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The autonomists, most notably Negri31 and Virno32, were the first to recognize the centrality of the general intellect to capitalist production and also the first to see this as a kind of commons, a collective wealth which is created by all and shared by all. Marazzi writes that “The common is the entire knowledge, understandings, informa- tion, images, affects and social relations that are strategically subject to the production of goods33”. Similarly, Raunig observes that “The ambivalence of the General Intellect consists in that it has become a reality, to a certain extent, in post-Fordism, yet not simply as control of the many over their working and living conditions, but rather also as a volorization of cooperation and even of thinking.34” The easy availability of communication technology has rapidly led to our current situation, one in which the thoughts, ideas, knowledge and social relations of our society now have the potential to be freely shared by all, creating a rich commons of knowledge. Yet this within this transformation lies a cruel paradox: as more and more human knowledge and activity migrates online, our shared general intellect, less and less of it can be found outside of the digital world. While it is clear that there still exist many spheres of economic and social relations which will always be able to resist being subsumed within the digital, the trend is clear. This signals a seismic shift towards a homogeneous and universal pool of information, one at risk of new forms of restriction and enclosure, akin to other forms of commons found in earlier periods of our history.

Bifo’s recent book AND: Phenomenology of the End deals with processes of subjectivation which, through communication, information technology, and the government of signs, determine our modes of life and affect the political conjuncture. His central argument emerges from describing the transition from a world in which the relation between bodies and signs was processed through sensitivity (a conjunctional concatenation) to a regime in which we only operate with already codified signs, and with combinations that have already been pre-established by a prior compatibility (connective concatenation). This transformation follows the recent virtual revolution in semiocapitalism, in which capital is valorized through the production of signs, that is due both to a technological transformation and an ontological rupture. This transformation and ontological rupture consist of the sign’s aspiration of autonomy in relation to its referent (in language, the link between the signifier/signified, and in finances the link between money/labor). In other words the human animal suffers the consequences of their actions over the environment – the infosphere which is populated with information flows which circulate at a vertiginous speed – that they have irreversibly modified and to which now they only aspire to adapt. The infinite emission of information becomes incompatible with the capacity of the individual and social brain to receive/metabolize, it becomes impossible for the human brain. This transformation of the environment is thus inseparable from an anthropological mutation that the author describes both from the perspective of new technological patterns and from that of the new power of finance and the pathologies that subjects suffer. The digital revolution disrupts the way in which the body is connected to signs, to the detriment of sensitivity, (tactile) sensoriality, and sensuality (pleasure-pain). That is, the loss of all the components that produce empathy. General desensitization neutralizes the critical power of culture and annuls the availability of the necessary time for erotic bonds, without which there is neither individual happiness nor the capacity to articulate counterpowers. This regeneration of sensitivity – in parallel to the loss of the sense of history – is not, however, for Bifo the effect of technological development on its own, but rather the conditions established by large capitalist corporations for this development.

The main focus of accelerationism should be shifted from the act of acceleration itself to ‘what is accelerated’, because if acceleration coincides with the dissipative or energetic economy of the organism, then it is simply a restricted project. Why? Because what is accelerated is the very economical form of binding which is determined by the exorbitant source of energy but is unsuccessfully adopted by the organism as an affordable yet traumatic consumptive solution that inscribes circuitous paths for dissipating into that exorbitant index of exteriority (whether it is the exorbitant truth of extinction or the sun). As Freud argues, dissipative regression into the exorbitant or traumatizing bedrock of the originary is numerically monistic and functionally exclusivist by nature. The conservative organism does not have any choice regarding binding or not binding the exorbitant source of energy since the binding is unilaterally imposed by the exorbitant index of exteriority. However, the way binding is effectuated corresponds to the conservative economy of the organism according to which the exorbitant index of exteriority must be afforded by the organism in order to circuitously transform the unbindable excess into conservable yet dissipative – at an accelerative rate – energetic spaces (umwegen). Accordingly, the exorbitant exteriority (extinction, sun, …) is inexorably bound but only in a way that is affordable by and for the organism. This is why the organism is inherently vulnerable to traumas: Traumatic binding of the exorbitant exteriority is not as much an ‘unsuccessful binding’ because it is energetically unbindable as it is unsuccessful because such an index of exorbitant energy should be economically afforded by the organism and correspond to the consumptive-dissipative rate dictated by the organic economy. Therefore, although the exorbitant index of exteriority is bound, this binding never naturally happens outside of the economical correlation with the organism. The aim of all life is death but dying (binding death) happens only in a way that the interiorized expression of life can afford. This affordable way of dying registers itself as an economical correlation between the organism and the exorbitant index of exteriority. And it is this economical correlation that manifests itself as the dissipative rate of the organism. Since this economical binding or affordable correlation is energetically dissipative, it tends to generate new energetic spaces, that is to say, it moves toward emergentic processes and increasing complexification on semi-stable, local and transient levels. Landian accelerationism – especially by adhering to an escalated technocapitalism – seeks to intensify this dissipative rate that simultaneously coincides with an intelligenic complexification and the dissolution of organic conservatism on behalf of an exorbitant index of exteriority (viz. capitalism as an off-planet or planet-consuming event). However, as argued, the dissipative rate is energetically conceived as an economical (and hence, restricted) correlation; its existence is dictated by the exorbitant index of exteriority but its modi operandi are conditioned by the affordability of the interiorized horizon of the organism.

“Let’s begin with the motif of territorialising. As previously noted, Army of the Dead frames its Alpha zombies within a quasi-Hobbesian state of nature. This is, obviously, not simply an anthropological projection of what happens when the human form gives in to violent lawlessness and cannibalistic aggression; any more than Hobbes’ account of the state of nature in the seventeenth century was. In fact, the very persuasiveness of Hobbes’ argument of the need for societal agreement is rooted in slippages between metaphors, analogies and experienced reality. This is no better illustrated than when what was effectively a thought experiment coincided with European expansion into the ‘New World’, where colonists encountered ‘natives’ who appeared, largely due to their ignorance of European farming methods, to be enacting the very state Hobbes had described. In this way, and to different ends, both Hobbes and Zach Snyder have assembled a set of relations in order to pull together contemporary anxieties of violence and the loss of culture with universalistic concerns around reason, intellect and right. Both find their experiments in pre- and post-society reified within broader narratives, whether this be European colonial conquest or vigilante riots.¶ The difference is “that in Hobbes’ time the issue really was spatial territory. Today, territorialisation is superseded by the fundamental precarity of what Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi describes as ‘the knowledge society’ of late capitalism. For Berardi, this precarity refers ‘to the fragmentation of time and the unceasing deterritorialization of the factors of social production’ (Berardi 2012, p.117). This is rooted in the shift to the post-industrial knowledge society in the late 60s and 70s, a shift marked by ‘technological transformations’ which ‘displaced the focus from the sphere of the production of material goods towards the sphere of semiotic goods: the info-sphere’ (2009b, p.44). Capitalism in its historical sense, as the production and exchange of material goods, was replaced with semio-capitalism, the production and exchange of signs. Under such conditions: “Both labor and capital…no longer have a stable relation to territory or community. Capital flows in the financial circuits, and enterprise is no longer based on territorialised material assets, but on signs, ideas, information, knowledge, and linguistic exchange. Enterprise is no longer linked to territory and the work process is no longer based on a community of workers…but instead takes the form of an ever-changing recombination of time fragments connected in the global network. (Berardi 2012, pp.117-18)¶ If Snyder’s film makes much of the difference between the high-tech capabilities of the global world outside Las Vegas and the mythological primitives within, this serves to emphasise the anomaly of focusing on the dangerously stupid as a spatialised, bounded group at precisely the time that the basis of such a grouping is based on the ever-changing recombination of ‘signs, ideas, information, knowledge and linguistic exchange’ rather than the solidity of, say, a fixed community. Consider, for example, the hybrid monstrosity created from mass data collection embedded within information technology, storing the extensive contents of our lives, mutated into simplistic collectives. After Brexit, this meant both ad hominem stereotypes – ‘convinced that they were right “Remainers were very much inclined to regard people who voted Leave as being old, white, under-educated stupid and racist’ (Mills, 2019, p.73) – and newfound populations such as the often-discussed ‘left behind’. This latter group emerged as a shorthand for some kind of primitive instinct-response by those incapable of strategic thought; a shorthand that, as Rafael Behr noted, ‘resonates as an analysis of social and political trends’ but ‘has become a convenient affliction projected on to diverse voters by politicians who need simple answers to complex questions’ (Behr, 2017). The left behind worked as a group because it drew on the territorialised distance between not only the economically downtrodden and the well-off, but also the inarticulate and the writers and policymakers looking for decisive answers to how Brexit happened. When Guy Standing (2018) warned that the ‘notion of “left behind” implies a static situation, which is misleading’, this is not just in an economic sense, but also in the way that the sense-making cynicism of post-Brexit analysis established itself in terms of intellectual territory: territories which no longer reflect the circulation of information and enterprise, but are nevertheless formed through particular figures and motifs with a longer culture resonance.¶ Such figures are not limited to the zombie, the racist or the socially and economically alienated. If the flow of capital creates complexities in the traditional groups of “economic and social grouping, then the models of the intellectual expert are not exempt from this. Indeed, under the conditions of semio-capitalism, the intellect becomes the key commodity: the shift to immaterial ideas, signs and knowledge creates a tension between the ideal figure of critical knowledge who spreads truth freely and universally, and the guardian of intellectual property who prevents the circulation of knowledge in order to retain its value.¶ However, rhetorically speaking the latter still depends on the former. As Berardi argues, the view of intellectual activity within the economy – such as in Marx’s discussion of the ‘general intellect’ in the Grundrisse – is that which can separate itself as independent from social conditions. ‘As the bearer of a universal human rationality, the enlightened intellectual can be considered as the social determination of Kant’s “I think”. The intellectual is the guarantor of a thought freed from any boundaries, the expression of a universally human rationality’ (Berardi 2009a, p.30). This form of enlightenment required a space ostensibly outside of social conditions, such as the traditional model of the university (Fisher, 2021, p.132). To observe the problem of sustaining such a model, one need only think of how every year the media produces stories about academic grades getting easier or harder and university entries rising or falling (given they will never stay the same, this is a perpetual motion machine of journalism),”¶ “along with the usual scoffing about ‘dumbing down’ and ‘joke degrees’. But in many cases, what are described as ‘joke’ or ‘unnecessary’ degrees are the product of years of struggle for professional recognition, such as in childcare, nursing or social work. They are, in effect, a testament to the currency of intelligence – or, at least, signifiers of intelligence, such as accredited degrees – in the development of late-capitalist economies. Boaventura de Sousa Santos thus refers to this as ‘university capitalism’: the production of ‘a commodity whose market value derives from its capacity to create other market values’ (2018, p.272). At the same time, the vocational nature of such degrees means that the expansion of the general intellect sits in tension between, on the one hand, the enhanced cognitive training of higher degrees, and on the other hand a quagmire of professional learning outcomes which replace the ‘universally human rationality’ Kant may have envisaged.”

At the end of the acceleration cycle, extinction looms. Beyond the pandemic threshold we enter a period of exhaustion: not only have our physical energies been drained by the virus, but nervous energy has waned, abruptly breaking the rhythm of social mobilisation. At the economic level the demand is in free fall not only because consumers are forced to stay home but also because of the deflation of consumerist excitement. This collective excitement has deteriorated, and this is not merely an economic deflation; it is the cause of the persistent economic downturn. The recession is the outcome of a psychological disinvestment, the consequence of a widespread withdrawal of desire. This downturn brings about a conceptual reconfiguration of the very concept of Future: first of all we should disentangle the concept of future (and also the psychological tension towards future) from the expectations of growth, expansion and acceleration, which shaped the concept of future in modern culture and imagination. Although the widespread consciousness and perception of this deflation of future is an effect of the abrupt interruption provoked by the lockdown, we should not forget that deflation was already underway. For at least two decades before the pandemic, the fact that expansion was nearing its end for non-economic reasons (environment, mental suffering) was obvious to every thinking person on the planet, with the noticeable exception of economists. Expansion grows impossible when the physical limits of the world and the neurological limits of the brain have been reached. Since that point on, the acceleration of the rhythm of communication and life has a destructive effect on the social mind, as the nervous system is disturbed by permanent hyperstimulation. The neoliberal cycle, which lasted around four decades, was essentially an attempt in postponing the big psycho-deflation and deferring the economic stagnation by the acceleration of mental productivity (nervous exploitation) and the devaluation of physical productivity (low salaries, precariousness). Extractivism of the physical resources of the planet and of the nervous resources of the brain has been the neoliberal reaction to the tendential fall in the rate of profit, but it has rapidly brought about the exhaustion of physical and nervous resources. The virus obliged the reluctant authorities of the world to accept the evidence: the age of expansion is over. They do not dare to recognise this apertis verbis, of course. But they are paralysed, or panicking, as the truth has been exposed: capitalism is dead. Now our cultural task is to think future out of the conceptual framework of expansion. Decoupling the concept of future from the expectation of expansion and acceleration means getting free from the framework of capitalism. But the separation of production from accumulation, of the useful from exchange value, of pleasure from consumption is unthinkable. Escaping from the capitalist frame implies the reactivation of a social energy of solidarity that seems unachievable after forty years of neoliberal reform and of connective mutation. Since the triumph of neoliberalism we have been taught that there is no alternative to capitalism, capitalism being the economic and cultural insurmountable border of human history. Now it’s crystal clear: if this neoliberal assumption is true, then we have to resign ourselves to the idea that extinction is the only future that our progeny can expect. However, I think that the neoliberal assumption is not true, and an alternative does exist: it is based on liberation from the obsession of economic growth; it is based on the redistribution of resources, on the reduction of labour time, and on the expansion of time dedicated to the free activity of teaching, researching, healing and taking care.

In After the Future, Bifo iterates Marx’s thesis in the radically new times of digital capitalism. And he finds that the “automaton” has multiplied its powers to disaggregate and orchestrate the parts or organs of labor; the whole psychosphere of the human being becomes subject to the movement of capital, now operating at digital speeds. With the networking powers of information and communications technology the capacities of capitalist work processes to orchestrate labor have not only been extended spatially, across the globe, but have intensified temporally also. Today’s firms do not purchase the worker as a whole, but a fragment of their activity, sensibility, attention, communicative capacity. One of Bifo’s most compelling contributions to the theory of “semiocapitalism” – capitalism that makes affects, attitudes, attributes and ideas directly productive without materializing them – is the cellularization of labor. As production becomes semiotic, cognitive workers are precariously employed – on occasional, contractual, temporary bases – and their work involves the elaboration of segments or “semiotic artefacts” that are highly abstract entities combined and recombined through an exploitative digital network only at the precise time they are required. The social field is “an ocean of valorizing cells convened in a cellular way and recombined by the subjectivity of capital”. These info-laborers are paid only for the moments when their time is made cellular, yet their entire days are subjected to this kind of production, “pulsating and available, like a brain-sprawl in waiting”, Blackberries and mobiles ever ready. The psychic and somatic form of the human cannot take this, and as our cognitive, communicative, emotional capacities become subject to cellular fragmentation and recombination under the new machine-speed of information, we get sick. Depression, panic, unhappiness, anxiety, fear, terror – these are the affective conditions of contemporary labor, the “psycho- bombs” of cognitive capitalism, each, naturally, with their own psychopharmacology. Nonetheless, we actively submit ourselves to this regime; this is the perversity of contemporary culture. Of course, the vast majority has no choice – these are the structural conditions of work. But the progressive commercialization of culture, deadening of metropolitan life, loss of solidarity, and insidious dispersal of mechanisms of competition are such that we have come to fixate our desires on work. Even as it pushes human affective and cognitive capacities to breaking point, the enterprise form is the only adequate expression of our communicative and affective qualities, and the one most able to confirm our increasingly competitive and narcissistic drives.

The hyperacceleration that digital technology has imposed upon the world in the last few decades has provoked an effect of exhaustion: physical, psychological and mental. At the same time the demographical trends of the Northern Hemisphere of planet Earth point to a rapid process of senescence of the population. The more the digital machine is powerful and fast, the less humans can rationally decipher and politically govern their environment, and the more impotent they feel. In Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Günther Anders writes about the humiliation that is implicit in the confrontation of men with their own automatic creatures, and he announces that in this kind of humiliation there are the seeds of the Übermensch returning in all his fury. Nazism, according to Anders, is not to be remembered as a bad memory of the past but has to be considered as a nightmare ready for the future. In his appalling prediction, future Nazism will be the effect of the humiliation of humans overwhelmed by the enormity of their own products that are ruled by forces of economic automatism and subtracted from conscious control. The Anders prediction comes true with the rise of worldwide Trumpism, when the humiliated get their revenge by destroying the Reason embodied in the algorithmic machine. But the humiliation has been intensified during the months of the lockdown, when billions of humans have been obliged to hide in order to escape the overpowering invisible force of the virus. This is where we are now: the wave of dementia that has been overwhelming the world since the year 2016, which erupted with Brexit and the victory of Trump, can be read, in my opinion, as a sort of furious reaction to the invincible power of the techno-linguistic automatisms embedded in the financial machine. What now? What will be the reaction of the social psyche to a new overpowering force which is more pervasive and more frightening than finance: the unconscious force of contagion? Will we at last be able to face reality, to renounce to the presumption of human omnipotence? Will we finally accept the idea that we are part of a system of reciprocity, of mutual interaction? Will we accept the idea that we are mortal? This is the point: facing mortality, and abandoning the obsession of total control. The crucial point here is the relation between reason and chaos. The modern project was based on the dubious assumption that the infinite complexity of the universe can be reduced to rational knowledge expressed in mathematical terms and therefore can be submitted to political control. That project has been enormously productive, enriching and progressive, up to a certain point. Then the extreme complication of the social exceeded the sphere of scientific knowledge and rational control. At that point complexity grew into chaos, and political reason was confronted by its limits. The intrinsic madness of capitalism was exposed at that point: capitalism cannot exist without a never-ending strain of accumulation, acceleration and expansion, so that the collective brain is engaged in a struggle against chaos, aimed at dominating chaos and submitting chaos to the principle of valorisation. But remember: those who wage war against chaos will be defeated, as chaos feeds upon war. Therefore capitalism slammed against the impenetrable wall of Chaos, and social life crashed as a result. The virus reminded us of our limits and obliged a slowdown that is not a provisional pause but the arrival point of the modern race. Now we are facing the alternative between reframing the expectations of future or paving the way to extinction.

However, when academic labor succumbs to the capitalist logic of productivity and is viewed as a cost factor, educational and scientific activity itself is reduced to a cost in business. In fact, today, the universities resort to compromising the capacity for creating sustainable conditions for research and education, in order to reduce the costs. While striving to increase student enrollment, they opt to reduce tenured positions, and refuse to allow time and provide funding to research projects that are not likely to fetch immediate material returns. The main objective here is to provide “service” to the highest possible number of students with the lowest possible number of permanent instructors. The concerns about the qualitative content of the lectures or the hampering of extracurricular research activities of the instructors are outside of the scope of the capitalist teaching factory’s agenda. In this sense, the prevalent logic in to- day’s academic institutions is becoming increasingly contradictory to the logic of scientific production.¶ The simultaneous commodification of knowledge and labor thus threatens the foundations of their reproduction. The precarization of the knowledge- producing labor force is both a result of this commodification drive and a cata- lyst that accelerates the erosion of knowledge as raw material.17¶ The increasing casualization of academic labor started to draw attention as early as mid-1990s. Already in 1994, Lessinger and Wojcicka-Sharff had compared the growing adjunctification of faculty to the working conditions in a “sweatshop” (Lessinger & Wojcicka-Sharff 1994). But it was mainly in the 2000s that precarious academic work came into the spotlight of sociological research.¶ The effects of neoliberalism on knowledge production have been mostly discussed with regard to the “corporatization of the university”, the privatiza- tion of higher education, the neoliberal view on students as customers, and the drawing of scientific production into the orbit of profit incentives.18 In the re- cent years, concepts like “academic managerialism” (Winter 2009; Kolsaker 2008; Deem & Brehony 2005) or “academic capitalism” (Slaughter & Rhoades 2004) have been coined to refer to the increasingly business-like and entrepre- neurial character of the academic profession in the knowledge economy. The critical discourse on the effects of neoliberalism on higher education is often being accompanied by an ironic usage of metaphors like “academic assembly line” and “academic production line” (Barry et al. 2002; Parker & Jary 1995 cited in Ninnes & Helstén 2005: 186). The Marxian “sausage factory”-analogy for universities is already worn-out by now in the stylistic sense but more actual¶ 17 In his article, in which he discusses the merits and limits of Polanyi’s “fictitious commodi- ties”, Bob Jessop provides a different approach to the commodification of knowledge. He focuses on the question of how knowledge in knowledge-based economy is being trans- formed into capital through intellectual property, and how this results in monetary capital accumulation. According to Jessop, capital appropriates the socially produced collective body of knowledge inherited from the previous generations, and, by turning it into intellectual property, realizes the primitive capital accumulation. Then it manipulates intellectual and manual labor via intellectual technology. The knowledge output yields profits and spreads, but as soon as it spreads, its value starts to decrease – as a result of market competition. According to Jessop, from capital’s point of view, this is the “self- defeating character of the information revolution” (Jessop in Buğra & Ağartan 2007: 115– 134). Jessop’s thesis can be read as an adaptation of the classical Marxian concept of the “tendency of the profit rates to fall” to information capitalism.¶ 18 The rise of the knowledge economy played a crucial role in the “hooking” of education into the orbit of capital accumulation. Already in 2000, Neil Smith wrote that “the educa- tion ‘sector’ represented a $700 billion investment opportunity” (Smith 2000: 331).¶ EBSCOhost - printed on 7/1/2024 5:18 PM via UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use¶ Situating the Issue of Displaced Academics 35¶ than ever with respect to content as shown in the previous section (cf. Smith 2000).¶ It is argued that, in neoliberal times, not only scientific research is being increasingly dominated by business interests of third-party funders,19 but also higher education itself comes to be seen as a pre-work training program. Con- sidering the “symbiotic relationship” between the universities and the institutions of power for the last 500 years and the increased pressures for narrower specialization in the 20th century, it can be argued, rightly, that “the advance- ment and transmission of knowledge for its own sake” has always been some- what “an ideal of intellectual autonomy which has never actually existed in- stitutionally in its pure form” (Brienza 2016: 94–95, cf. Clark 2006). However, with the progressive withdrawal of direct state funding from the mid-1970s onwards, the universities became brutally susceptible to market pressures due to their increased dependence on external funding. Academic institutions and degree programs that refuse or fail to cope with the priorities set by business metrics are now considered to be outdated, while some scholars suggest reforms to make the university more “marketable” or “market-smart” (Breton & Lambert 2003; Zemsky, Wegner, Massy 2005). The drive to subordinate the sphere of production to the fluctuations of market demand imposes itself fervently upon the academic production relations.20 The compulsion with which this happens steadily undermines the academics’ capacity to maintain a more or less non-utilitarian attitude toward knowledge accumulation. Ulrich Beck once said that the hitherto existing forms of social organization such as fam- ily, class, neighborhood and alike are becoming “zombie categories” (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 203). One might argue, that the institutional structures of academia as a site for the production and dissemination of knowledge and critical thinking seem to follow suit.21

In the book, Bifo articulates his thinking about semiocapitalism, the system whereby capitalism and the media are connected, arguing that today it is not possible to reflect on one without linking it to the other. His main argument is that today we are living through individual and community pathologies caused by semiocapitalism, and in particular by the specific relation between cyberspace and cybertime. Cyberspace is the totality of the information and stimuli that circulate via media systems. Cybertime is the organic bodily capacity to deal with and elaborate information, which therefore has bodily a limit. The dramatic relation between the two, what he calls “splitterkapitalism”, creates clashes that bring about a multitude of problems for people in spheres such as labour, mental health, sexuality and affective life. Bifo observes that the current semiocapitalist order started to take this direction in Western societies in 1977, when hope and ideas of changing the economic, social and political organisation of society which had characterised many of the political movements in the previous decades, started to fail.

Bifo considers the 1990s to be a period of total identification, within the general Zeitgeist, with capital. Because of this identification, all technological changes were seen as forms of liberation and as creations of new spaces of freedom. The following decade, the 2000s, has for Bifo been characterised by a form of cultural depression resulting from the realisation that the mania of the ‘90s could not last. Monopolies emerged violently from the new world created by the internet and digital technologies. The potential for the internet and new digital technologies to allow people to live well, work less and have more time for affective and intellectual life were not realised. Indeed, the opposite occurred. The sphere of labour encroached on all aspects of individual and social life, and daily life became submerged under a continuous flux of information. Bifo discusses the end of previous social class divisions, and speaks about the ‘“cognitariat’”, the international group of workers involved in cognitive and emotional labour. He does not see any way for this form of spittlerkapitalism to end, but he proposes the creation of autonomous spaces in people’s lives as an antidote to some of the problems created by this wider context.

This section covers a period that begins halfway through the 1970s and takes¶ us up to the present day. The first classes that concern us here are, naturally, the¶ cognitive workers and capitalists. These take the specific form of informational¶ workers and capitalists (6 and 2). What do we mean when we refer to informational work? An activity in which the worker has a PC, tablet, netbook – or¶ something similar – as a principal work tool and whose principal output in the¶ productive process is an informational good – that basically produces digital¶ information (Zukerfeld 2013). The output of informational workers could usually be reproduced by close to zero marginal costs. Thus, when capitalists buy¶ labour time from the informational workers, they receive a product that bears¶ reproducible knowledge. Indeed, it is not uncommon for informational workers to turn out to be exploited both through alienation and through reproduction in the same productive process.¶ Informational work has been measured particularly in the USA and it has¶ been found that at the beginning of the millennium it already occupied the¶ greater part of the work force (Apte and Nath 2007; Wolf 2006). Definitively, in¶ its activity, access to physical ownership over the productive resource par excellence (digital technologies, with falling prices for a constant capacity) doesn’t¶ carry great costs or importance, except for their own cognitive resources¶ applied during the productive process and now objectified in an informational¶ good, regulated fundamentally by intellectual property.¶ An important point in relation to this type of worker – and that is related,¶ among other things, to the ambivalence of their main instrument of labour – is¶ that their cognitive resources, in contrast with the previous stage, aren’t necessarily acquired in formal institutions, or rather, that these skilled workers¶ don’t necessarily have formal qualifications. The instrument of labour itself is a¶ powerful tool for the incorporation of informal knowledge (through tutorials,¶ videos, forums etc.). In the same way, the previously mentioned ambivalence of¶ this tool is manifested in its potential to construct networks of recognition, or¶ social capital in Bourdieu’s terminology (1985). At the same time, it is important to note that – unlike the workers of the previous stage, liberal professionals and physical workers in the service sectors – informational workers have a¶ smooth path to freelance work (5). Certainly, the falling prices of the means of¶ production such as the computer, are a defining factor. But not only that: the¶ infrastructure that an informational worker requires (space, energy, devices of¶ a different nature like modems, telephones, etc.) is easily assimilated into either¶ the domestic environment itself or a less costly (in relative terms) space. Naturally, the conditions of the infrastructure, although in different proportions, are¶ also modified in the case of companies.¶ In the capitalist sphere, the most profitable economic activities are concentrated in the exclusive form of intellectual property, but in addition, these are the most diverse: the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, the audiovisual and music content industry, software production and informatics services; all these productive areas come together in the stratum of informational¶ capitalist (2), that is constituted as a hegemonic fraction of capital during¶ this period. Said heterogeneity and unity corresponds, naturally, to the marriage that the institution of intellectual property had managed to consummate¶ between knowledge with an industrial or technological application and artistic¶ knowledge, that up until the 1970s had not combined. Indeed, just as the access¶ to goods regulated by private property loses significance in the face of access¶ to knowledge for the informational worker, this type of capitalist is not concerned with monopolising physical intensive resources, but rather, and above¶ all, knowledge intensive resources. In this regard, Nike is a good example, not¶ owning ‘a single factory, or machinery, equipment or real estate property’ but¶ only intellectual property (Rifkin 2000, 32). That said, if a company like Nike¶ represents the ideal type of informational capitalist, the case of the Ford Motor¶ Company represents the ideal type of pure capitalist (1). Indeed, a significant¶ layer of capitalists base their profits on patents, or more generically, on intellectual property rights over their products or parts of them and, at the same¶ time, on the sale of these articles. So it is that Ford (but also Sony and others) own both factories and R&D laboratories. A particular characteristic that¶ capitalists assume in this period is that if, to some degree, they need the industrial workers, they have a much greater need for the informational worker, and¶ consequently their research departments. In fact, the product life cycle is an¶ important factor: the profits of these capitalists come much more from new and¶ innovative products than from the prolonged sale of a standardized product.¶ The quantitative growth of informational workers takes place in a¶ simultaneous – and complementary – way alongside the quantitative growth¶ of physical workers, particularly a fraction of precarious manual workers (8)¶ and the excluded (9), radically increasing the polarisation between these classes¶ (Castells 1998; Rifkin 2000; Fuchs and Sandoval 2014). The well-known fact¶ that Nike’s subcontractors utilise child and semi-slave labour to lower their¶ costs points to this relationship between informational capitalists and workers¶ on the one hand and precarious manual workers, on the other (Rifkin 2000, 75).¶ This is a stratum of ‘vulnerable’ physical workers (Castel 2009) concentrated in¶ the marginal elements of the productive processes, although not completely¶ excluded from them. In contrast, the excluded (8) (Castel 2009; Nun 2003),¶ in the present stage take the concrete form of the chronically unemployed and¶ structurally impoverished. This social class, unlike the vulnerable group, ‘are¶ superfluous, they are not needed’ (Nun 2003), but they also manifest an unusual quantitative explosion (Castells 1998). Naturally, the watershed between¶ these two classes is very diffuse. Although nation states in different locations¶ and decades adopt varying attitudes regarding these sectors, the most pertinent¶ difference compared with the previous period is that the capitalist productive

It goes without saying that, when revisited and reconfigured by artistic minds and practices, exo-attentional devices can provide ways to exceed our expectations, by making us see, hear, read and conceive forms and experiences that would never have been accessible without the power of abstraction offered by machinic computation. Even if exo-attentional devices can dramatically increase our knowledge and control over our environment, the functional need for explicitness inherent to their ontology as digital objects carries with itself the threat of a worrying impoverishment of our background attention25 . They tend to hypnotise us with figures unduly isolated from their nourishing ground. One can therefore suspect them to be intimately linked to the extractivist mode of production which has come to threaten the environmental sustainability of our forms of life. The three displacements discussed above—pushing us to consider matters of work, of time and of abstraction as more decisive that the issue of automation in itself—all point towards the same direction. Automation anxieties are not so much mistaken as misplaced: it is our socio-economic regime of production, of consumption and of commercial competition, dominated by the ruling abstraction of finance, which should be considered as cause for anxiety, rather than the technological development themselves. The three displacements advocated here converge in suggesting that capitalism is more to be feared than automation. From the attentional point of view developed on the issue of work, capitalism can be defined by its tendency to align all of our individual and collective attentions worldwide on one single principle of relevance: financial profit. The complex nature of this alignment need to be specified, however, in order to prevent oversimplifications. While globalisation may certainly induce processes of standardisation and homogenisation, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi are right to stress that the forms of life captured by the capitalist process produce value by distinguishing themselves from each other. Capitalism is as singularising as it is subsuming. The issue is that the singularisation is subject to competition in a way that foregrounds quantitative measures of success over the richness of qualitative diversity. The heterogeneity of forms of life is important only to the extent that those forms add capital value26 . It is by the same movement that the capitalist axiomatic tends to destroy our environments and our subjectivations. It is ecocidal insofar as it ravages the richness of qualitative biodiversity, which is sustained in ‘natural’ environments by the very multiplicity of cross-pollinating ends and principles of relevance, as they are brought into a given ecosystem by its many heterogeneous dwellers. By exacerbating a ruthless and reckless competition, whose only meta-principle of relevance is financial profit, (neoliberal) capitalism aligns our attentions on a single extractivist attractor, which plunders our resources treated solely as financial ‘assets’. As Anna Tsing has eloquently documented, it mines them to exhaustion, before leaving ruined landscapes in search for other territories and energies to exploit27 . Capitalism is egocidal insofar as it plunders our subjectivities in the same extractivist manner as it plunders our physical, biological and social resources. Neoliberal competition not only exhausts, but undermines the psychological foundations of the ego it so ostensibly deifies28 . As we saw when discussing issues of work, the competition for financial profit induces a fragmentation of our working activities into standardised time-cells, which only make sense from the superior point of view of global financial management. At the level of our individual work experience, this fragmentation hollows out our labour, simultaneously, from its stable income and from its subjective meaning. As for the treatment of time enacted by financial capitalism, we saw how the dynamics set in place through exo-attentional devices driven by commercial interests tend to anticipate our expectations, tying us to our past and to those deemed similar to us, making it ever more difficult to afford the luxury of the time delay necessary for the concrescence of our subjectivity. These ecocidal and egocidal tendencies converge when one considers the specific mode of abstraction promoted and fed upon by financial capitalism in the age of digital media. By becoming increasingly reliant upon exo-attentional abstractions limited by the explicit categorisations needed to program algorithmic machines, computational media simultaneously tend to isolate us from ‘the richness of qualitative diversity’ inherent to our analog prehensions of our backgrounds, and threaten to prevent the anchoring of our subjectivation within singularities that have not been pre-formatted to fit ‘optimised’ models.

It is often acknowledged that centuries of globalisation have reduced both cultural/ linguistic and biological diversity (Emmeche, 2001; Maran & Kull, 2014: 47; Eriksen, 2021, 2023). As Claus Emmeche observes, “[w]hat looks like increased ‘semiotic freedom’ so to speak, becomes in fact increased uniformity and a standardization of nature” (Emmeche, 2001: 249; cf. Eriksen, 2021). In listing eight ‘key principles of ecosemiotics,’ Timo Maran and Kalevi Kull declare (as Principle 4) that “[h]uman symbolic semiosis (with its capacity of de-contextualization) and environmental degradation are deeply related” (Maran & Kull, 2014: 45). Having traced the feasibility of the money sign to the human capacity for symbolic reference, we turn now to how money is connected to globalisation, decontextualisation, and loss of diversity. Fundamental to all semiotic inquiry is the insight that meaning is contingent on context. Over billions of years of evolution, semiosis has driven diversification and speciation by calibrating the genetic codes of organisms with their specific ecological contexts. However, the past six centuries of human history have been characterised by the diametrically opposite logic, closely tied to the ramifications of money: evolutionary success has been geared to being independent of context. In various ways, this tendency preoccupied the major social theorists of modernity in the 19th century, whose reflections were succinctly synthesised in Anthony Giddens’ concept of ‘disembedding’ (Giddens, 1990). Drawing on Simmel and other theorists of money, Giddens demonstrates the central role of money in generating the social conditions of modernity (Giddens, 1990: 22–26). Karl Polanyi, too, focused on the fundamental transformation of society brought about in 19th-century Britain by all-purpose money and the ‘disembedded’ market (Polanyi, [1944] 1957). Whether we refer to it as ‘capitalism’, ‘modernisation’, or ‘globalisation’, the logic of money has pivoted on decontextualisation. Commodity fetishism, cosmopolitan personalities, and universalising knowledge production all have this in common: they presuppose and encourage the capacity of exchange-values, people, and concepts to detach themselves from the particular and the local. Whereas premodern semiosis tended to enhance embeddedness in local contexts, modernity and globalisation have favoured mobility, interchangeability, and abstraction. In terms of political economy, this is to observe that ‘exchange-values’ have become hegemonic at the expense of ‘use-values.’ As Baudrillard has shown, use-values are semiotically determined (Baudrillard, [1972]1 3 Signs of Life and Death: The Semiotic Self-Destruction of the Biosphere1981; Sahlins, 1976). Exchange-values, in contrast, are quantitative and prone to digitalisation.2 The expansion of money and the global market has transformed the selective pressures shaping the formation of both social and ecological systems. The ‘survival of the fittest’ is no longer primarily about calibration within ecological or local contexts, but may increasingly be a matter of transcending or emancipating oneself from the specific. The logic of selection in the modern, globalised world benefits both cultural and biological generalists (Hornborg, 2023b). The organisms, objects, and thoughts that are most likely to spread are those that are least dependent on context. This drift toward decontextualisation is ultimately a corollary of what I have proposed is a fourth mode of reference: a (money) sign that liberates interpretants to imagine its referent as they fancy, almost without constraints. The uniqueness of the money sign is that it does not communicate any indication of what it might refer to, whether through contiguity, similarity, or convention. This level of semiotic freedom appears to represent a threshold where its repercussions no longer generate increasing diversity but rather the opposite: accelerating entropy. It is the point where freedom from constraints shades into anarchy. Paradoxically, the sign that most historians and not least economists celebrate as the epitome of human progress is simultaneously the root of the global ecological crisis that threatens us, along with innumerable other species, with extinction. At this point in history, further progress must mean acknowledging the semiotic basis of the Anthropocene predicament and assuming control over our own semiosis. As Per Aage Brandt observes, ”[w]e may have to discuss the possibility of ’sustainable symbolization’ and, thus, of the sustainability of money as such” (Brandt, 2017: 156). He pertinently asks, ”Can money be changed into something less pervasive and destructive?” (Brandt, 2017: 160).3 A semiotic perspective on money might focus on how it relates to context, difference, and entropy. It is a sign, invented by humans, that neglects all contexts, recognises no differences, and conveys no other message than to increase entropy. It thus operates so as to reverse the evolution of complexity and diversity throughout the planetary biosphere. Ironically, the thrust of this evolutionary process has for several billion years been a struggle against entropy by generating ever more complex layers of ‘difference that make a difference.’ The challenge confronting humankind is whether to allow money fetishism to mindlessly continue to dismantle such differences, diversity, and complexity, or to assume responsibility for the sign that was to serve us but has become our master. I have argued elsewhere that it would in principle be possible to redesign money so that it enhances contexts, diversity, and complexity (Hornborg, 2017b, 2019, 2023c). This is not the place to reiterate the scheme; suffice it to say that the basic idea is to recognise more than one currency and to distinguish between them as referring to separate spheres of value, separate functions, and separate scales of geographical reach. It would mean inscribing difference and A. Hornborgsensitivity to context in the sign system through which we engage each other and the remainder of the semiosphere. In investing intentions in the design of our currently vacuous monetary signs, it would signify a momentous advance in semiotic agency.

As soon as “[t]he principal ‘fixed capital’ becomes ‘man himself’” (Ibid.) then the imperative to capture this is intensified, returning us to the condition of the formal subsumption, “in the sense that it is based essentially on the relation of monetary dependence of wage-labourer inside the process of circulation” (Ibid., 31). In this form of capitalism then, in order to maintain its grip, capital has to act as an external force directly on the brain. It can therefore be no surprise that we have increasingly become witness to the development of, for example, affective mechanisms aimed squarely at the nervous system. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has explored such practices as inducing new kinds of pathological relations to work. He has termed this relation ‘neuro-totalitarianism’ in the context of what he calls ‘the soul at work’. In the book of that name Berardi tells us, in line with the broader understanding of cognitive labour, “hi tech workers invest their specific competencies, creative, innovative and communicative energies in the labour process; that is, the best part of their intellectual capacities” (Berardi 2009, 78). However, while such workers are in some senses less alienated and, as we have seen, subsumed by capital, than their industrial predecessors, their distance, but at the same time monetary reliance, means that they need to be perpetually on call. When workers are called to give, they must give everything and as such “Info-workers can be seen as “neuro workers”. They prepare their nervous system as an active receiving terminal for as much time as possible” a process that Berardi (2009, 90) compares to “the constant stress of a permanent cognitive electrocution”. In a generalised condition of cognitive electrocution that spreads out from cognitive labour into the entire social sphere, wherein social activity itself is drawn into this process of digital formal subsumption, we live in something akin to a “multilayered dimension of technomaya” wherein “[d]igital technology has given a power to the media that is directly acting on the mind, so that the spell of the media-sphere has wrapped itself around the psychosphere” (Berardi 2014, 6). The extent of the misery caused by this is indicated by the huge increase in mental illness and suicide that has occurred in the Post-Fordist era, “in the last 45 years suicide rates have increased by 60% world-wide” and Berardi puts this down to the fact that “An epidemic of unhappiness is spreading over the planet” because “[s]emiocapitalism is infiltrating the nervous cells of conscious organisms, inoculating them with a thanato-political rationale” (Ibid., 13). Semiocapitalism includes the drive to capture attention that is typical of the digital platforms that have come to dominate digital life since the early 21st century. The monetarisation of attention, in terms of both the targeting of adverting but also in the user generation of new content, can be seen as something akin to the becoming labour of the social. This expanding condition ensures that the struggle within historical materialism is now over the brain itself. For example, Google is referred to by Berardi (2014, 14) as “the most refined attention-draining machine” that has now been further boosted by the development of the smartphone that is “pervading every moment of the day and night”. Berardi concludes by suggesting that this “manipulation of neural systems” (Ibid., 25) needs to be understood in light of the neuro-plasticity of the brain. The ability of the brain to assimilate and adapt to contextual inputs makes the brain the material end point of capital’s attempts to capture it in value creating circuits, “intervening on the neural system, redirecting neural activity and reshaping synaptic pathways” (Ibid.). 6. Conclusion: Plasticity and Determination in the Last Instance The moulding of the plastic brain has always been the focus of capitalism, but it has gone from being a derivative to a primary aim in the shift to post-Fordism, as Marx himself pre-empts in the Fragment on Machines. In this configuration Berardi (2014, 25) does offer some cause for hope, surmising that the neuro-plastic aspects of the brain “invites a process of sabotage and subversion of the dominant modes of mental wiring”. Although Berardi’s references to neuro-plasticity are fleeting there is nothing here that is unreasonable. In essence neuroplasticity means the brain is significantly moulded by its environment and is perpetually affected and adapted to its context, “The adult brain is not only capable of changing, but it does so continuously throughout life” (Constandi 2016, 4). But the brain is not changing passively, it is always actively filtering, modelling, reworking, and feeding back on itself. As the leading scholar in the humanities and social sciences on this topic, Catherine Malabou (2008, 13), demands regarding the plastic brain: “securing a true plasticity means insisting on knowing what it can do and not simply what it can tolerate”. This is supported by the brain’s ‘modulational’ capacity which means plasticity adds to it, “the functions of artist and instructor in freedom and autonomy to its role as sculptor”, brains don’t just receive information but, “have the power to form or to reform this very information” (Ibid., 24). The need for a consciousness of plasticity to be harnessed, collectively, to reflexively take back control of the brain’s own volitions, is the pivot point of the contemporary struggle against capital. Harnessing must also take account of the leaps forward in understanding pre-conscious affective aspects of the brain, but nevertheless here we can propose the brain as operating as the source of determination in the last instance – not merely another aspect of overdetermination – as would be the conclusion from earlier representations of the base/superstructure or determinism/agency question. These earlier incarnations may be appropriate to their times, and to their contemporary understandings of the brain, but we are now in a positon to again refresh Marx in light of changes to capitalism, and also the emerging insights of neuroscience. To recognise the brain as determining in the last instance is not to take a pure voluntarist position, but to understand that the brain is under the immense pressures of neuro-totalitarianism inherent in the Post-Fordist economy and embedded in the dialectic of historical materialism, but also with the power to adapt, to rework and to reinvent. The prevailing condition is one in which the brain’s modulational capacity is habitually concealed, repressed and nominally diverted to tasks not best served to its own thriving – but in the end it is the brain itself which is the substrata that supports the rest of the mechanism of capital. Malabou (2008, 1) makes a direct analogy of brain plasticity to Marx and historical materialism, telling us: “Humans make their own brain, but they do not know that they make it”. So it is we still can talk of historical materialism to the extent that the brain has become caught in a dialectic with the machinery of fixed capital. As Malabou tells us “to talk about the plasticity of the brain means to see in it not only the creator and receiver of form but also an agency of disobedience to every constituted form, a refusal to submit to a model” (Ibid., 6). For Malabou, the imperative is for us to gain consciousness of this plasticity, of its capacity. In doing so we should make sure we are not merely submitted to the logic of capital, in particular the kind of digital, flexible networked capitalism discussed above, so she asks, “What should we do so that consciousness of the brain does not purely and simply coincide with the spirit of capitalism?” (Ibid., 12). Therefore, the struggle is to gain control of consciousness, in that sense the task is as it ever was – but is now more immanent than ever given the brain’s foundational importance for capital. Berardi (2014, 27) talks about the need to “disentangle the autonomy of the general intellect from its neuro-totalitarian jail”. This seems to me like the best call to arms for a Marxism of the 21st century and a suitable renewal of the project that was born with Marx himself 200 years ago – so to answer my earlier question, we must marshal our collective brains to bring about change, but this must instigate a change in the mode and relation of production that is currently parasitic on the brain, or ultimately it will be a superficial and fruitless enterprise.

What seems to characterise our current semio-capitalist, post-cyberculture condition is depression – economic depression but also corporeal fatigue and mental depression. He writes: The future becomes a threat when the collective imagination becomes incapable of seeing alternatives to trends leading to devastation, increased poverty and violence. This is precisely our current situa-tion, because capitalism has become a system of techno-economic automatisms that politics cannot evade. The paralysis of the will (the impossibility of politics) is the historical context of today’s depression epidemic. ( Berardi, 2011 : 59) Berardi’s ‘paralysis of the will’ points to a real foreclosure of the horizon of any future politics, and his thought finds an echo in Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life ( 2014 ), whose first chapter glosses over ‘the slow cancellation of the future’: the disappearance of the future, most visible in the realm of con-temporary culture, where time, instead of going forwards, runs backwards, in a constant return of zombified revivals of cultural forms and styles: If the late 1970s and early 80s were the moment when the current cri-sis of cultural temporality could first be felt, it was only during the first decade of the twenty-first century that what Simon Reynolds calls ‘dyschromia’ has become endemic. This dyschromia, this temporal dis-juncture, ought to feel uncanny, yet the predominance of what Reyn-olds calls ‘retromania’ means that it has lost any unheimlich charge: anachronism is now taken for granted. ( Fisher, 2014 : 14) Both Berardi and Fisher are amongst the strongest advocates for a repoliticisation of mental health, following the attempts of Foucault, Laing, or Deleuze and Guattari in the 1960s and 1970s. Both argue for a direct link between semio-capitalism or – ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher) – and depression. Fisher describes the realism of capitalism as a ‘deflationary perspective of a depres-sive who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion’ (Fisher, 2009: 5), whilst the first chapter of his Capitalist Realism claims that it has become easier to image the end of the world than the end of capitalism. For Fisher, himself battling depression, there seems to be little hope for a strategy of de-cancelling future. However, Berardi struggles to find an answer to the question: where is the hope? His answer is bafflingly simple: we must resist because we simply do not know and cannot know what will happen after the future, ‘and I must preserve the consciousness and sensibility of social solidarity, of human empathy, of gratuitous activity – of freedom, equality, and fraternity.

A world within worlds rather than a world wide Web, the Internet “itself quickly became a mirror of the actual world, with corporations and e-commerce colonizing the landscape.”132 The Web has certainly become yet another marketplace, not only for cheap clothing and accessories, pornography, and get-rich-quick schemes, but for art as well.133 Acceleration has defined the Internet’s path of progress as it physically advances and establishes connections on distant shores, as well as the way it is thought to have contributed to maximizing efficiency in all aspects of life; the technology may spread spatially, but it affects individuals temporally. Product producing industrial labor, hegemonic in past phases of capitalist development, is now rapidly being replaced with cultural, cognitive, affective and information labour, or immaterial labor, made possible by such technological advancements. Post-Marxist scholars such as Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and Michael Hardt have elaborated on the liberating potential enabled by the shift away from assembly line labor production in Post-Fordist economies; the production of value is no longer as easily defined by linear time and working hours. However, “even if these authors claim that immaterial labor portends a radical change in the activities of labor, it remains hypothesized primarily as a commodity-producing activity.”134 As Sylvia Frederici notes, that while Negri and Hardt may recognize affective labor as material, “what [they] do not see is that the tremendous leap in technology required by the computerization of work and the integration of information into the work process has been paid at the cost of a tremendous increase of exploitation at the other end of the process.”135 Abbate again reminds that while “Communications media often seem to dematerialise technology, presenting themselves to the user as systems that transmit ideas rather than electrons. The turbulent history of the Internet may be a reminder of the very real material considerations that lie behind this technology and of their economic and political consequences.”136 Many users remain unaware of the extent to which wireless connections, delivered as if by invisible force out of nothing and nowhere, are inextricably tied to a reality rooted in both materiality and corporeality. The Internet, as a system of cables or as a phrase that encompasses all of digital technology, certainly did not come out of ‘nowhere,’ as if it were born like an amicable version of Victor Frankenstein’s creature.137 The online is not a nowhere either, it is in the most literal sense, on a line, on the network of cables that link all continents save for Antarctica, on a line that charts every digital footprint ever made. A situated understanding of the conditions that enable the craved connection to the the cloud reminds that the technology of today was never liberating nor emancipatory on either end of the line. The rise of artificial intelligence and the Internet of things have shown that while devices may continue to shrink in size, their ability to synchronize with the perceived desires of a select portion of humanity grows, and so too do the already heaping piles of e-waste.139 Countries like Finland, the first to declare access to broadband Internet connection a human right back in 2009, the legislative counselor for the Ministry of Transport and Communications, Laura Vilkkonen, quoted saying [emphasis added] “it’s something you cannot live without in modern society. Like banking services or water or electricity, you need Internet connection,”140 remind that both disconnection and connection produce death. Websites are no longer a jumble of clunky pixel glitches and slow to load sticky scrollbars, but seamless minimalist pastoral landscapes wherein smog is mistaken for clouds. The news is just nows. It all serves to widen the gap between past and future so quickly that we do sense ourselves falling into the faultline because the GPS failed to account for construction on the route to the the future.141 The future however, ended back in 1972. The Limits to Growth, a report funded by Volkswagen and commissioned by the Club of Rome, detailed the long-term consequences of exponential economic growth, noting that without a change in human consumption habits, without a revolution in industrial economies, and more importantly, if the natural world and its finite resources are not accounted for in capitalist business models, then we should expect to see utter depletion within the next hundred years. While the report received criticism in regards to its methodology, or what constitutes a ‘resource,’ the idea remains a poignant and stark reminder that no direct political action has been taken since, regardless if the results reflected even an inkling of a possible reality in 5, 10, or 500 years. In 2012 however, one of the authors of the 1972 publication, Jørgen Randers, released an update, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years , 142 and according to his analysis of trends on consumption, any possible future requires a reduction in consumption, a decline in population, a low carbon energy system, and most importantly, institutions that counter national short termism. The Internet, he says, which has increased access to knowledge, might be able to help, but only if it is first realized that knowledge is simply not enough in the face of powerful opposition.

Abstract: In order adequately to define the third type of capitalism that is in the process of formation, we need to bring together three things: a type of accumulation, a mode of production and a specific type of exploitation of living labor. By accumulation we understand the investments that a society makes both via its public authorities and via the behavior of private agents, whether in businesses or in households. Accumulation is thus not reducible to the ‘gross fixed capital’ of the economists. When we refer to a system of accumulation, what we mean is the association of what the regulation school calls a mode of production with a type of accumulation. Whereas industrial capitalism can be characterized by the fact that accumulation was based mainly on machinery and on the organization of manual labor, understood here as the organization of production and the allocation of workers to fixed jobs, cognitive capitalism is a different system of accumulation, in which the accumulation is based on knowledge and creativity, in other words on forms of immaterial investment. In cognitive capitalism, the capture of gains arising from knowledge and innovation is the central issue for accumulation, and it plays a determining role in generating profits. By cognitive capitalism we mean, then, a mode of accumulation in which the object of accumulation consists mainly of knowledge, which becomes the basic source of value, as well as the principal location of the process of valorization. Issues, such as property rights, positioning in networks, alliances and project management become major institutional and organizational factors. Their role is crucial. The strategies of this capitalism are determined by the quest for a spatial, institutional and organizational positioning likely to increase its capacity for engaging in creative processes and for capturing their benefits. Cognitive capitalism is not only a type of accumulation oriented towards the valorization of knowledge and innovation. It is also a new mode of capitalist production. It would not be accurate to say that our era has become a world of abundance in terms of either material goods or information and knowledge. The fact is that there is still plenty of work for economists, because other forms of scarcity - depletion of scarce resources, non-renewable resources and hard-to-renew resources - are now appearing as a result of ecological disequilibria. But the three key resources that now appear to be scarce are: cognitive attention; time; and what people call ‘care’ (affective attention). The real challenge is thus to minimize as far as possible this phase during which cognitive capitalism and industrial capitalism can build anti-natural alliances in order to control, restrain or break the power of liberation of the knowledge society. And this will depend on the intensity and quality' of societal pressure - in short, on collective intelligence, once again. Keywords: cognitive capitalism, accumulation, production, labor, knowledge 1. INTRODUCTION One of the most important characteristics of cognitive capitalism is that the economy is becoming more virtual. This means that more and more of the economy is made up of things that aren't real and services that help people make those things. It also affects agriculture, industry, and even basic everyday services. This is because of new computer technology and digital data. The weight of the immaterial comes from this. When you make knowledge, you need to put in information, process it, store it digitally, and then make more knowledge. One of these intangibles is promoted to play a big part in the growth of the economy. In this process, the company, as well as the market and the government, try to get their hands on the new ideas that are found in the interactive cognitive processes of social cooperation and tacit knowledge. E. Rullani said that knowledge and science, which had been used to value industrial capital but were still separate, became important parts of the system. The two things that make them hegemonic are both true: (a) Science and knowledge set the stage for innovation: they are the necessary foundation (in terms of value). (b) Both of them make the most important part of exchange value clear in products and services. They have the most important thing that connects capitalism to exploitation. Material labor doesn't go away, but it loses its main role as a strategic asset. This is shown by the fact that the "hollow box" company (Peter Drucker) doesn't care where its products are made or how they are made. It can be anywhere in the world. People in a lot of countries can now get information about how to do things in the business world. Transport costs per unit of output have dropped thanks to economies of scale and lower energy costs. That's another story, though, and has to do with how long this kind of growth can last. The strategic asset for the company is what allows it to keep control over the whole process of value. People don't care about how things work, but how they're used. Tech progress is no longer an outside resource that businesses can buy on a "spot" (immediate) market for goods or services, as development economists were a little too quick to think. People use information and communication technologies in a socio-technical system that is part of the world (ICTs). The acquisition of knowledge, which is a lot more complicated than just getting information and the use of technology are the most important factors in technological progress and innovation. This is what evolutionist theory can do. In Adam Smith's famous description of the pin factory, the division of labor model was used as the foundation of political economy. Taylorism made it even better, but now it's been called into question in three major ways: (a) the process of simplifying complex work into simple work. (b) the separation of manual actions into groups based on an intellectual concept that is meant to cut down on learning time. (c) In a world of small-run production, the idea that specialization is a function of market size doesn't make sense. This is called a "economy of variety". In a situation where there is a lot of uncertainty about what people will want, quality and new ideas help people stand out. These, on the other hand, are hampered by too many people doing the same thing. It happened in the case of quality, when Taylorism was no longer used. People who do different jobs make it hard for people to come up with new ideas that require coordination of complex processes and active cooperation from other people. This is called "the division of labor." Productivity gains are no longer the result of economies of scale. They come from economies of learning, in a "economy of variety" that grows small series over short periods. The international division of labor is becoming more and more like this. As markets become more complicated, economies of scale can no longer be used alone to deal with them. These are still sought for reasons that have to do with the search for economic value through and for the market. Learning economies are becoming more important as the market and inter-capitalist competition become more complicated. Neoliberal decompartmentalization of all markets makes this even worse (except for the labour market, which became far more highly segmented). This means that the division of labor and its parts are changing as a result of new ways of making things. The traditional order of conception, production, and marketing is reversed. Now, deep innovation is all about "flexible production" and "just-in-time production." Among the industries at the heart of Fordism, we have seen this change. One example is the auto industry, which uses principles based on those of Japanese engineer Tai'chi Ohno to run its business. But when flexible production is used in the "short cycle" of the garment and ready-to-wear industry or in the cultural industries, it shows even more clearly how consumption is a source of information and real-time control of production. Finally, the nature of digital technologies means that people who use digital technology devices can also be part of the process of coming up with new ideas. Because there are so many different things that go into making a product, it isn't possible to measure it with capital or labor because there are so many different things that go into making a product (resources contributing to production). As a result, the traditional lines that divides the two groups of people who work for capital and the people who do the work they do have been broken down. The fact that words like "human capital" and "intellectual capital" have become common is a sign of this. But the term "immaterial capital" it is a bad combination of words, as we'll see. People who think about evolution in economics say that there should be three types of inputs for goods and services: hardware (the things that move), software (the things that think), and wetware (the things that move) (the cerebral or living layer). But, to this, you also have to add the rise of a fourth component in models of social and productive cooperation: Netware, or the network. Informatics is what makes the network society possible. This is because the spread of the personal computer and the development of computer programming and electronics led to the creation of a coherent package of digitization, computer programming, and electronics. Finally, the Internet, which becomes the new global common good of collective intelligence, was built. We'll talk about the digital network again, which is a big change. "Cooperation between brains" means that there will be less emphasis on energy and entropy in the way people work and how things get made into things that make money. This happens at a certain point, when the energy used by machines in industrial capitalism starts to hurt the limits of the Earth's biosphere and the whole world's ecosystem. R. Reich and J. Rifkin have come up with a controversial theory called the "end of work." Some people think that this means that the "leisure society" is coming, but this isn't true. Instead, it means that the way we think about labor has changed. What is coming to an end is the idea that industrial labor and manual labor power are important. But cognitive capitalism doesn't stop there. It doesn't just keep calling more and more on living labor, rather than dead labor, to do the work (crystallized in machines, to use the terminology of Marx). Marx had a good idea about the rule of science when he wrote the Grundrisse (1857-8). People who have money and are rich will one day use that money to show how important science is. That's not the only thing we're seeing that's different. We're also seeing that living labor is very important in machinism. There are two important things about living things that work together to make money: the fact that they work together to make money, and the fact that they have knowledge that can't be explained by machines. In societies that have a lot of living labor and a lot of "living" consumption, they both play a big role. As we'll see, invention-power has a "bio-productive" side to it that superimposes itself on manual labor power, and this side of invention-power is what cognitive capitalism takes advantage of and makes money off of. During the time of industrial capitalism, people thought about how people did at work based on how productive they were. This led to a change in how people thought about how they did at work. It also tends to get rid of another thing. In terms of performance, the most important indicators are those that show the surplus of aggregate productivity. A question in accounting is how to account for value, which doesn't show up in the ledgers but can be measured by "fair value," in other words, its stock market value. It's also important to think about "productive territories," or "territorial excellence," when you think about how well the whole thing worked. This has led to a whole field of study called "clusters" and "local production systems," which focuses on the factors outside of an individual business that lead to productive innovation. Innovation isn't just happening inside one company anymore; it's happening all over the place where there's a lot of work to do. Cognitive capitalism makes information-goods or knowledge-goods very unique when it comes to how they are learned, how they are used, how they depreciate, how they are enriched, and how they can only be owned by a few people. These characteristics, in turn, affect how information and knowledge move around in the company and society. There is a lot more "horizontalization," which leads to a lot more questioning of acceptable forms of hierarchy. There are also more tensions over intellectual property rights. But this feature, which makes knowledge a public or "free" good, can't be separate from the rise of information technology. It causes a problem with the enforcement of traditional property rights like intellectual property rights, patents, and copyrights, which used to be a social compromise between the needs of production and the public's enjoyment of intangible goods like music, movies, books, and so on. In cognitive capitalism, external effects, which we have called "externalities," are no longer small and tied to simple partial phenomena like the indivisibility of public goods. Instead, they become more important and complex. If the value to be extracted is based on intelligent, inventive, and innovative work, and if that work is done in a network, then figuring out how to get positive externalities is the most important thing about value. In other words, what needs to be found and fixed is work done outside of work hours, implicit knowledge, and abilities to put things in context. Debt, which has been built up over two centuries of frantic industrial capitalism and its version, "realized socialism," is made up of negative externalities that need to be controlled and resolved. This shift in politics and management of the chain of value is made easier because debt is made up of these negative externalities. Political economy has no choice but to deal with this relationship it has with its own outside. It can't avoid it. Anyone or anything in its toolbox that isn't useful in this way isn't very important to the Renaissance. 2. CONCLUSION As with industrial capitalism, cognitive capitalism makes knowledge by making knowledge and makes living by making living. This is different from how industrial capitalism makes things by making things. It starts making life right away, so it's called bio-production, or making life. The creation of new knowledge can only happen if there is a lot of knowledge that isn't just technical and material. But it can only happen if people's brains work together in digital networks that are linked together. This type of capitalism fits in with a new development in society called "the knowledge society," which is what people call it now. Invention-power is what cognitive capitalism uses more than physical labor power. This creates a situation where cognitive capitalism makes knowledge and money through the production of the population. This process of making life can be called "bio-production." Bio power is the power that can control this "bio-production," and it's called that because it can do that. People who know how to live and how to make it are at the heart of the change in the way people make things today. Biotechnologies are now trying to make the living into a tool that can be used to change the world more powerfully and better than mechanical tools can. It's becoming more and more common to talk about a development of productive forces, which is when people's brains work together to make things. These are just a few of the most important parts of this development. We can now try to figure out what this "third capitalism," or "cognitive capitalism," is all about. It goes beyond mercantile capitalism and industrial and financial capitalism.

Anticipation travels quickly through the bleachers in a stadium of supporters before the teams take the field or in a theater before the curtain is raised.4 Occurring in the midst of an in-between-ness of bodies and minds, and preceding the staking out of definitive positions on the play to come, anticipation is intersubjective and projective. It is an “affect,” conforming to those intensities which constitute “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension […].”5 When an architectural project is met with a flurry of anticipation, it is able to push or pull its audiences gently, to suggest to them a particular direction or angle of approach, to curate their reception of its outcomes in advance, to position them in relation to that which is “not yet.” It is precisely the anticipation that surrounds “projects” that also situates the project as a key operation within contemporary “semiocapitalism”. With roots in the schizoanalysis of Félix Guattari (although it has been more recently popularized via the work of Italians Lazzarato and Franco “Bifo” Berardi), this theorization of capitalism acknowledges the primacy of regimes of signs in the production of products and workers alike. Both Lazzarato and Berardi emphasize the doubled nature of this mode of “subjectivation,” wherein, on the one hand, we encounter the production of individuated subjects by way of language (so-called “signifying semiotics”),and, on the other, we witness the projection of a visceral “asignifying semiotics” oriented towards the production of what Gilles Deleuze termed“dividuals.”6 This latter category of sign can be thought of in terms of indices, diagrams or statistics that “operate ‘prior’ and ‘next’ to signification, producing a ‘sense without meaning,’ an ‘operational sense.’”7 The project, we argue, is just such a diagram. In response to such (asignifying) signs, subjects undergo a form of depersonalization that can be spoken of in terms of a Guattarian “machinic enslavement” – an operation that integrates workers into broader assemblages that can be exploited by capital. Rather than the mass, an aggregate that was so important to the disciplinary societies of the twentieth century, in the contemporary “control society,” we confront arrangements of bodies–minds that form samples, data, markets or “banks.”8 In a project-based economy, we can imagine these banks of labor to be made up of both intensive surplus labor of the kind that produces “surplus value without doing any work” (children, the retired, the unemployed, consumers etc.) and an erratic and extensive, floating labor force that is engaged on a short-term basis under precarious conditions. Through such banks, “cells of productive time can be mobilized in punctual, casual, and fragmentary forms.”9 Whilst, on the one hand, the subject is treated in the abstract, as a “mere theoretical probe or experimental procedure”10; on the other hand, she must be able to be immediately mobilized – to be “driven towards movement.” She must, in other words, be able to be affected. It is for this reason that “the everyday world, the lifeworld, the world of interpersonal relationships” are ruthlessly exploited as “hitherto untapped resources” under contemporary capitalism.11 What we are left with is a Vitalpolitik which, as Joseph Vogl explains, “sets its sights on individuals in their entirety, watching over them from morning to night, in their homes and in their beds, as lovers and as dreamers, in sickness and in health.”12 Our disposition towards the present moment (and, importantly, towards the future) is, as such, central to our ability to be “mobilized,” and this goes some way to explain why contemporary capitalism seems so deeply to obsess over our collective states of mind, our moods, our dreams and our preferences. Under the sign of the project, we are exposed to a diagrammatic operation that sketches a possible future. In anticipation of that future, we are moved. In making the project the site for her work in the late capitalist economy, the architect finds herself displaced; in fact, as long as she continues to work on “the project,” we can pose that she defers the moment of its materialization. She lingers in a state of anticipation, compulsively producing substitutes for a future real. “In societies of control,” Deleuze reminds us: “one is never finished with anything.”13 The blessing and the curse of the project in this sense is that it is always temporary. Reliance on the vagaries of the project reveals the incredible vulnerability and precarity of workers (architects included), who simply disappear “off screen” in between projects, their earning potential deactivated until the next chunk of work is allocated or created. As Lazzarato notes, the cycle of [immaterial] production comes into operation only when it is required by the capitalist; once the job has been done, the cycle gets dissolved back into the networks and flows that make possible the reproduction and enrichment of its productive capacities. The strength of the project under semiocapitalism thus lies in the fact that it invokes a sense of the finite, a dread and a longing for it to be over, the promise of a succession of fresh starts, of (entrepreneurial)opportunities to remake oneself. It is typical of neoliberalism at large that such precarity is painted in terms of an opportunity. In delimiting a time and a space, the project acts as a kind of “container technology” capable of holding things together.15 It is thus also a way of coping with precarity –of, literally, not falling apart in the face of a world of precarious work and machinic enslavement – which is perhaps one reason why it holds such an unquestioned status as the primary organizational diagram when it comes to the work done by architects (who both work within and on projects). We can speculate, following the work of Boris Groys, that the subjective appeal of the project lies, therefore, in its very boundedness, in the fact that it will, ultimately, end. As Groys notes: Each project is above all the declaration of another, new future that is supposed to come about once the project has been executed. But in order to induce such a new future one first has to take a period of leave or absence for oneself, with which the project has transferred its agent into a parallel state of heterogeneous time. This other timeframe, in turn, is undocked from time as experienced by society: it is de-synchronized. Under semiocapitalism, the diagrammatic “desynchronization” of time itself has, we argue, become a commodity – and the project, in parallel, has attained the dual status of being both the primary product of architectural labor and the primary technique by which such labor is managed.

The origins of cybernetic capitalism, then, lie at the apex of the American national-imperial state, forged during the Second World War. Indeed, the dawning of the cyber-capitalist age might be dated to 21 seconds past 5:29 am—local time in New Mexico, us—on 16 July 1945. At that moment, ‘Trinity’, the first atomic bomb, was detonated in the desert. Plutonium atoms were torn apart in a nuclear reaction, releasing an immense amount of energy in the form of heat, light, sound and radiation, making the earth tremble, melting the desert sand into green radioactive glass and sending an immense mushroom cloud seven miles up into the sky. This rigorously calculated incident was a crucial moment in world history: techno-scientific forces now enabled people to reorganize the building blocks of matter. Twenty-three days after the Trinity blast, the us used their terrible weapons on the people of Japan. Three warplanes were sent to Hiroshima. The first carried the payload—the atomic weapon, ‘Little Boy’. The second was filled with scientists, equipped with sensors and instruments to measure the blast. The third carried photographers, to record the event. Hence science and surveillance literally flanked the world-historic atom-bombing mission. On their return the scientists fed their data into computing-machines, to calculate the success of their abominable human experiment. The atomic explosion was only possible because nascent computing-machines—ibm’s Harvard Mark i—were available to crunch the vast number tables for the Manhattan Project. Computing-machines and nuclear weapons were born together, in the womb of war. The first general-purpose digital computer, eniac, was activated four months later, in December 1945; its first task was a mathematical test to ascertain the practicability of thermonuclear weapons, more terrible than the fission blasts that had annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The rise of the digital device brought into retrospective focus the analogue technologies that had preceded it, which literally bore an analogy to some natural phenomenon: for example, a hammer is analogous to a fist, an airplane wing to a bird’s pinions. Digital computing, by contrast, was fundamentally discontinuous, built on the binary of 1 or 0, ‘all or nothing’, on or off. The radical break of the digital had a place in the broader social pattern of increasing abstraction. Digital computers did not emerge from the history of labour and craft, but rather at the command of capital and the state. They could not exist at all without technological transformations that depended in turn upon the intensely abstracted theoretical work of intellectually trained computer scientists in us research laboratories. As with the cybernetic mode of practice more broadly, this cohort of elite scientists and engineers had its origins in wwii, when the us mobilized massive government-sponsored research projects, run by both the military and civilian arms of the state, with the intensive involvement of some of the major corporations. If the origins of the military-industrial complex could be emblematized by any one person, the American engineer Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) is the likely candidate. Dean of the mit School of Engineering, founder of Raytheon, director of the war-time Office of Scientific Research and Development and an initiator of the Manhattan Project, Bush’s presidential report, Science, the Endless Frontier, with its telling colonial metaphor, was one of the founding documents of cyber-capitalism. While dedicated to war, the new research laboratories provided spaces for intellectual inquiry, allowing for free-wheeling, interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research and large-scale collaborations. They shifted the trajectory of technological development, from incidental and piecemeal results of individual creativity and practical tinkering—as exemplified by someone like Nikola Tesla—to institutions designed to transform social practice. These techno-scientific projects would move beyond the conquest of nature—the dream of the early-modern scientific revolution—to aim at its reconstitution: the reorganization of social life at a higher level of abstraction. Thus if capitalist modernity was more abstract than the various feudal and customary societies it displaced, the cybernetic transformation would take this to another stage. The ‘leveling domination of abstraction’, to use Adorno and Horkheimer’s phrase, involved levelling in two senses: leveling as in flattening—such as the colonial destruction of deep social relations and place-based practices—and levelling as in adding new layers, with the reconstitution of social relations by more abstracted practices. With the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the us announced its arrival as the supreme superpower of the capitalist world. But the landscape it confronted was one of global rebellion and upheaval. On the day of Emperor Hirohito’s unconditional surrender, the August Revolution began in Vietnam, with Viet Minh taking over Hanoi, beginning a struggle for independence that would take thirty years of war. Two weeks later, Indonesia declared independence, after three centuries of Dutch domination; within a month, Gandhi and Nehru were demanding the removal of all British troops from India. Anti-colonial movements fired up, attacking the older imperial-industrial powers and asserting their sovereignty just as power was being abstracted away from direct control of territory. These struggles—against older empires and us hegemony alike—were not cybernetic in essence, but were soon to be confronted with this more abstract layer, for us counterinsurgencies served as a crucible for developing techniques of communication and control. The collapse of older orders of colonialism was matched by attempts to weave a more abstracted form of imperial power atop this rapidly changing global order. Cybernetic technologies were rapidly deployed against perceived enemies abroad, above all the ussr and Third World anti-colonial movements, as well as workers and radicals in the rich world. Yet the abstracting power of the techno-sciences was not Washington’s to keep. In 1949 the Soviet Union detonated an atomic weapon. In the same year, the Chinese Communist Party emerged victorious from the bloody civil war; within fifteen years, Beijing had acquired nuclear weapons of its own. Not long after it would begin a calamity-ridden quest for wealth and power that has been triumphant, with the country assuming the position of an aggressively nationalist world power. Today, it is in the grip of what I have called ‘cybernetic capitalism with Chinese characteristics’, as an active and unpredictable struggle for hegemony over this more abstract stratum gets underway. Cybernetics ascendant Emerging from the nexus of military-imperialist, capitalist and techno-scientific intellectual forces entangled at the summit of the us state, the cyber-capitalist sector has retained its elite ‘steersman’ character even as it has penetrated the wider economy, colonizing and reconstituting less-abstract forms. Analytically, it can be conceived as a thin layer, spread unevenly across the capitalist world-system, overlaying older patterns of social practice—Fordist production, the print media, subsistence farming, informal labour—transforming but not necessarily eradicating them. Thus, for example, while the postal service as a means of communication was overlaid by increasingly higher forms of abstraction—the telegram, telephone, moving image, radio, tv, teletext, fax, internet, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, gps—it persisted; today, however, while it can still convey hand-written letters, it does so through systems thoroughly reorganized by computer-controlled logistics. Initially after 1945 the older forms remained preponderant; cybernetic capitalism could co-exist with other modes—indigenous ways of being, traditional beliefs like the universalizing religions, modern forms such as the post-Westphalian nation-state. Moving forward to the present, it is no longer emergent, but the globally dominant social formation, with the older forms in part reconstituted on a more abstract level, with tensions, conflicts and contradictions appearing between the various levels. Many aspects of this transformation are discussed under the rubric of ‘neoliberalism’. No doubt the brutal drive to put profit über alles has had devastating ramifications for society, subjectivity and the planet’s ecology; yet the focus on production and exchange should not occlude other aspects, such as communication, inquiry, organization and technology. Neoliberal transformations are underpinned by cybernetic changes that laid the foundations for a global market to operate, via instantaneous communication and rationalized logistics. The intellectual fathers of the neoliberal doctrine were quick to grasp this. Following the lead of neo-Malthusian ecologist Garrett Hardin, Hayek celebrated the ‘mutual adjustments’ of cybernetics’ regulatory function as an instantiation of the invisible hand: ‘This foundation of modern civilization was first understood by Adam Smith in terms of the operation of a feedback mechanism by which he anticipated what we now know as cybernetics.’ At the same time, this view failed to grasp the radical discontinuity of cybernetic capitalism. Plainly Smith, or Hayek for that matter, couldn’t imagine the vast amount of surveillance data amassed behind an individual Facebook profile, enabling the automation of real-time psycho- and geo-targeted advertisements to ‘nudge’ consumer behaviour. If this was not the liberal market utopia they had in mind, that is indeed the point: the rupture represented by cyber-capitalism means that it was previously unthinkable. Wiener’s claim about the new age of cybernetic communication and control proved prophetic. Networked computing-machines have spread intensively and extensively in world-historic ways, their abstraction processes cutting into the very basis of human sociality, hacking away at more grounded forms of existence. Expanding outward and downward from the military-industrial complex, driven by the quest for new markets, cyber-capitalism now operates through a material ensemble of social practices, meanings and technological apparatuses—a vast, globe-spanning conglomerate of multiple layers of systems and standards, machines and management, labour and legalities, commodities and communications, ideologies and interoperability, products and protocols. From this cybernetic layer come multiple feedback loops that reorganize less-abstract levels of social existence, undermining and unsettling taken-for-granted ways of being and doing in the world, overlaying them with technologically mediated, power-concentrating, inequality-intensifying, labour-automating, financially speculative, energy-intensive forms that are above all profoundly abstract. One aspect of continuity has been the relation of cyber-capitalism to the summit of the military-industrial complex. The reference may evoke images of olive-drab generals and Eisenhower’s famous speech, yet the material-power structure it denotes has not gone away but rather extended its tentacles deep into everyday life and globalized across the world. A comprehensive update today would rebrand it as the national-security, techno-financial, entertainment-surveillance complex. The invention of the internet, a collaboration between darpa, the Pentagon’s r & d department, corporations like ibm, think-tanks like rand and highly trained techno-scientists at mit, Stanford and elsewhere, is a case in point. Aerospace and weapons companies like Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin have been integral to cyber-capitalism’s success. The tech giants remain tightly linked to the military-industrial complex.

This kind of relationship between individuals and institutions operationalised through international flows of information, labour, and capital exemplifies a Post-Fordist logic outlined at the start of this article. Fabricated stories or not, all creation of online content, whether news or opinion, is a form of precarious employment that foregrounds various aspects of Post-Fordism, many of which lie outside the scope of this article. If this article were to focus directly on the kind of employment of those writing fake news stories, a Post-Fordist lens would highlight the immaterial, flexible, individualised nature of that work. However, it should be clear that the proliferation of fake news impacted and incorporated a much larger group of individuals than simply those writing the stories. By focusing on the wider effects, rather than specifically the niche group of writers, the consequences of online advertising supported content demonstrates a proliferation of Post-Fordist logic, even in the lives of those whose employment is firmly material, industrial, or Fordist. In particular, the writing, reading and sharing of fake news articles can be seen as components of an immaterial labour arrangement. Immaterial labour is described by Maurizio Lazzarato as: ‘the activity that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the commodity, immaterial labour involves a series of activities that are not normally recognised as ‘work’—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion.’ (2014, p 133) Immaterial labour is not unique to Post-Fordism, it has served a role stabilising previous economic arrangements, for example, the marketing of cultural values in the twentieth-century that Adorno and Horkheimer refer to as the culture industry. However, the immaterial labour of producing fake news does not shape the values of consumers in order to sell them commodities. Instead, fake news functions by both fixing certain norms and acting as the commodity that matches such a demand; however, such a demand is exacerbated, rather than fulfilled. These norms and values are part of another element of Post- Fordist labour: affective capitalism. Such a framework highlights the affective qualities of fake news: the reactions it creates as well as the social atmosphere it builds upon. Kylie Jarrett, following the work of Brian Massumi (2002), describes affect as ‘those sensory experiences of movement and feeling that are part of the social, cultural and psychological experience of individuals, but which lie beyond the directly signifying properties of discourse. It is differentiated from emotion for it is as an embodied intensity that is outside conscious articulation.’ (Jarrett, 2015, p 121) Here, the similarity to the notion of the ‘general intellect’ should be noted. Jarrett uses such a perspective within a feminist critique of digital labour in order to argue that it is a mistake to describe individuals online only in terms of rational action. Isto Huvila continues such a call in the context of search engines. Huvila argues that rather than seeing individuals as rational information seekers, what ‘counts in the contemporary affective economy of knowing, is the affective attachment to a sensation of being able to know’ (Huvila, 2016, p 577). However, although affect must have a significant bearing on the spread of fake news, it is difficult to establish a clear understanding of how and why fake news gained traction, with readers, in the way that it did. Were individuals convinced of the accuracy of the stories or were they shared for other reasons? In taking a large-scale economic focus, this article outlines the economic and advertising-dependent incentives behind the creation and proliferation of fake news, but does not address the smaller-scale actions of individuals, rational or otherwise, on which such a proliferation depends. However, even if nothing is known about their reception, it is the economic structure that provided the informational affordances required for fake news to flourish. It is this economic structure that was jointly reinforced by the way in which Google and Facebook prioritise online content.

A key McLuhanist idea taken up by Baudrillard is ‘reversal,’ where at the ‘peak of performance,’ technologies and processes reverse their effects (McLuhan 30, 33, 182). Hence if, in the broadcast-era, the media materiel worked to build the stocks of the real, then digital production has the opposite effect. As in the economic law of over-production leading to devaluation, our digital creativity erodes the reality principle itself. As Baudrillard suggests, ‘it is the excess of reality which stops us believing in it … the real is suffocated by its own accumulation’ (Intelligence 19). Our digital hyperproduction, therefore, reverses now into the crash of the real. We move from the broadcast era of hyperreality, where huge quantities of material were mobilized to perfect the real, to the digital world of hyporeality, where the personal reality is hyperinflated and the real as a shared experience hyperdeflates. This hyporeality (‘hypo’, meaning ‘under’ or ‘less’) is characterized by decline or loss: for when the real is reduced to the self and its productions, then little or nothing is required either to create or believe in it. Recent fears over ‘fake news,’ disinformation, Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories have seen a growing discourse around the notion of a ‘post-truth’ society, with the collapse of belief in the mainstream media leading to fears for ‘truth,’ for democracy and for political debate itself. One explanation for this ‘crisis’ is Pariser’s claim that we’re split today into personal ‘filter bubbles,’ where personally-chosen networks and information and algorithmically-fed feeds remove us from a plurality of sources and a shared experience of the world. This argument has value, but it fails to recognize that the entire, previous era of broadcast media was itself a ‘bubble’—a ‘mainstream bubble,’ encompassing the entirety of the population and filtering collectively not individually, by market demographics, professional codes of conduct, government regulation and advertiser good-will, ensuring nothing too extreme or offensive appeared. Our world of individual bubbles, therefore, is the result of the digital bursting of the mainstream bubble and its mass-filtered mass-consensual reality. Digital technologies have exploded our informational sources into the fractal fragments of everything we can see or find—every friend, follower, message, link, webpage, forum, comment, personal, direct or group message, every gif and meme, photograph, video, update, ‘like’ or ‘story’ and into anything one can think or do or explore and enjoy, however far outside the mainstream. But this isn’t simply about individual bubbles, but rather the foam of individual bubbles—as Sloterdijk suggests of ‘foam cities,’ we are not dealing with ‘mere agglomerations of adjacent (separation-sharing) inert and solid bodies,’ but rather with ‘multiplicities of loosely-touching lifeworldly cells,’ each of which ‘possesses the dignity of a universe’ (Sloterdijk 565). This foam represents, therefore, a foam of personally-created life worlds: a Cambrian explosion of realities. Far from being post-truth, there has never been as much—or rather so many truths. At the core of this proliferation of realities is the hyper-empowered, hyper-productive digital self.