The digital revolution goes deeper than the industrial revolution itself, bringing new challenges as well as new opportunities. Based on the “immaterial” economy, it changes the rules of the game. The capitalist we once knew, owner of a company, producing goods and services, and struggling to bring more useful products, is falling into the hands of the giant information and financial platforms.

The landscape seems the same, we still have factories, shops and supermarkets, but the overall logic has changed, with power at the top being handled by absentee owners, through the control of finance, communication infrastructure, information and scienific progress, based on immaterial networks, leading to growing inequality, corporate poliitical power as well as social control through the attention industry.

Communication platforms

The global financial platforms mentioned in a former paper on the digital revolution are, in turn, shareholders in the universe of communication platforms, which essentially constitute the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), and which dominate the attention span of billions of people worldwide, maximizing, in this case, "engagement," that is, whatever leads to more MDAU (Monetized Daily Active Users) attention span. Facebook is reaching nearly 4 billion people, YouTube 2.5 billion, Instagram 2, WhatsApp 2, and TikTok 1.6 billion. The dimension of engagement, for example, is what determined the $44 billion price tag that Elon Musk paid for Twitter. Attention maximization uses algorithms that identify, through the capture of individual private information, the most attractive content, enabling behavioral marketing, which in turn is the basis for maximizing profits for the platforms. Attention manipulation has become an important element of social control.

(Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism; Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine).

The attention industry

Real-economy companies, in turn, have become accustomed to investing heavily in marketing on these communication platforms, typically more than 10% of the product's value (27%, for example, in the case of Johnson & Johnson), increasing the cost for the end consumer, as these costs are included in the prices paid by the consumers. As a rule of magnitude, a quarter of what we pay for medicines goes to advertising. But the actual costs are much higher, as they involve the appropriation of people's time.

Conscious attention span is the time of our lives, and its aggressive capture based on private information, disrupting the rhythm of concentration on what we do, and penetrating practically any online activity that requires our attention, uncontrolled phone calls and spam, generates the sensory overload that is part of growing social anxiety and the rise of depression. It is our right to privacy that is constantly violated, even if it makes no economic sense.

We know how to find what we want to buy (information sought on our own initiative), and for what we have no interest in acquiring, we don't need marketing interruptions. Marketing is a means, not a final product, a cost and a burden on the economy that we all have to bear. A good, useful product doesn't need millions of repetitive messages. Organizing useful product information is different from invasive merchandising. All the commercial manipulation of the attention industry could be redirected toward cultural creativity, which would enrich society and become a more relevant occupation for so many professionals. Still seen by many as a secondary phenomenon, the attention industry and behavioral marketing have become a profound distortion of society, with a particularly profound impact on children and young people. It invades the time of our lives, which we freely give away.

(Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine; Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation; Juliet Schor, The Overspent American; Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants; Ben Goldacre, Bad Pharma).

The explosion of inequality

Widespread rentierism across the planet leads to an explosion of inequality, which people have difficulty assessing, given the sheer size of the numbers. A simple and clear statistic is provided by Forbes: in 2024, 3,028 people had accumulated wealth worth $16.1 trillion worldwide. This represents eight years of GDP in Brazil, the world's eighth-largest economic power. These fortunes increased by $2 trillion in one year. It's important to understand the mechanism: three-quarters or more of the world's population struggles to make ends meet, let alone make financial investments. And they're often in debt.

Meanwhile, the richest reach the end of the month with plenty of surplus money, which they invest in financial products—a universe of intermediaries helps them manage—and thus multiply their money. And the richer they are, the faster they get rich, in what is called a financial snowball effect. The $16.1 trillion seen above can be compared with the data UBS provides us on the wealth of the poorest half of the population: $5 trillion. That is, about three times less than the three thousand people at the top of the pyramid, in the hands of 4.1 billion people. It is effectively much more a mode of exploitation than the mode of production that characterized industrial capitalism.

(Forbes, Bilionáros batem recorde; WID, World Inequality Database; UBS, Global Wealth Report 2025; Kathryn Hennessy, How Money Works; Tom Malleson, Against Inequality; Oxfam, Às custas de quem? Zucman e Saez, The Triumph of Injustice).

A new class division

The traditionally studied economic world involved three classes: the owners of the means of production, that is, the capitalists; industrial workers, in factories; and rural workers, a peasant mass of extremely diverse sizes depending on the levels of development of countries and regions of the world. To what extent does this reflect the modern world?

“Capitalists” today essentially constitute large financial investors; modern billionaires own shares in countless companies in various sectors and countries, hire managers, and essentially monitor the decisions of algorithms regarding stock market movements and the consequent reorientation of their share composition. They are the great rentiers. The ultra-rich at the top of the pyramid (UHNW –Ultra-high net worth individuals) would be politically exposed without the support of a new wider upper class, the HNW, worth more than a million dollars, representing just over 10% of the planet's adults.

This is a composition of technical managers from the rentier world and corporations, as well as lower-level financial investors. In a way, this allows the big rentiers to have a buffer zone, a broader cushion of support that strengthens their political base and creates the impression that they are not alone at the top, in addition to ensuring technical support for managing this new universe of virtual money. Many small investors feel like participants in this modern world, awaiting every change in stock prices and financial changes. The rest of the world cannot be simplified into "workers," as the change in the structure of production processes fragments and diversifies activities, giving rise to the "precariat," and in particular, a huge mass of informal workers.

(Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World; Robert Reich, Super Capitalism; Oxfam, Às custas de quem? UBS, Global Wealth Report 2025; Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism).

Appropriation of the public sphere

The large number of companies within the framework of industrial capitalism, particularly in the welfare state phase we saw in the thirty post-war years, demonstrated coherence between companies that needed rules of the game through the public sphere, the state's own role as a provider of goods and services for collective consumption, such as social policies and infrastructure, as well as justice and security, as well as the relatively coherent world of workers, largely organized in unions.

Currently, with the fragmentation and sectoral diversification of the world of work, unions have structurally lost ground, and the productive business world has become dependent on financial giants that dictate levels and forms of dividend extraction, while the state watches helplessly as public policies are privatized and the power of the giants of financial rentierism is reinforced. At Trump 2.0's inauguration, it was significant to see the billionaires standing on the platform behind him—13 billionaires who didn't hesitate to applaud when the elected official proclaimed “drill, baby, drill”, unaware of the planet's environmental plight. It's not the "right" that's taking power in various parts of the world, with "conservative" values, but rather the international articulation of a structurally different system.

Since 2010, in the US, corporations have been able to finance political campaigns: they buy their representatives. In Brazil, this was authorized for 18 years, between 1997 and 2015, electing corporate representatives instead of defenders of national interests, the effects of which we still feel today. Let's remember that Larry Fink of BlackRock manages $13.5 trillion, while the US federal budget is $6 trillion. Elections? The attention industry can take care of them.

(Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time; Robert Reich, The system; Elzbieta Korolczuk, Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment; Hazel Henderson, We have the best congress money can buy).

The toll on scientific advances

Knowledge is a social construct, one advancement making room for another. Thomas Jefferson summed up the difference in 1813: "That ideas should freely spread from one person to another, throughout the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and the advancement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she rendered them, like fire, capable of expansion through all space, without diminishing their density in any point; and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. Inventions cannot, by their nature, be objects of property." Today, with knowledge materialized in science and technology, ideas become central to productive processes, and the battle for their control has advanced radically.

Copyrights were expanded from 14 years at the beginning of the last century to 70 years after the author's death: we will have to wait until 2067 to have free access to Paulo Freire's works. The argument was to encourage authors. Pharmaceutical products benefit from 20-year patents, a period that in the last century might have been realistic in terms of stimulating innovation, but at the current pace of innovation, it represents a latifundium. In the case of the pharmaceutical industry, for example, with greening, a small change that allows patents to be renewed for another 20 years radically hinders the innovation process, allowing for an absurd rentierism that hinders innovation itself. Here, another form of rentierism, and more unproductive gains.

(Joseph Stiglitz, The Road to Freedom; Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, Unjust Deserts; Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State; Brett Christophers, Our Lives in their Portfolios; Marcia Angell, The Truth about the Drug Companies; Ben Goldacre, Bad Pharma).

We are facing structural change, building a new system forcefully pushed ahead by the overall technological change, the industrial revolution. When the industrial revolution was surging in the second half of the 18th Century, it was not feudalism being modernized, but a new system being built. The transformations we are presently facing are not changes in the capitalist system, but the surging of a new system based on world-scale platforms, immaterial “products” and dramatically augmented levels of wealth concentration. We can call it rentierism, more accurate than Industry 4.0, as the Davos people like to call it. It is a new mode of production, a systemic reorganization of society.