Billionaire media owners fly in and out of Silicon Valley on private jets while they slyly insinuate Artificial Intelligence (AI) into our lives. 

We know it matters, and that there are consequences for democracy, mental health and the biosphere. Yet it can seem so remote, the work of the polluter and cyber elites is hard to pin down.

Then you get home from the pub, where you’d been laughing with a friend imagining a smart, robot vacuum cleaner with legs that meant it could climb stairs, and tap into your social media. 

Misuse

A chill goes down your back when you are quickly confronted with an advert for a stair-climbing robot vacuum cleaner.

Real or urban myth? Many have had the experience of feeling targeted by adverts for something they’re convinced they’ve only ever just mentioned in conversation. Are we being listened to?

Corporate capitalism’s eagerness to keep us profitably over-consuming means that yes, sometimes, we are, in fact, or have been listened to. 

In January 2025 tech giant Apple agreed a $95 million lawsuit to settle allegations that it used its AI assistant to eavesdrop on the conversations of customers using its products, and that voice recordings it made were shared with advertisers. 

Online giant Amazon was fined over $30 million over the misuse of recordings made by its ‘always listening’ AI assistant, Alexa. 

Platforms

The US Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection said Amazon was guilty of "misleading parents, keeping children's recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents' deletion requests," and had "sacrificed privacy for profits".

Meanwhile, in early 2026 Google paid $68 million to settle a class action lawsuit that was brought over its devices both listening to and recording people’s private conversations. 

This may seem bad enough, that the monopolistic firms of the modern, digital age are all being found guilty of breaking the law with a form of ‘surveillance capitalism’. 

But the apparently legal, and real reason that a stair-climbing robot vacuum cleaner turns up on your feed after coming up in conversation is potentially even more insidious and disturbing. 

Where the other big beast, Meta, is concerned, here’s how it works with regard to their platforms Facebook and Instagram, according to US ad agency McNutt & Partners. 

AI will be the most significant driver with electricity demand from AI-optimised data centres projected to more than quadruple by 2030.

Friends

It’s down to an incredibly sophisticated form of tracking that converges multiple data sources about not just you, but the people you hang out with - in effect, digital eavesdropping, or spying.

Assume you never texted about or searched online for the product, but only spoke about it, and it’s now staring up at you from your screen. What happened? 

We already know that Facebook tracks your online searches and which websites you visit. Many, however, will be unaware or have forgotten that with the right box ticked or unticked, even if you’re not using the Facebook app, it is tracking your location. 

That means it knows who you’re mixing with, and if the person you were speaking to has looked up, or had any interaction regarding the product online, then that will make the connection. 

But that ad could show up even if you never discussed the product, but your friend did with one of their friends. Because Facebook knows you were together it will deduce that this third party connection is enough to push the ad to you. 

Consumerism

As the agency puts it: "Facebook’s algorithm compares your interests, demographics, places you’ve been, groups you’re a part of, hashtags you follow (the list goes on) to that of your friend." Where your unique digital identities converge sufficiently, you’ll be targeted.

But it can go further still, to the point where it seems you have only ‘thought’ about something and an ad appears. Your thoughts are a stream of consciousness with one thing leading to another, connected in ways you might not be aware of. 

Facebook’s algorithm combines with the vast amount of data that constitutes your digital ID in not unsimilar ways, able to see patterns and make connections to scraps of information you may have left behind before or after having the thought, and speculatively offering up the ad as consequence. When this happens, it is likely not a coincidence.

To what extremes AI will take this ‘surveillance capitalism’ is hard to predict, like the technology itself. 

But in the way that early advertising practitioners styled themselves, this is ‘consumption engineering’ in which you, in the form of your personal data, are being sold to advertisers, in ways that makes the imperative and pressure of consumerism increasingly impossible to escape. 

Supercharge

Consequences can be seen in how humanity as a whole goes into Earth Overshoot ever earlier in the year, by 24th July in 2025, and that seven of nine identified planetary ecological boundaries have now been transgressed due to overconsumption and the linked generation of waste. 

Before AI came along this trajectory was already established, the danger is that AI will accelerate these trends, putting overconsumption on steroids.

Research by the Hot or Cool Institute found that the global average lifestyle carbon footprint across 25 high, upper middle and lower middle income countries is more than six times the 1.5°C-aligned target, 7.1 tCO₂e per person per year compared to 1.1 tCO₂e, the target for the year 2035. 

However, globally there is a polluter elite. The United States, for example, has an av­erage lifestyle carbon footprint of 18.1 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e), more than 10 times that in Nigeria (1.5 tCO₂e). 

Three areas - food, housing and transport – are the main drivers of lifestyle-related emissions, together making up 66 per cent to 95 per cent of the total lifestyle carbon footprint. But AI looks set to supercharge things.

Manufacturing

The International Energy Agency has stated: “Electricity demand from data centres worldwide is set to more than double by 2030 to slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan. 

"AI will be the most significant driver with electricity demand from AI-optimised data centres projected to more than quadruple by 2030.” 

The agency further pointed out that in the United States, “data centres are set to account for almost half of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030.

“Driven by AI use, the US is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals.” 

Dr Simon Clark, the atmospheric physicist and science communicator, speaking at the Scientists for Global Responsibility annual Responsible Science Conference in 2025, discussed the corporations pushing AI.

Automation

“[They] are, in many ways, the climate crisis in microcosm, because they exemplify this idea of… growth at all costs," he said. "These AI companies are operating in an under-regulated space, where the environmental costs of their products are treated as a negative externality.” 

In this context, existing locked-in imbalances of power look set to increase inequalities, as those best placed to exploit and benefit from the technology do so. The Centre for Global Development argues that this is so for three major reasons. 

Richer countries are better simply better equipped to exploit the tools of AI, and poorer countries have less capacity to handle the technology’s disruptions. 

AI too is a particular threat to traditional manufacturing-led development models with, for example, as many as 60 per cent of jobs in Bangladesh’s garment sectors potentially being lost to automation by 2030.

Also speaking at the Responsible Science Conference was Emily Ghosh, senior scientist and programme director of the Equitable Transitions program at the Stockholm Environment Institute US. 

Algorithms

Ghosh spoke of the “new layer of inequality emerging with the rise of these cyber elites”, made up of tech giants and billionaires who dominate even the emerging green tech economy who are, “not just shaping how we’re using data, but how data, resources, and even our personal behaviours are monetised.” 

Noting that the tech industry's role in the low carbon transition is often presented as a solution, she added: “While Google, Amazon and Tesla are making massive investments in renewable energy, electric vehicles and AI, they have disproportionate control over many aspects of our lives, or information, of resources, and labour.”

AI is an engine of domestic inequality, negatively reinforcing existing biases. AI algorithms rejected up to 80 per cent of mortgage applications from Black families in the US. An AI system downgraded exam results during the COVID-19 pandemic for 39 per cent of students, disproportionately hitting pupils from disadvantaged schools.

Concentration

Richer people pollute more, due to their increased consumption of high carbon products and services - flights, big houses and large cars, possibly several. 

Some estimates show that if issues of ownership and control are not addressed the global wealth share of the top one percent could rise from around 38.5 per cent today to 46 per cent in 2050.  

This asymmetric distribution of benefits fuels inequality and is a driver of both division, poorer well being and further over consumption.

The Media Reform Coalition highlights the concentration of media ownership which also represents a centralisation of power and concentration of wealth. 

Wealth

Seven of the top 15 online platforms people use to access news in the UK are owned by three companies: Meta, Alphabet (owners of Google) and X Corp. 

Google has captured an astonishing 93 per cent of UK search engine use. Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google together take around 60 per cent of all UK advertising spend. 

Three companies alone - DMG Media, News UK and Reach - control 90 per cent of the national newspaper market, which also represents an important online presence. The sector has seen a 20 per cent rise in market concentration since 2024. 

And, in terms of streaming, the market is enormously centralised too, with Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+ making up 75 per cent of all UK subscriptions.

When these media owners lend their support to politicians who oppose regulation of industry and redistribution of wealth, it represents a convergence of interests with profound, one-sided political and climate consequences. 

READ HERE TOMORROW: POLLUTER AND CYBER ELITES PART 2.

This Author

Andrew Simms is co-director of the New Weather Institute, assistant director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, co-founder of the Badvertising campaign, an author on new and green economics, joint proposer of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, and co-author of the original Green New Deal. Follow on Bluesky @andrewsimms.bsky.social.

These two articles are published with permission from the forthcoming Responsible Science Journal 2026, a publication of Scientists for Global Responsibility.