Posthuman Capitalism

Dancing with Data in the Digital Economy

Yasmin Ibrahim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000397543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Posthuman Capitalism critically reviews the manifestation of capitalist agenda online by examining the phenomenon of the 'posthuman' in the data economy.

The chapters examine our posthuman condition, where we are constantly asked to partake in platforms which perform to capitalist agenda while socializing us into new platforms of living, consuming and interacting online. Labelling these modes of our experiential extractions, transactions and re-making of our mortal lives as posthuman capitalism, the book reviews the human entanglements from sociality, friendship, desire, memory, transgressions of privacy and co-production of value through the data economy.

Offering innovative and interdisciplinary conceptualisations and vantage points on our contemporary data society, this book will be a key text for scholars and students in the areas of digital media, communication studies, sociology, philosophy and social psychology.

1
Posthumanism and the data economy

Dancing with data

Introduction

Gilles Deleuze (1988) in examining the finite characteristic of modern social formations asserts that the flow of forces has given rise to the ‘unlimited-finite’ – a state in which beings are neither conceived in a perfect form nor opacity. The posthuman is one such entity. Neither completely human nor entirely machine, this hybridised posthuman as a conflicted being is in a perpetual state of transcendence, of space, of materiality, of memory and of consciousness. In a state of being incessantly altered and reworked yet dis-embodied and affectively configured through the substrates of the technical (visible and invisible). Combining the autonomous subject with automaticity, the posthuman binds human vulnerabilities with non-human agencies of the machine. Juxtaposed against this is the digital economy in which capital’s schizophrenic tendencies¹ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) are masked by valourising data science within rationalist and positivist or market-centred imperatives of remaking and remodelling the world, invoking data as imbued with prophetic and revelatory powers to reorder our social realities. In the digital economy, data is characterised as mundane in its pervasive occurrence online, yet euphoric for its immanent potency in offering new truth regimes. Our social imaginary about big data propels fervent efforts to integrate this as a centric aspect of calibrated decision-making and strategic intelligence in the digital economy. Equally it is about birthing the sensuous human from data configurations, quantifying culture and human engagements while intimately co-locating automaticity with the somatic. Ordaining cultural and commercial life with capital’s new measures, modes of accounting, auditing, logs while fusing these with the occluded logic of quantum machines and covert algorithms. Speed and frenetic computing merge seamlessly with anxiety-ridden lifeworlds.

The data economy and the human as inextricably and incestuously bound in the age of the digital pledges our consciousness, subjectivity and mortality to the realm of machines to extend, reconfigure and repossess (or re-occupy) in immaterial modes. The human psyche and human condition in terms of its moral depravity, loneliness, curiosity, latent desires and its crisis with the self are reabsorbed as data and profiles in the digital economy. If capitalism always worked ferociously and seductively within a libidinal economy (Deleuze and Guattari 1980), this digital posthuman economy is about the mechanisms and processes which surveil, monitor, observe interlocking human tendencies with digital architectures converting human into data assemblages and its residues released as data shadows and footprints. In the process, it produces a moral economy onto itself aggregated from offline norms and new rules emerging in the human dynamics of ‘platformed’ capital and the mundane pervasiveness of data as imbued with the hidden logic to unlock markets and its consumer orientations. The movement of the human reconfigured within the architecture of the digital and its spheres of conversion into (and transactions of) data is to consign and congeal the human as ‘post-’ in these chronotopic transformations. Presence and movements are constantly captured and simultaneously converted into patterns, profiles, cues or data whereby they are transacted and reconfigured in a wider economy to which humans may not be directly privy to; invisible economies (i.e. as imperceptible forces or ‘ghosts’ or as algorithmic logic) by which the human is abstracted into industrial operations and within the articulations of ‘big data’ versus personalisation.

In such a configuration, the human (as data) rebounds through the processes of remaking herself as a metaphysical entity while being complicit as an agent of change in the data economy. As such, these modes of conversion (i.e. human into data) may not entirely be comprehensible in terms of surveillance or data governance per se (yet an intimate relationship is forged with organic/cognitive and ambient intelligence), signalling otherworldly and machinic processes working in tandem with the human condition and our transcendence into the virtual realm as the fragmented subject negotiating the material and virtual worlds and its convergence (Clough 2000). Technologies and virtual realms including simulated worlds provide modes to enact the self and our social realities, invoking ‘processes of subjectivation’ (Foucault 1992) in which the self in its entangled and mutable form is reconstituted, defying the imagination of the self as a static entity and given over to agility and fluidity. Its comingling with the social, economic and psychic blurs boundaries constantly between our agencies and desires with those supplanted with and by machines (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). Posthumanism thrives on this intense disorientation as a formless and fluid configuration of processes which can be both imperceptible and invisible in the data economy without foreclosing the existence of synthetic of ambient intelligence released within this ecology. The posthuman has been constructed as an entity blurring oppositional realms between the synthetic and biological/organic, and between reality and fiction (Clough 2000; Poster 2006; Rikowski 2003; Hardt and Negri 2000).

Posthuman capitalism is then the reassemblage of other spheres of human life and activities not directly assessed as productive (Vandenberghe 2008; Deleuze and Guattari 1980) aligning these with the extractive tendencies of capital and its predilection for accumulation of wealth and value in its primitive modes. It’s defined by the enmeshing of the productive with the pleasurable, and the accrual of affective and immaterial labour, rendering these within the architecture of data extraction and traffic measurements, and the infusion of somatic technologies into the movements of the human into spheres which were initially imagined as free of governments and the tyranny of capital. The human swims within these extractive, empiricist machinic/human co-operative assemblages to instil her human quest and endeavours while being complicit in the libidinal economy of capital, merging her desires with that of capital to remediate her and her sense of agency within its own modes of seduction and rituals of commodification in retaining the human as welded to this enterprise. With the datafication of heterogeneous and rhizomatic realms and lives, though overwhelming in its ability to reconfigure the human and her actions on a global scale, and though there may be a suggestion to remake the world through digital’s pace, speed and ubiquity, human creativity and resistance can manifest with and through the digital architectures and data economy, through its technical substrates. Positioning resistance within and without. As a mutable and turbulent terrain, the digital virtual sphere infuses us with the unanticipated such that machines and machinic interpretations will not strictly adhere to what they are designed to do. The posthuman emerges and inhabits the realms of the ‘chaosmatic’ arrangement of capitalist agenda in digital platform,² alongside its ‘slippages’. If capital moves into lifeworld to colonise life itself (Vandenberghe 2008: 878) and cultural life (Rifkin 2001), it equally sutures and creates alternate virtual spheres which merge with our everyday life; spheres which warrant constant affective labour and human engagements in feeding and sustaining this data economy. Beyond the enslavement by the megamachine of slavery which Mumford (1967) asserts or Guattari’s (2015) notion of enslavement applied to cybernetic revolution, human production of culture within platforms is not emptied out in terms of the agency, resistance and subversion of the human.

Machines, like humans, will transgress despite the best intentions of their creators, designers and programmers. They can evolve differentially creating slippages between the intent and agenda of its genesis and their ultimate manifestations producing a divergence due to their adaptation and appropriation into sociocultural environments. Their unanticipated transgressions from their conception will entail machines veering from their intended functionality, revealing new possibilities, risks and uncertainties induced by badly instructed machines without completely thwarting its intrinsic project to anticipate the human or the interiorisation of social control (Deleuze and Guattari 1980), in the modes of the everyday life. Machines may prevail within renewed modes of experimentation and refinement. The human, however, will prevail through her resilience and spirituality despite her fatigue with the machinic bind, enmeshing cultural formations to the terrestrial and digital, and eliciting natural human tendencies through the machinic. It is within this dialectical bind of testing the limits of the machine and the human while intensely enmeshed and tethered to each other that the digital economy renews itself or perhaps at times reluctantly changes its rules of engagement. Adaptations occur in both the human and machine with the latter morphing to the demands of the capital, the former being complicit in terms of its own crisis with the self in postmodernity and in terms of her quest for meaning and identity in an alienating world, refracted into alternate spheres of the virtual. The human immerses herself within substrates of the technical to mimic its consciousness, and in terms of the mediations of design and interface, through mnemonic memory, cloud storage and synthetic intelligence³ which have a retentive tendency with data and a mechanism to transform human movements equally into data and traffic. If neuroscience transformed the body from an anatomical entity which engages in familiar patterns of action with other bodies, such a vantage point also positioned the body in a transactional mode with an external world of sense-making with these interactions contributing to the amorphousness of human culture. In such a formulation the transcendence of the body from anatomical structure to the living body or ‘the “Leib” of phenomenology’ (Husserl 2012) taken as ‘a dweller and co-maker of life-worlds’ (Streeck 2015: 422) inadvertently induced a realm which capital sought to not only absorb but also co-produce in enacting its rituals of intimacy and proximity.

I characterise the ‘machinic bind’ as the intense intimatisation and corporealisation of technologies with the human, testing the limits of experimentation and transgressions unleashing innovative interplays with the ‘superstructure’ (Marx 1873 a). In specific terms, it is the movement of machine logic (and data mining) into spheres of human experience to abstract affective labour and data which would unleash a plethora of intense co-habitation between the two. The ubiquity of this condition then transmutes the human through the sociotechnical substrates and its intrinsic mutations; reframing human interactions and the ‘social’ in terms of the bias of convergent mobile technologies, and platforms and its propensity towards publicness and instantaneity. With the machinic bind despite its intimacy with the human there is alienation in the ways in which data is abstracted and used for a wider economy inducing distance in this transaction. The social sphere is redrafted through the bias of a technical architecture which emphasises mimesis, interactivity, reciprocity and generativity as social engagement. Data enters into interpretive hermeneutics to release value from its original modes of extractions co-located with the agenda and movement of capital. Emotional and invisible labour is inextricably implicated in augmenting products and services, emphasising the increased alienation between labour, surplus value and the final iteration of a product or service in the marketplace. There is manual human processing involved in making machines ‘smart’. Hence behind every ‘intelligent’ machine emerges a low-waged human (Day et al. 2019) within permutations of radically ‘flexibilised’ labour and its casualisation. Within a data retentive architecture, inequalities become re-inscribed (DiMaggio et al. 2004) and intelligence redrafted through algorithms and machine learning to mimic and retain pre-existing human tendencies projecting and ingraining the ideological as well as degrees of deep-seated bias and prejudice. This cybernetic revolution folds within a retentive memory and entrenched inequalities, inducing jouissance, adducing precarity and vulnerabilities in entrenching the human figure as a generative entity in building next-generation platforms, apps and syncing machines.

To partake in the digital economy is to enter into a transactional mode in which the human imbibes some of the tendencies and fantasies of the machinic mode (Hardt and Negri 2000; Guattari 2015) and vice versa, blurring the active interplay with capital and its tryst with the posthuman. A mode in which machines learn to be more human, masking their agenda of claiming the human body and senses such that they are inside the everyday life and human affectivity, morphing into human biorhythms while remaking space and temporal spheres in postmodernity; of distance and proximity, or intimacy and disconnection. Entering intimate domains of the human in the realms of the everyday life and its relationship with technologies producing a biopower that is constantly recalibrated by reading and interpreting the human in its modes of social control through technological mediation. This adaptation is not a perfect system and within these slippages and voids between human and machine, the digital as a transgressive entity lumbers with the frailties of constantly throwing out new ethical and moral challenges mediating human engagement with a hyper-connected world and its virtual marketplaces in which everything can be transacted particularly the human form and the abstraction of disembodied labour. This machinic bind opens up new ethical challenges compounded by the lack of clear resolutions to resolve existing and entrenched human vulnerabilities.⁴

In this phase of posthuman capitalism fervent exchanges foreground the relationship between woman and machine and equally in the reconfiguration of the public and private realms as neither distinct nor dichotomised. Capitalism activates its operational agenda through this intimacy with humankind and the extrapolation of anxieties, angst, subjectivity, identity and desires against an absurd world where there is a constant quest to find meaning in the unstable and mutable virtual realm. Enmeshing with the human, technologies and its virulent copulation to produce data and data subjects, capitalism thrives both in the productive cultural spheres of human life while priming other spheres to feed into these as generative realms. With spaces of leisure and work coalescing in the digital sphere, distinct categorisations between work and leisure dissipate while registering the digital realm as one in which labour will accrue intensively in multitudes.

This world of libidinal fears, anxieties and desires which the human inhabits and the intense infiltration of silent, active ‘listening’ and ‘syncing’ or convergent biotechnologies into everyday life is about the intimate re-modulation of capital with the precarious form of the human as a site of intense data experimentation and as a site of observing and learning. Or rather capital’s domestication of the human within programmatic modes of technologies in eliciting compliance and in patterning everyday lifeworlds. Capital ingests these forms to experiment with its insatiable desires. To infuse and reinvent its presence, filtering and entering into new platforms which promise constant connectivity, instant gratification, voyeurism and communion as well as possibilities to remake the ‘self’ as the basis of this posthuman capitalism (Ibrahim 2018). The human’s constant engagements with these platforms inculcates the human in nocturnal mode, extending the attention economy, scrambling waking hours and sleep patterns to divert these back to platformed communication and reciprocity online. This frenetic recombining of sociality, interactivity and connectivity in generating vast amounts of data, and in revealing cultural norms and patterns in human transactions, valourise the act of sharing as a ‘virtue’ and in compliance with platform economics which underpins its logic and rationality in the acts of sharing in garnering human attention and the production of rhizomatic networks and assemblages. This data economy watches the human fortified in its facility to monitor through technologies of vision, and technologies which project the ‘self’ back to itself, domesticating everyday life not only to extend the ‘Panopticanism’ of postmodernity, where watching can happen anywhere, but also to turn humans into specimens and prototypes that machines can learn from and refine, to arrive at social cues and to induce with affective triggers before the human has arrived. The machine anticipates the human even before her arrival into patterns of behaviour. The human pledged into a process of ‘becoming’ is intensely engaged with machines which seek to pred...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Posthumanism and the data economy: dancing with data
• 2 Sociality, sharing and the sensorium of data: our trysts with turbulent data empires
• 3 The ghost in the ‘digital’ machine: memory and machine logic in the digital age
• 4 Is anyone listening?: Alexa is and so is another human
• 5 Surveillance and facial recognition: algorithms and the faciality of racism
• 6 The malls that don’t sleep: consumption, desire and the attention economy
• 7 Resistance and the fragmented subject: the human will prevail
• Index