Capitalism’s proliferation of exo-attentional devices creates the means for extractivist production of the environment and our subjectivities---that causes ecocide.

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.