November 15, 2025 – How much does cognitive warfare cost? Fernando Buen Abad analyzes the cost of capitalism’s cognitive warfare: media manipulation, military budgets, ecological damage and mental colonization, a critique of global domination.
Its cognitive warfare is the most sophisticated, dangerous, and expensive form of domination that capitalism has invented so far. It is not perpetrated solely with tanks or rifles, although it prepares and legitimizes them; it is not measured only in conquered territories, but in captured subjectivities; it is not counted solely in immediate fatalities, but in generations colonized by ideologies and practices that accept exploitation, inequality, alienation, and plunder as natural.
The cost of cognitive warfare is not simply the money invested by media monopolies, cultural industries, or digital platforms. It is a multifaceted, multidimensional cost: economic, political, cultural, semiotic, and anthropological. All of humanity pays the price: in stolen work hours, in shattered imaginaries, in distorted common sense, in lives turned into commodities. Questioning the cost of cognitive warfare requires dismantling its mechanisms, understanding its logic, and revealing the hidden accounts that the system attempts to conceal.
Their cognitive warfare costs as much as the global machinery that sustains it. It begins with the physical infrastructure: satellites, submarine cables, servers, data centers, hardware, software, algorithms, armies of engineers and programmers working for transnational corporations, often under extremely precarious conditions, to feed platforms whose core business is capturing attention and manipulating behavior. It costs as much as the colossal budgets of the military and intelligence agencies that have made information manipulation a frontline warfare strategy. Just look at NATO reports, which for a decade have explicitly recognized “cognitive warfare” as a decisive battleground, where the human mind is the “battlefield” and social perception is the “territory to be conquered.”
In economic terms, the calculations are monumental. The major digital platforms alone—Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple—allocate hundreds of billions of dollars to research, development, and infrastructure that, while presented as technological innovation, also function as cognitive weapons. The monetization of personal data, the creation of psychological profiles, and the modeling of behavior through artificial intelligence are not isolated expenses; they constitute a political economy of manipulation. And it is society as a whole that pays the price, with its time transformed into free raw material, with its expropriated privacy, with its thoughts directed toward obedience or distraction.
There is an even greater political cost. Entire governments can be overthrown or neutralized through cognitive warfare operations that combine fake news, big data, micro-targeted propaganda, poll manipulation, the industrial production of bots and trolls, hate campaigns, and the sensationalization of fear. The so-called “Arab Spring,” the attempted soft coups in Latin America, and the lawfare processes against progressive leaders are all part of this tally. Cognitive warfare costs nations their sovereignty. Every time a country relinquishes control over its telecommunications, its cultural production, or its education system, it surrenders a piece of its cognitive freedom.
There is also a semiotic cost, which, in turn, is measured by the degradation of the sign. Cognitive warfare adulterates symbols, wears them down, and empties them of emancipatory content. Words like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights” are turned into export commodities by powerful nations, while their instrumental use to justify wars, sanctions, blockades, and genocides is concealed. The cost is the impoverishment of language, a humanity forced to think with adulterated words, with poisonous metaphors, with standardized images that foreclose the possibility of meaning in other ways.
Its cognitive warfare also comes at a humanistic cost. Cognitive capitalism produces fragmented subjectivities, inflated egos, extreme individualism, and widespread loneliness. The price is paid in entire generations trapped by screens, incapable of critical reading, conditioned for immediacy, instant gratification, and compulsive consumption. It is paid in the ongoing infantilization of audiences, treated as passive consumers of banal entertainment that normalizes violence, sexism, racism, and xenophobia. It is paid in the naturalization of digital surveillance, accepted as an inevitable price for technological convenience.
Their cognitive warfare also costs human lives. Although their weapons are invisible, their consequences are deadly. The media bombardment that prepares for “conventional” wars is part of the price; the invasions of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yugoslavia were preceded by global disinformation campaigns that portrayed the aggressors as saviors. Thousands of lives were sacrificed in the name of false narratives. Cognitive warfare costs as much as every corpse produced by information manipulation. And there is also an ecological cost: the technological infrastructure that sustains cognitive warfare consumes colossal amounts of energy, produces toxic electronic waste, depletes minerals and water, and devours indigenous territories where lithium, coltan, and rare earth elements are extracted to manufacture devices. Every smartphone transformed into a cognitive weapon has behind it a devastated landscape and an impoverished community. The environmental cost is inseparable from the ideological cost.
Hence, the fight against cognitive warfare cannot be limited to denouncing it or tallying its costs. It is necessary to build alternative communicational, pedagogical, and cultural frameworks. We need a People’s Communicational General Staff, capable of articulating media, networks, universities, cultural collectives, and social movements to contest meaning, dismantle manipulation operations, reclaim critical discourse, and restore its transformative power. Cognitive warfare costs as much as the passivity of those who fail to confront it. The full price of cognitive warfare is not just an astronomical number in dollars; it is the suffering of humanity trapped in a hostile symbolic order. And yet, the greatest cost would be borne by capitalism if the people awaken, if the victims of cognitive manipulation decide to organize and contest historical meaning. At that moment, the cost would become a revolutionary investment, recovered consciousness a material force, historical memory a weapon for the future, and emancipatory semiotics a horizon of freedom.
According to official figures from the U.S. Department of Defense, $11.6 billion was allocated in fiscal year 2023 alone to “Information Operations” (IO) and “Cyber Command” programs, areas directly linked to cognitive warfare. This is in addition to the budgets of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which in 2022 allocated $3.8 billion to projects involving neurotechnology, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic influence systems. These figures reveal that cognitive warfare is no longer a marginal aspect of military spending; it has become a strategic front with resources comparable to those of the air force or navy.
The global market for digital surveillance and the monetization of personal data—the economic foundation of cognitive warfare—reached an estimated value of $226 billion in 2022, according to Statista. It is projected to exceed $400 billion by 2030, with an annual growth rate of 6.9%. This business is not limited to digital advertising; it underpins political micro-targeting, social engineering, and the large-scale manipulation of perceptions. Every recorded “like,” every second of attention, every click is transformed into economic value and a potential cognitive weapon.
Energy costs are also staggering. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centers and transmission networks consume approximately 3.7% of global electricity (2022), and this percentage is projected to reach 8% by 2030. Google’s server farms alone consume an average of 15.4 terawatt-hours annually, an amount of energy comparable to the electricity consumption of entire countries like Ecuador. Behind every digital interaction lies an ecological footprint that forms part of the hidden cost of cognitive warfare.
In the media sphere, concentrated ownership multiplies social costs. The 2023 Media Ownership Monitor report revealed that in Latin America, 80% of the population consumes news content produced by just 10 media conglomerates. In Brazil, for example, Grupo Globo controls 51% of the television market. This concentration not only represents control of the agenda and discourse, but also a cognitive warfare economy where monopolies invest millions in the production and distribution of propaganda disguised as information.
The political-electoral dimension reveals another facet of the costs. The Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed that, in the 2016 US presidential election, the company collected data from at least 87 million Facebook profiles, investing over $15 million in micro-targeted propaganda campaigns. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 election was accompanied by a network of over 100,000 automated accounts (bots) that spread fake news on WhatsApp and Twitter, with an estimated $12 million in opaque funding. The democratic cost is incalculable; it is the price of governments installed not by the critical will of the people, but by algorithms of mass manipulation.
Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez is a Mexican by birth (Mexico City, 1956) and a specialist in Philosophy of the Image, Philosophy of Communication, Cultural Criticism, Aesthetics, and Semiotics. He is currently the Director of the Sean MacBride University Center for Information and Communication and of the Institute of Culture and Communication at the National University of Lanús.
