Intellectual Property Law facilitates the creation of an immaterial surplus of labor through unconscious generation of desires that lead to endless cycles of exploitation and semiotic exchange

So, what then is a parasite, the creature who siphons off the surplus? Serres describes the parasite in terms of an unequal exchange of energy, the way in which one organism extracts more energy, labour or time from another organism than it gives back in return, the way one stratum extracts more from layers beneath or beside. Serres explains how organisms are always stealing energy from each other. From this simple thesis, Serres develops a “universal economy of unequal exchange”: The parasitic relation is intersubjective. It is the atomic form of our relations.136 Man is a louse for other men. Thus man is a host for other men. The flow goes one way, never the other. I call this semiconduction, this valve, this single arrow, this relation without a reversal of direction, “parasitic.”137 To parasite means to eat next to...The country rat is invited by his colleague from town, who offers him supper. One would think that what is essential is their relation of resemblance or difference. But that is not enough; it never was. The relation of the guest is no longer simple...There is no exchange, nor will there be one. Abuse appears before use.138 We parasite each other and live amidst parasites. Which is more or less a way of saying that they constitute our environment.139 Pasquinelli gives the parasite a Marxian inflection and picks up on the aprioristic feature of “abuse” and “exploitation.” Before there is use-value or exchange-value there is abuse-value (i.e. primitive accumulation, enclosure and proletarianization). Capital requires a surplus in order to reproduce itself - living labour, ecosystems, and “externalities” of all sorts. In terms of tracking asymmetrical tensions and arrows cutting across, dividing and splitting the semiotic-libidinal domain of the mediasphere, we have to constantly throw ourselves into the energetic surplus of the offline in order to account for exploitative absorptions that pass through a continuum of organisms, strata and workers. The mediasphere is an energy system constituted by a complex of non-mediatic “outsides.” As a kind of caveat, Pasquinelli will also make clear that the “parasite” is not one- dimensional. The parasite does not want its host to die but generates a symbiotic relationship with it and is not simply an insidious leech (although, keeping the host alive can, at times, be all the more sinister); there are moments of alliance and non-hostility immanent to the parasitic relation that exceed direct exploitation and extortion.140 Parasitism is not a moralism. Rather, it flickers between two determinations or poles¾cruel exploiter and friendly symbiont. What the “libidinal parasite” opens up in terms of an “uneven ontology of desire,” then, rather than regarding desire as “a boundless positive energy” or a force that can “endlessly erode all structures of control” (as the relentless Spinozisms of Deleuze and Negri do), is a more radical understanding of how semiocapitalism and neoliberalism divide, cut up, structure, accumulate and siphon flows of desire.141 With the parasite, we supplement the “enchanted universe of production” (Spinoza, Negri, Deleuze, Virno) for the “dark universe of consumption” (Serres, Bataille, Pasquinelli, Parrika). Pasquinelli uses mediatic phenomena such as Internet porn videos, the simulacra of pop icons and other spectacular machines to explain the function of libidinal parasites as seductive gravitational attractors that “channel and accumulate our libido in a highly physical way. Media parasites absorb our libidinal energies as a surplus and condense it in the form of attention and fetishism towards brands, technology, material and immaterial commodities.”142 But there are other, more complicated forms of libidinal surplus value at work within the geology of media and the planetary divides of global labour that subtract our libidinal bandwidth away from secluded processes of how “desire” is manufactured in the first place. Take, for instance, “the residue products from the processes of fabrication, like the minuscule aluminum dust residue released from polishing iPad cases to be desirably shiny for the consumer market.”143 Or, even, how immaterial labour functions on the international stage: “in Vietnam or Thailand a famous designer buys for three dollars a shirt conceived in Paris or Zurich. The shirt will be sold in the West for forty-five dollars in the name of the ‘immaterial designer’” and thanks “to patents, trademarks and intellectual property - that is, to the much higher remuneration commanded by knowledge with respect to material-applied labor - wealth is in fact redistributed to the North.”144 Creativity is ontologically, fetishistically and economically restricted to the commons of the global North. It belongs (legally) to the intellectual and aesthetic consciousness of the cognitariat. We do not often talk of desire in strictly material or “corporate” terms (businesses desire profit and deterritorialize enormous parts of the earth in order to make commodities¾from computers to Ikea furniture¾so they can realize that desire). Desire typically has a phantasmagoric texture, egocentric connotation and anthropogenic locus. It seems to be an immensely polished, exfoliated and diaphanous subjective revelation, intersubjective relation or even machinic relationality¾a cupidinous arrow, machinic coupling or personal inner movement exorcised from all molecular negativity, grit or material support.145 We forget that desire has to traverse supply chains before it gets to the consumer or enters the “psychosphere” in the form of an “abstract” object of enjoyment. When speaking about “desiring-machines,” it is better move away from the “residual consumer” or “larval subject” (and its nomadic and ephemeral identity) found in Anti-Oedipus and emphasize the machine in “desiring-machines,” insofar as it enables us (without denying the “dynamic composition of heterogenous elements” or “transversal relationality”) to think about how corporate technicity (i.e. factories, data centers, fixed capital, financial computation) operates as a major force of geological exhaustion, extortion and destruction. Even beyond the desire to produce surplus value, in so far as a desiring flow functions to disrupt a molar or arborescent configuration of the socius (e.g. centralized financial systems) but plugs into a technological infrastructure that gives it a cyborg dimension it becomes problematic: the “cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which is intended to disrupt hierarchical and centralised financial systems, requires the energy of nine US homes to perform a single transaction; and if its growth continues, by 2019 it will require the annual power output of the entire United states to sustain itself.”146 As Cubitt viciously demystifies for us, the “[f]antasy cyborgs look like human beings with technological implants,” whereas “[a]ctually existing cyborgs are huge agglomerations of technologies with human implants. Corporations like Enron and FirstEnergy are such cyborgs, composed of non-human actors with human biochips embedded to carry out specialist tasks” (like public relations and human resource management), and whose sprawling machinic agency has at is disposable “electrical grids connecting aggressively active users (who can scarcely be caught in the term consumers), the unmanaged turbulence of deregulated and automated markets, and the inhuman drive for corporate profit.”147 Again, it seems necessary to turn to the provocative formula of Anti-Oedipus and read it in geological and corporate terms: “we always make love with worlds.” How does capitalism produce desire, insofar as the desire for surplus profit demands immense material consumption, a 145 Even for Lacan and Žiźek, desire is animated by a primordial “lack” (loss or void in Being) that is then determined and constituted by the signifiers of the “Other” or symbolic order, that is, through the “immaterial” organization of signs and never contaminated by the heterogeneous flows that condition its possibility or production. Desire is, in some degree, an auto-animating force beyond the realm of patriarchal code but, nevertheless, the constellation of objects around which desire is organized are always these phantasmal or “imaginary” objects. Psychoanalysis does not understand production but only structures. consumption that has nothing to do with the “individual”? What material elements does it use, abuse and discard of in the process of “desiring-production”? Desire has a constellation of material traces, minerals and chemicals (from psychopharmaceutic SSRIs to aluminum dust used for polishing Ipads, from serotonin to silicon) grafted onto its quasi-spiritual stomach lining: “plagued by worker suicides, and indexical of the wider health issues having to do with aluminum dust that is a side product of ensuring our iPads are shiny and properly polished, such places are the murky unconscious of gadget culture.”148 Parikka continues the link between desire and materiality: aluminum “itself is one of the primary chemical and metals of technological modernity: its fetishlike shininess defines Italian futurism as much as post-World War II automobile culture” and exposes a paradox in that “the residue of the utopian promise is registered in the soft tissue of a globally distributed cheap labor force.”149 This is an “entanglement” between structured regimes of desire and the materiality of technology that new materialists and cyborgs brutally shy away from. Desire is a complicated parasite that is forever predicated on unequal exchanges. It passes through objects (relations, machines, parts and people) in order to realize and express itself¾at the same time things pass through it, supporting or sabotaging it to varying proportions. The extent to which this relationship is extortive or enrichening, of course, depends on the material honesty of our social relations.