Digital Enclosures and the Global Land Grab: Technofascism’s War Against the Peasantry

By Prince Kapone, Weaponized Information

A New Age of Primitive Accumulation

The land grabs of the 21st century do not come with colonial armies or conquistador flags. They come through climate finance, blockchain platforms, satellite surveillance, and “smart farming” apps funded by the World Bank. Today’s enclosures are digital, financialized, and cloaked in liberal humanitarian rhetoric.

This is the new face of imperialist accumulation. Not a break from colonialism, but its technocratic evolution. It is the return of the plantation—wired, privatized, and managed by algorithms.

Digital Colonialism: Big Tech Meets Big Ag

As droughts, floods, and ecological collapse force rural populations into desperation, monopoly capital has seized the opportunity. A new wave of land dispossession is being driven by partnerships between Big Tech, finance capital, agribusiness, and state-backed development schemes. This is the machinery of technofascism in the countryside.

Consider the following developments:

• Microsoft’s FarmBeats initiative collects soil and weather data from African farms using sensors and drones, selling insights to agribusiness while bypassing farmers entirely.
• Land mapping apps funded by the World Bank claim to “digitally secure land rights,” but in practice, they accelerate formal titling for foreign investors and corporations.
• BlackRock and Vanguard are major stakeholders in agricultural ETFs and agritech ventures, funneling speculative finance into farmland acquisition across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia.
• Digital ID and fintech platforms like India’s Aadhaar and Kenya’s M-PESA are being weaponized to create databases that link farmers’ biometric data to credit scores, land use, and access to inputs—enabling surveillance and control.

This is not development. It is counterinsurgency through digitization. A war for control over the most basic means of survival: land, seeds, and water.

Climate Finance as a Weapon of Enclosure

Climate catastrophe is the perfect excuse for recolonization. Under the pretext of “building resilience,” new schemes are being pushed by imperialist institutions:

• Carbon markets and REDD+ allow corporations to buy up land in the Global South for “carbon offset” forests, evicting peasants and Indigenous communities in the name of saving the planet.
• Climate-smart agriculture (CSA), pushed by the Gates Foundation and CGIAR, floods rural economies with digital tools, GMO seeds, and financial packages that lock farmers into dependency.
• Geoengineering and AI-predicted weather insurance are promoted not to protect peasant lives, but to guarantee profits for agribusiness and global insurers.

In each case, the goal is not food sovereignty or ecological restoration. It is the creation of datafied, compliant, export-oriented rural economies—managed from Silicon Valley, financed from Wall Street, and governed through technocratic NGOs and comprador states.

The Struggle for Data Sovereignty and Peasant Autonomy

The digital land grab must be met with new forms of resistance that unite peasant, Indigenous, and urban movements under a common banner: data sovereignty, land justice, and ecosocialist reconstruction.

We must demand:

• Ban foreign ownership of farmland and data extraction from peasant communities;
• Socialize the agri-digital infrastructure—from GPS systems to crop modeling algorithms;
• Reject technocratic development models that replace land reform with QR codes and replace collective farming with platform dependency;
• Support movements like La Vía Campesina, MST, and Indigenous land defenders who are already building counterpower grounded in ancestral knowledge, communal systems, and agroecology.

Breaking the Digital Fence

Today’s imperial frontier is not only geographic—it is digital. The new enclosures are built with software, satellites, and AI-backed capital. But their logic is as old as empire itself: expropriate the land, extract the surplus, and pacify the resistance.

The peasantry—still the largest working class in the Global South—is not obsolete. It is the frontline of resistance against technofascism and ecological annihilation.

The only future worth fighting for is one where land is not owned, data is not commodified, and food is not a profit stream but a human right. This is not a utopian dream. It is the concrete demand of revolutionary ecosocialism.

Part V Coming Soon: “Communes, Collectives, and the Ecosocialist Horizon”