Tech savvy users have most digital concerns
University College London
Digital concerns around privacy, online misinformation, and work-life boundaries are highest among highly educated, Western European millennials, finds a new study from researchers at UCL and the University of British Columbia. The research, published in Information, Communication & Society, also found individuals with higher levels of digital literacy are the most affected by these concerns. For the study, the researchers used from the European Social Survey (ESS) – a project that collects nationally representative data on public attitudes, beliefs and behaviour, from thousands of people across Europe every two years. They analysed responses from nearly 50,000 people in 30 countries* between 2020 and 2022. For the ESS, participants were asked how much they thought digital tech infringes on privacy, helps spread misinformation, and causes work-life interruptions. Combining responses to the questions into a single index, the researchers generated a digital concern scale, ranging from 0 to 1, where a higher score indicates greater concern. To establish their digital literacy and digital exposure, the respondents were asked how often they use the internet and to rate their familiarity with preference settings on a computer, advanced search on the internet, and using PDFs. At the country level, digital exposure was captured through the percentage of the population using the internet in each country. The researchers looked at the levels of concern across different countries, as well as how the concern varies across social groups. They also looked at patterns by people’s digital literacy and their exposure to digital tech. Findings They found millennials (those aged 25–44 in 2022) reported greater concerns, compared to younger (15–24) and older adults (75+). They found no significant differences in the level of digital concerns between men and women, nor between income groups or between urban and rural residents. Across the board, people were more concerned about the potential harms of digital technologies than not. Bulgaria was the only country in the study that did not exceed the mid-point (0.5) on the digital concern scale (0–1). Of all the countries studied, digital concern was lowest in Bulgaria (with a score of 0.47) and highest in the Netherlands (0.74), followed by the UK (0.73). Compared with native-born citizens, migrants reported lower levels of digital concern, and those who were in work had a lower level of digital concerns than those out of work. People with middle/high school education and those with a university degree reported greater levels of worry compared to their peers with no education or only primary school education. The researchers found that those with greater tech know-how are more concerned about the negative impacts of digitalisation, but this association is only observed among people who use digital technology on most days or on a daily basis. The findings suggest that individuals may perceive the potential harms of digitalisation as something that is beyond their control. So, the more they know about and are exposed to the issues, the more powerless and concerned they may feel. Lead author Dr Yang Hu (UCL Social Research Institute) said: “Our findings call into question the assumption that greater exposure to the digital world reduces our concern about its potential harm. “Rather than becoming desensitised, greater use of digital technology seems to heighten our concerns about it, particularly among people who have a high level of digital literacy. “Anxieties about digitalisation have become a defining feature of today’s world. As our use and understanding of technology grows, concern about its potential harm can impact individuals’ mental health and quality of life, as well as wider societal well-being. “As businesses, governments, and societies embrace new technologies, tech has become ubiquitous and digital literacy is essential for most people. The rapid development of AI is undoubtedly accelerating this process, so digital concern is not an issue that can be ignored.” Co-author Dr Yue Qian (University of British Columbia, Canada) said: “Our results reveal dual paradoxes: those who are supposedly most vulnerable to digital harms – young people, older adults, and those with a low level of digital literacy – appear least concerned about the harms, while those with advanced digital skills report the most concern. “While mainstream efforts at improving digital literacy have focused on bolstering practical skills, authorities should not ignore people’s concerns about what rapid digitalisation means for the subjective well-being of individuals and societies.”
Notes to Editors *29 European countries and Israel. For more information or to speak to the researchers involved, please contact Sophie Hunter, UCL Media Relations E: sophie.hunter@ucl.ac.uk, T: +44 7502505610 The paper will be published in on Monday 15th December, 00:01 UK time and are under a strict embargo until this time. Hu, Y., Qian, Y., (2025). Who is concerned about digitalization? The role of digital literacy and exposure across 30 countries. Information, Communication & Society. DOI 10.1080/1369118X.2025.2592771
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Journal
Information Communication & Society
Method of Research
Data/statistical analysis
Article Title
Who is concerned about digitalization? The role of digital literacy and exposure across 30 countries
Article Publication Date
15-Dec-2025
Once regarded as a utopian project, digitalisation is now letting Big Tech and superpower governments regulate the world in ominous new ways. Is rejecting the devices and technologies they control the only effective way to fight back?
National Guard soldiers look at their phones as they sit in the cargo doors of the busses being used to transport them to and from the U.S. Capitol building on January 15, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Credit: Samuel Corum via Getty Images.)
Consider four events that vividly capture the spirit of our times. In late August 2025, in the port city of Tianjin in northern China, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, and Vladimir Putin — surrounded by the heads of state of twenty-three other non-Western nations (among them Iran, Pakistan, and the Central Asian republics) — sealed an economic and strategic alliance representing roughly 36 percent of global GDP, and 40 percent of the world’s population.
The following day, in Beijing, during the celebrations marking the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II, China displayed to the world its formidable military might. Alongside ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States and annihilating its Pacific bases, the parade unveiled a new generation of digital weaponry — drones, autonomous vessels, robotic dogs, digital air defence systems, and hybrid warfare apparatuses — all crucial to prevailing on contemporary battlefields, in which China appears second to none.
Meanwhile, across the ocean at the White House, the Trumps dined with the chief executives of the great digital corporations — the Big Tech (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft) — joined by representatives from firms like Cisco, Nvidia, Oracle, and Palantir, completing the US digital ecosystem. The purpose of the dinner: to solidify the alliance between the government and the digital oligopolists, mostly rooted in Silicon Valley, whose mission is to preserve America’s wavering technological supremacy — first and foremost in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
For Big Tech, the invitation could not have been more welcome. Military expenditure has become an increasingly lucrative source of profit. The trillion dollars allocated by Trump for the new anti-missile shield — built on cutting-edge aerospace and digital technologies — marks only the latest step in a process that has seen the digital industry shift sharply away from communication, entertainment, and advertising, toward surveillance, social control, and military applications.
A symbolic counterpart to this militarisation of the digital arrives with the fourth event: on September 5, 2025, Trump renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War (DoW) — restoring the title it held in 1940, a year before the United States entered the Second World War.
Meanwhile, ongoing conflicts show no sign of abating, expanding their destructive reach. Other flashpoints ignite — between India and Pakistan, between Cambodia and Thailand — deepening geopolitical tensions and accelerating the fragmentation of the global economy. The grim toll of casualties carries with it a mounting risk of escalation, even of a nuclear kind.
The Military-Digital Complex and the New World (Dis)order
At the dawn of the internet, digitalisation was heralded as the key to unlocking the emancipatory virtues of the free market — spreading knowledge and economic opportunity, but above all ensuring peace and strengthening democracy. Today, it seems instead to be reviving old contradictions. Digitalisation has not only revolutionised how we communicate, produce, and consume; it has also fostered an unprecedented concentration of economic and technological power. Consider the market capitalisation, revenues, and profits of the US-based Big Tech firms in 2024 and 2025. In March 2025, their combined market capitalisation was three times the GDP of Germany and not far from that of the entire Euro Area ($16 trillion). In 2024, their share of profits over revenues was at 27 percent, a very high value for US companies. R&D expenditure was 13 percent of revenue.
This concentration of techno-economic power breathes new life into the theses of thinkers like Hobson and Lenin, who revealed the imperialist nature of capitalism by linking war to the expansionist strategies of the great industrial monopolies of the early twentieth century. Old contradictions — inequality, instability, and the fractures within political and institutional systems that find in war their ‘natural’ outlet — now wear a new technological mask. The clash is between two military-digital complexes, the United States and China, locked in an increasingly violent struggle for control of markets, technologies, and critical raw materials. The digital sphere has become their privileged battleground: a vast panopticon where the profit-maximising strategies of digital oligopolies (which depend on constant surveillance and the extraction of data from those — ourselves included — who rely on their services) converge with the security, geopolitical, and military objectives of their respective states.
It is a perverse alliance. Private capital monopolises infrastructures (data centres, undersea cables), technologies (cloud and AI), and knowledge — codified in the patents they accumulate or embodied tacitly within organisations, and thus inaccessible to outsiders — now indispensable for conducting virtually any social or economic activity.
The state facilitates this process and seldom resists it (though tensions and contradictions abound), caught as it is in a relationship of mutual dependency. It cannot do without the technological and infrastructural capacities of Big Tech; without them, many of its objectives — both civilian and military — would be unattainable. Nor is it eager to curb the economic power of those who control the (social) platforms where public opinion and political consensus are shaped.
Through their respective Big Tech firms, the US and Chinese governments can maintain other nations within their spheres of digital subordination — possessing ‘eyes and ears’ that deliver a constant and invaluable stream of information.
Yet, dependence runs in the opposite direction as well. For Big Tech, cultivating a stable alliance with the state is not optional — it is a matter of survival. Their profits depend on their ability to monopolise network infrastructures and the data flowing through them. Hostile regulation or moves to bring these infrastructures under state control could severely limit, or even destroy, their capacity for accumulation. The same would be true of any serious increase in taxation.
And if the global economy slows — crippled by commercial, technological, and military wars, and by pervasive uncertainty — then the state, and particularly military spending, becomes an essential lifeline for preserving profit margins.
War, moreover, offers technological opportunity. It channels massive funding into military research in fields where Big Tech already holds dominance — automated command and control systems, artificial intelligence, and autonomous weapons. Active participation in conflicts also provides an unparalleled testing ground, where new applications can be refined under extreme conditions, free from oversight or ethical constraint.
What is the relationship between economy, technology, and war? What can history and economic theory teach us about that recurring pendulum that drives technological evolution — at times toward the betterment of human life through advances in health or the environment, and at others toward the multiplication and refinement of instruments of death?
And what are the consequences of the militarisation of the dominant technological paradigm — the digital one, in our case? What explains the unprecedented power of Big Tech? Why, despite decades of evidence and political denunciation of the destructive effects of digital monopolies, has that power never been seriously challenged?
We will attempt to answer these questions by tracing the mechanisms that make contemporary society dependent on digital oligopolies.
The power of Big Tech has grown in parallel with the digitalisation of war. What, then, is the role of digital technologies in past and present conflicts? How has their partial redirection toward military goals altered the very nature of the great digital corporations? First, autonomous weapons and AI-based decision-support systems: the growing centrality of these tools carries enormous implications. It increases the leverage of Big Tech within the military-digital complex; it accelerates decision-making while narrowing the space for human intervention, heightening the risk of escalation; and it undermines the mechanisms of deterrence that, until now, have prevented nuclear confrontation.
Looking at the United States, the fusion of Big Tech and the military apparatus manifests itself not only in the vast number of contracts — most of them concerning critical infrastructures and technologies — that feed the profits of digital oligopolists, but also in the transformation of the government’s industrial and technological policy.
Private actors play an ever-growing role, and new institutions (for example, the Defence Innovation Unit, a DoD agency based in Silicon Valley to promote technology transfer from the civilian to the military domain) emerge to facilitate Big Tech’s participation in shaping research and innovation strategies. What the military establishment demands from them is speed: to accelerate the transfer of new applications from the civilian to the military domain. In exchange, Big Tech appropriates immense public resources and shields its monopolistic power.
A Chinese Military-Digital Complex?
While the United States appeared to dominate the global economy unchallenged — thanks in part to the meteoric rise of Big Tech — something equally momentous was taking place on the other side of the Pacific. China was achieving its own rapid economic and technological ascent by combining openness to international trade, strong public intervention, and long-term industrial planning. This strategy enabled Beijing to close the gap with Washington and to gain control over key production chains, including in the digital sector.
As the United States and Europe steadily eroded their own manufacturing capacity, China became the indispensable producer of most goods and components. It also became the only nation capable of building a digital ecosystem — anchored around its own Big Tech giants (Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, and Tencent) — able to compete with its American counterpart. This ecosystem, while in some ways similar — given the systemic nature of China’s Big Tech firms and their central role in developing digital infrastructures and technologies — is also profoundly different, shaped by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ability to exert direct influence over the behaviour and strategies of major corporations.
A Chinese-style military-digital complex, then? The tendencies are indeed symmetrical. As the confrontation with the United States intensifies, the bond between the CCP and firms like Alibaba and Tencent grows ever tighter. Military applications dominate China’s technological and research strategy as well, enabling it to impress its rival in crucial fields such as generative AI, quantum computing, and autonomous weaponry.
The Clash between Military-Digital Complexes
The clash between the two military-digital complexes is now open. Since the first Trump administration, the United States has implemented measures designed to hinder China’s digital rise: restrictions on the export of cutting-edge microchips (and the machinery needed to produce them), intended to slow Chinese progress; pressure on U.S. allies — including Europe — to limit the market access of Chinese tech firms; and outright confrontational acts, such as the arrest in Canada (at Washington’s request) of Huawei’s founder’s daughter. Huawei was not just any company, but the colossus that, having begun by producing elementary components for China’s telecom networks, rose in less than two decades to dominate the global networking industry — all while cultivating close ties with the security services and the People’s Liberation Army.
Trump’s return to the White House further sharpened the confrontation, though amid a general climate of uncertainty and unpredictability surrounding US strategy. The tit-for-tat that followed ‘Liberation Day’ — April 2, 2025, as Trump dubbed the day he imposed tariffs on all imports from countries with which the United States ran a trade deficit — gave a clear sense of the forces at play and of the centrality of the digital industry to the conflict. China was among the hardest hit by US tariffs (an initial 34 percent duty on Chinese imports, coupled with the abolition of exemptions that had allowed duty-free shipments under $800 — a vital mechanism for e-commerce platforms like Shein and Temu). Trump threatened to raise the tariffs even higher should Beijing retaliate.
China’s response went well beyond mere reprisal — and it had the power to shatter Washington’s coercive ambitions. With Announcement No. 18, the CCP imposed restrictions on the export of rare earths — chemical elements with unique properties that, while not scarce in the Earth’s crust, are difficult to extract and separate due to their low concentration — and on the permanent magnets that depend on them. China supplies about 90 percent of global magnet production and 60 percent of refining capacity.
These materials are indispensable for manufacturing a vast array of digital devices and are critical components in missile defence systems and next-generation fighter jets. Control over such strategic sectors — and the deep interdependence that binds the U.S. and Chinese economies more tightly than it appears — greatly strengthened China’s negotiating position. Trump, faced with this reality, backtracked: he softened his stance and initiated bilateral talks that minimised the penalties on Chinese imports. A brief exchange of blows, then — one that momentarily (new Chinese restrictions on the export of rare earth and magnets are in sight) eased tensions while highlighting the centrality of the digital industry, and its interconnected supply chains, in shaping the balance and evolution of the confrontation between the two blocs.
Europe: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
What about Europe? Caught in the crossfire between the two military-digital complexes, Europe plays the part of the fragile clay vessel among iron pots. It remains largely dependent on the United States for digital infrastructure and services. American Big Tech dominates European markets, absorbing vast amounts of data and deepening that dependence still further.
In trade negotiations, Trump makes his stance plain: any punitive measures against Big Tech will trigger retaliations against Europe. Technological dependence thus intertwines with military subordination — a condition the United States exploits coercively to keep Europe as distant from China as possible, while pushing for a European rearmament policy whose main effect is to funnel resources into, and thereby strengthen, the US military-digital complex.
Trapped within a self-defeating economic policy framework that leaves little room for industrial strategy — except when it serves the purchase of weapons — Europe contents itself with regulation. Carefully crafted measures such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and the Digital Services Act (DSA) seek to contain the power of the major digital corporations: limiting their unrestricted access to personal data, fostering competition among digital service providers, and imposing sanctions in cases of abuse of dominance.
Yet, even with such an advanced legal framework, it is difficult to imagine these measures truly shifting the balance of power. Europe lacks the technological and productive autonomy to do so. Developing capabilities comparable to those of the United States and China would require years — perhaps decades — and a level of international cooperation (especially in raw materials, components, and knowledge exchange) that is implausible in today’s climate of growing geopolitical tension. The militarisation of the digital industry diverts resources and expertise away from uses that could improve the human condition and foster global cooperation. The fusion of digital monopolies with the imperial ambitions of states deepens inequality, hollows out democracy, and increases the risk of a global conflict.
A New Faustian Pact and the Role of Social Conflicts
We are witnessing a new Faustian pact — one that is driving the planet toward a perilous precipice. The arms race serves to consolidate the monopolistic profits of Big Tech (and of other corporations, particularly the traditional arms manufacturers, eager to claim their share of the swelling tide of military spending). To preserve those profits, the great digital corporations support belligerent strategies and do not hesitate to participate directly in military and intelligence operations.
The state, in turn, cannot do without its financial, infrastructural, and technological capacities. For that reason, it refrains from challenging their monopolies and tolerates the deepening dependence on tools controlled by Big Tech.
How can we counter this Faustian pact? How can we ensure that digital technologies are used for purposes other than social control and the destruction of people and things, as is happening in Ukraine and Palestine? A glimmer of hope emerges from the gradual convergence of fights against war and the militarisation of society with struggles aimed at improving living and working conditions against the concentration of capitalist power. There are engineers at Alphabet and Amazon who oppose the development of military applications. There are activists attempting to occupy Microsoft data centres where data and algorithms used by the Israeli army are stored. Chris Smalls, head of the Amazon Labour Union, participated in the Freedom Flotilla mission to Gaza, aiming to break the military blockade and deliver humanitarian aid to the exhausted population. These episodes are far from disrupting the workings of the military–digital complex. However, they do at least testify to a growing awareness of the close link between the concentration of economic power, the struggle between oligopolists to acquire raw materials, technologies and markets, and the increasing militarisation of society.
At an individual level, tackling the military–digital complex requires us to adopt a critical approach to the technologies and devices we use. Rejecting the total surveillance imposed by Big Tech by critically engaging with (or rejecting, where appropriate) tools such as social media, which often contribute directly to the spread of social pathologies and the commodification of public spaces, is essential to safeguarding social justice and democratic viability. It is also a way to prevent the race towards new and more devastating conflicts from becoming inevitable.
This essay is part of Alameda Institute’s After Order project, examining the transformations of sovereignty during our catastrophic times.
Contributors
Dario Guarascio is an associate professor of economic policy at the Sapienza University of Rome.
