In this incisive deconstruction, José Pérez de Lama explores how the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution—popularized by Klaus Schwab and embraced by Silicon Valley—functions as a techno-political narrative that masks the persistence of extractive, neocolonial, and precarious systems. Far from heralding a new emancipatory era, the revolution is shown to reproduce the same material logics of control, inequality, and environmental degradation as its predecessors. The article meticulously contrasts the fantasy of digitized, decentralized progress with the grounded realities of labor exploitation, planetary resource exhaustion, and algorithmic governance. Drawing from critical theory, STS (science and technology studies), and posthumanist philosophy, Pérez de Lama reveals how the “revolution” is less a rupture than a rhetorical innovation, a narrative device to legitimate new forms of capitalist accumulation under the guise of transformation. The critique is not anti-technology per se, but calls for political imagination and situated practices that resist technocratic fatalism and reclaim technoscience for democratic and ecological purposes. Rather than passively accept disruptive innovation, the author urges scholars and activists to recode the future by re-grounding technological discourse in material realities, collective agency, and socio-environmental justice.
Pérez de Lama, J. (2016) ‘La Cuarta Revolución Industrial. Un relato desde el materialismo ecológico y la ciencia política’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 6(2), pp. 47–67.
