The logic of competition and innovation constructs systems of non-stop anxiety and overstimulation, transforming human attention into another resource to be extracted

There is common knowledge about the fundamental traits of capitalism such as the accumulation of profit, upholding private ownership and the freedom of the individual in a competitive market, based on wage labor. Capitalism’s main critique is that this setup, seemingly geared toward a free market and economic growth, causes exploitative and oppressive structures for a large group of people. What this essay is focusing on is the way in which capitalism developed in the 21st century, enmeshed with the exponential advancement of networked digital technologies in a globalized world. Currently, the product in which capitalism is interested is knowledge and affect, both invisible and inseparable from the person who “produces” them. The contemporary state of capitalism has been labeled in different ways, such as cognitive, neuro, mental, emotional, affective, platform or surveillance capitalism depending on the perspective of the author. Nevertheless, all these adjectives converge around the shifting interest of capitalism from material production to the colonization of the mind by utilizing the power of networked, digital media technologies. As Yann Moulier Boutang asserts “material labour does not disappear, but it loses its central role as a strategic asset”7. Historically, the perspective on contemporary capitalism that concentrates on the ways power structures target cognitive production connects to the Italian Marxist movement of operaismo. Giorgio Grizziotto writes about a shift from the industrial to a biocognitive stage in which technological transformation exerts its power through devices such as mobile phones that became inseparable from our lives as thinking, feeling and material bodies. Tiziana Terranova summarizes it as follows: This transition is expressed not only in technological transformation and innovation, but also in the way in which technological mediation invests the social body, from allergies and autoimmune diseases to burn-out syndromes caused by hyper-competition between precarity, anxiety and stress caused by the fact that attention becomes the central and integral part of work to the materialization of the mobile phone as a biopolitical device in the mobile phone.8 Attention is the central parameter through which the body-mind gets hooked up to the invisible force of technological transformation and normalization. The individual body is added to the social body through its attention, a channel for mediation, which narrows down the human biocognitive existence to competition and other anxiety-driven, negative parameters. In his article “The Economy of Attention”, Georg Franck connects the influences of social and mass media in constituting a so-called “attention capital.” He uses the term “mental capitalism” in which, he observes, “we seem to have a nearly perfect reflection of the material base in our mental superstructure”9. Yves Citton talks rather about an “ecology of attention” and focuses on the synchronicity and communality by which media content is consumed. In his words: And so the general function of this entire mediasphere, of which we had difficulty deciding whether it related to the necessities of production or to the puzzling pleasures of entertainment, comes into view. The very fact of watching the same things together at the same time, even if in apparent isolation from each other, produces effects of communal valorization which are indispensable to the constant renewal of the system of production.10 The term “ecology of attention” points to the inseparability of the natural, media and technological environment, on the one hand, and the underlying hegemonic structures, on the other. The pervasiveness of power exerted through networked digital technologies is expressed through the vanishing of the demarcation between being on and offline, work and leisure, public and private spaces. The vision of a coming metaverse11, or the web 3.0, brings in yet another kind of immaterial ecology: the ecology of the hyperreal. The hyperreality of the metaverse assimilates and commodifies not only cognitive aspects of the human life. Emotion and affect are tools in achieving the desired attention, but they can also be seen as products, constructed and utilized by capitalism. Eva Illouz defines emotional capitalism as follows: Emotional capitalism is a culture in which emotional and economic discourses and practices mutually shape each other, thus producing what I view as a broad, sweeping movement in which affect is made an essential aspect of economic behavior and in which emotional life – especially that of the middle classes – follows the logic of economic relations and exchange.12 The term “affective capitalism” goes in tandem with “emotional capitalism”, emphasizing the body, its feelings, longings, and desires. Brian Massumi describes how affect becomes an intrinsic commodity of capitalism: “The ability of affect to produce an economic effect more swiftly and surely than economics itself means that affect is itself a real condition, an intrinsic variable of the late-capitalist system, as infrastructural as a factory”13. Affect is not only a variable as a means of control but also as a means of production. Thus, attention and affect are closely intertwined in a vicious spiral in the contemporary mediasphere. In turn, the terms “platform capitalism” and “surveillance capitalism” focus on technologies and digital networks that commodify, produce and control fundamental aspects of our human existence such as knowledge, memories, decisions, emotions and affects. In his book Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek places data at the epicenter of the production of contemporary capitalism. He looks at various digital platforms that are specialized in extracting, interpreting, and using data as the main asset to achieve growth in a knowledge economy14. Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism focuses on data as a commodity as well. She asserts that “surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data”15. Behavioral data, and specifically the so-called “behavioral surplus”, has been used to create predictions and profiling with detrimental consequences for the future of democratic societies. In that sense, digital technologies and contemporary capitalism are perfectly entangled. To summarize, the interdependence between contemporary capitalism and networked digital technologies results in a pervasive power structure that aims to colonize cognitive and affective aspects of human life by subjugating them to the logic of the binary computation. In other words, everything that is computable is commodifiable and controllable at the same time.