E-Commerce and the Internet of Things are vessels deployed to accelerate communicative capitalism temporally – access becomes the determining factor in who lives and who dies.

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.