Tech companies were once quick to deploy utopian rhetoric about how they could solve the world’s problems, but this has been revealed as mainly an alibi for the pursuit of profit and monopoly — a dystopia for everyone else. To escape will require utopian thinking premised on a different set of values, exemplified by organized resistance to tech’s hegemony.

After 9/11, national security became the all-purpose alibi for surveillance and policing programs, deemed necessary to fight a war on “terror” that was endless by design. Now tech companies are reorienting these same tools to fight the coronavirus pandemic, threatening to turn “public health” into another forever war.

The normalization of surveillance by a range of widely adopted and readily available technologies have opened the way for insurance companies to insert themselves straight into our homes, cars, and bodies, thus gaining further abilities to assess our lifestyles and adjust our behaviors. This threatens to undermine the social logic of insurance, which spreads risk across broader populations so that they are collectively easier to bear. By making "riskier" individuals pay more and make fewer claims, "insurtech" is undermining the safety net and worsening structural inequality.

The technologies and policies associated with “smart cities” claim to serve citizen-customers and render life efficient; instead they treat the city like a battlespace, redeploying surveillance and information systems originally created for military purposes for urban policing.

AI has become a label startups use to make their service seem innovative and disruptive, whether it uses machine learning or not. The inflated claims of what AI can achieve has fed an investment bubble and helped normalize the ways “smart” systems use intrusive surveillance.