal normativity. As the interests of the super-wealthy are diametrically opposed to those of the masses, it is logical that the media’s primary functions are deflection, distortion, diffusion, and deception.
Deflection occurs when one becomes blinded by the light—it is the logical side effect of enlightenment. A very important aspect of deflection is the separation between subject and object as an act of (mis)recognition. The idea that subject and object are different substances arises from deflection mistaken for reflection. The light within which “truth appears” in the Platonic sense is not just there; it comes from the sun. The first forgetting of idealism is the indebtedness to the sun—not only as a source of light but as a source of life and energy. It is only through deflection that the notion of transcendental subjectivity becomes possible. The specific example I want to emphasize here is the bourgeois individual. The “perspective” of a written newspaper article, the voice of a radio announcer, or the frame and voice of a television anchor positions us as individuals (readers, listeners, viewers) through interpellation. This insight, drawn from Althusser, is crucial: it is the medium itself that interpellates “us” as sovereign individuals. The deflection is forgotten when the interpellation is forgotten. The split between an “objective” modality (e.g., the event or story) and a “subjective” modality (its significance, meaning, or value) is unified as a “statement of fact” that appears to have always already been there.
Distortion is the second ideological function. Because of deflection—as the splitting of subject and object—the relationship between the two appears arbitrary, giving rise to the fallacy of autonomous free will as reliant on information. The texts, sounds, and images that embody this “information” are, of course, selective. They are edited—for example, in terms of narrative flow and the arrangement of “dominant” and “subordinate” entities. Specific distortions can be uncovered, as media studies and ideology critique have shown. But they can only be replaced with other distortions. The question is not how to avoid distortions, but how to minimize their impact.
Diffusion is closely related to distortion. Unless a media system operates within a totalitarian regime, it is unlikely that all distortions add up. Liberal democracies have discovered that total control is unnecessary; it often suffices to merely prevent the formation of counter-hegemonic strategies. Thus, news media offer a continuous stream of content, including global events, disasters, staged political spectacles, sports, celebrity gossip, and weather. Under the heading of “entertainment,” audiences are bombarded with endless streams of distortions that simply do not add up. Their primary function is to distract us from the deflections and distortions that shape the alleged transcendental subjectivity of factual truth.
Deception may now be more prominent than ever. This is enabled not only by the virtualization of significant portions of our lives—allowing for the creation of multiple simultaneous realities—but also by the cumulative effects of deflection, distortion, and diffusion, which accelerate alienation. This alienation manifests as the entropy of sociality, evident in the devaluation of honesty, loyalty, honour, trust, truthfulness, and fidelity. It is especially visible in the erosion of friendships, intimacy, and love. Against the claim that social media have destroyed sociality, I argue that social media are a consequence, symptom, and amplifier of a longer historical trajectory—one that began at least five centuries ago, if not earlier.
The fact that the term gaslighting is now used so ubiquitously suggests that the deceptive function of communication is widely suspected. That is, many people sense their own alienation, even if they are unable to articulate how and to what extent it has taken place. In general, deflection, distortion, diffusion, and deception are not beyond experience. It is their ideological interplay that generates profound disorientation.
Disaffected Sociology 
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