The changes we face are structural and generate a new systemic articulation within society as a whole. Here, we put the pieces together, and the result is more than worrying. We face the immaterial economy: bits, unlimited stock, speed of light, connectivity, and a networked society. Search and analysis capabilities, artificial intelligence. Knowledge available online and unlimited, communicable, and capable of global collaboration. Change in corporate decision-making (absentee owners). Immaterial money, private rentier appropriation. Maximization of rentierism, attention as a source of income, and behavioral marketing. New class division. Political marketing and appropriation of the public sphere. Corresponding legislation, patents, copyrights. Disastrous impact in terms of inequality and environmental destruction.

And we have knowledge, science, and technology as social constructs, the potential for collaboration, so we can seek the democratic reappropriation of the digital revolution. We have sufficient resources; we know what needs to be done in social and environmental terms. It's about redirecting resources, technologies, and policies in convergent efforts to address critical challenges. It's not just fragments of change; it's a paradigm shift, and we must put the pieces together. In this paper on the digital revolution, we concentrate on the structural change, and will continue the analysis in the next paper.

Scientific basis

The knowledge economy and the digital revolution are part of the same movement: knowledge is the primary factor of production, and the digital revolution is a vector for structural transformation in society. Boolean algebra, defining two states: "true" (1) and "false" (0), paved the way for logical operations and knowledge construction with the binary system, with a single variation being sufficient to express knowledge in general.

Alan Turing anchored the system in the computerized analysis process, decoding Enigma, Germany's military communication code, during World War II. In an increasingly accelerated evolution, the computing capacity for information storage was generated, and within the framework of American military initiatives (DARPA), came the internet, the connectivity of signals and users. Successive advances have given us the individual computer, the cell phone, the smartphone, and artificial intelligence—an interactive social process that transforms the world by placing information and knowledge at the center of societal transformation. Scientists, public agencies, military research initiatives, and private initiatives—all together, a broad process correctly characterized as social construction. It's a common good.

(Gar Alperovitz e Lew Daly, Unjust Deserts; Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State; Lawrence Lessig, Remix).

The digital revolution

The ongoing transformation constitutes the digital revolution, as broad as the industrial revolution was two and a half centuries ago. Demis Hassabis, a Nobel Prize winner in science, believes that what we are experiencing "will be 10 times bigger than the industrial revolution, and possibly 10 times faster." In an age when economic advances essentially result from scientific and technological advances, within the framework of the knowledge society, the ability to store knowledge virtually without limits, freeing it from material supports and making it accessible without significant additional costs, changes the entire economic context.

To this we must add planetary connectivity, another revolution that allows us all—within the limits of the digital divide—to access knowledge anywhere, in real time, within the planetary interactive system. When Mustafa Suleyman points out that we can access all the accumulated knowledge in the world with just a few keystrokes, he demonstrates the depth of this dual transformation that characterizes the digital revolution: a planet of immaterial information and knowledge in the "cloud" in infinite volumes, instantly accessible by anyone, opening space for global networked interaction and collaboration.

(Manuel Castells, Democracy in the Age of the Internet; André Gorz, L’immatériel; Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas; Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave).

Transformative knowledge

The transformation constitutes a revolution within the revolution, as the systems developed represent a transformation of the very capacity to expand knowledge. Just as energy (steam, electricity, combustion, nuclear, solar) was a transformative vector within the industrial revolution, electronics applied to knowledge generated our enormous capacity to expand the digital revolution itself. In addition to the ability to generate and store knowledge and make it available to the entire planet instantly, it also transformed our ability to access it intelligently, enabling search, selection, and organized presentation based on objectives.

This is the evolution of software, culminating in the current expansion of artificial intelligence capabilities. We therefore live in an age of virtually unlimited online knowledge, communicable, and capable of global collaboration. When knowledge becomes the most important factor of production in the productive processes of the real economy—in industry, agriculture, and various types of services, including health and education—the entire system is transformed. It is a new mode of production, perhaps better called a new mode of exploitation.

(Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons; Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar)

The extractive decision-making process

The digital revolution has radically shifted the decision-making process of large corporations. In the traditional framework of industrial capitalism, a factory owner was the identified leader of the company, the owner of a production asset, and generated profits by paying workers less than their productive contribution. But to exploit workers, he needed to create jobs, sell useful products on the market, and pay taxes. In the new system that has emerged, thanks to virtual money and global connectivity, a new decision-making process emerges, with absentee owners who appropriate the surplus produced through shareholder control. The dividends demanded by the controlling shareholders of companies worldwide constitute rentierism, based on finance (financial investments, even if called just "investments", different from productive investments) without corresponding generation of products and jobs.

Financial investors, and the funds that manage shareholders' interests, although initially financing productive investments, have gradually become net extractors, breaking the coherence between the financial economy and the real economy. Financial profits that exploit the productive base constitute rentierism, a step above capitalism. Instead of appropriation or greater control by the base of society, we have rentier appropriation at the top, within the framework of financialization.

(Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century; Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, The Triumph of Injustice; Peter Phillips, The Titans of Capital; Marjorie Kelly, Wealth Supremacy; Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State).

Financial rentierism

The rentier appropriation of social surplus amounts to approximately 30% of GDP, sterilizing the capacity to expand productive investment. In Brazil, an extreme example of financialization, the basic data are striking. With the public debt basic interest rate at 15% in September 2025, on a public debt of approximately R$7 trillion, the drain is equivalent to nearly 10% of GDP. These interests are paid by society and transferred to financial investors, the richest 10%, instead of being invested in social policies and infrastructure. The usury applied to household credit, an average of 55% per year, represents another 10% drain, weakening household consumption and aggregate demand in the economy. The usury on corporate credit, an average of 25%, represents a drain of approximately 4% of GDP, weakening productive investment.

Tax evasion, practiced by the richest 10%, amounts to approximately 6% of GDP, and tax breaks represent another 6%. Tax exemptions on distributed profits and dividends (since 1995), on primary and semi-primary goods destined for export (since 1996), the non-levying of wealth tax (despite being enshrined in the Constitution), and the low inheritance tax rate mean that in Brazil, the sterilization of financial resources by unproductive rentierism represents more than the 30% Marjorie Kelly estimates globally. A profound change, in terms of the political economy of the digital revolution, is that we need to go far beyond exploitation through low wages—the extraction of surplus value—and broaden our vision along the lines of analyzing integrated financial flows: the forms of appropriation of social surplus have expanded and diversified, with interest extraction, tax evasion, deformation of tax systems, tariffs of the most diverse types permitted by the fluidity of virtual currency, and its potential for exploitation on a global level.

(BCB, Estatísticas Monetárias e de Crédito; Marjorie Kelly, The Divine Right of Capital; Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, The Triumph of Injustice; Ladislau Dowbor, The Financial Drain; Joseph Stiglitz, Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy; Brett Christophers, Rentier Capitalism).

Intercorporate control network

In the rentier power pyramid of financial platforms, algorithms are programmed to maximize returns, disregarding social and environmental impacts, which are even dismissed as "externalities." The governance system is innovative and profoundly transformed. At the top of the pyramid, or rather, at the central node of the intercorporate control network, are the asset management groups, analyzed by ETH (2012) and Peter Phillips (2024). Ten groups at the top manage the equivalent of 50% of global GDP in financial assets, in turn controlling thousands of companies worldwide, with significant stakes in, for example, Banco Itaú, Bradesco, Vale, and countless other groups in Brazil.

The decision-making process in the ten groups mentioned (BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, etc.) is managed by directors who are also members of each other's boards of directors, generating an interdependent and supportive system of maximum dividend extraction, with little to do with free markets. This allows for the maximization of financial returns without fear of competition. The managers of these financial platforms are also members of the boards of directors of numerous groups beyond the largest mentioned. It is an articulated system, with maximization managed by algorithms. It is not market competition, but rather an intercorporate network of control.

(J. Glattfelder, The Network of Global Corporate Control; Peter Phillips, Titans of Capital; Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit).

Taken together, these structural changes go far beyond being new facets of what we knew as industrial capitalism. They are deep enough to constitute a transformation of the system itself. The whole world is being connected in a global web, and structural change is being pressed on by a network of global corporations. Big money is made not by producers, but by those who control them, controlling the producers, through dividends, interest rates, patents, and other mechanisms. The material economy is there, but control has shifted to computers, algorithms, and platforms.