Continued expansion of the technosphere guarantees planetary destruction and extinction---any defense of the current system cannot account for the computational takeover of every sphere of life

Whatever the case, capital and markets must now be understood as magnetic fields as well as key determinants of the climate system on earth. Furthermore, whether the old distinction between the economic power of corporations and the political sovereignty of states still holds is more and more open to debate (Barkan 2013). Most global corporations aspire to secede from everybody else while exercising surveillance on everybody else. Their big dream is to be exempt from taxes and to be free from accountability; in short, to enjoy the kind of immunity and state of exceptionality we used to recognize only in truly sovereign powers. In a book about what she terms surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff (2019) argues that a global architecture of behavior modification is underway. Driven by powerful states, high-tech corporations, and military apparatuses, surveillance capitalism threatens what she calls “human nature” in the twenty-first century, just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. She shows the extent to which vast wealth is accumulated in what she terms new “behavioral futures markets,” that is, markets where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to new technologies of behavioral modification. Indeed, capital, especially finance capital, has become our shared infrastructure, our nervous system, the transcendental maw that nowadays maps out our world and its psycho-physical limits (Zuboff 2019). To the millennial properties Jean and John Comaroff highlighted at the start of this century (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000), capital has now blended the magnetic attributes I have referred to above.

Around us, it looks as if nothing escapes its control. Affects, emotions, and feelings, manifestations of desire, dreams, or thoughts—no sphere of contemporary life has been left untouched by the spread of capital. No sphere is shielded against its atmospheres, its radiation, and its charged particles. Capital now extends its grasp deep into the underbelly of the world (Konings 2018; Edwards, Becker, and Colwell 2012). Soon, mining companies will unleash their collection of vehicles on the seabed beneath international waters. They will

creep across the bottom in systematic rows, scraping through the top five inches of the ocean floor. Ships above will draw thousands of pounds of sediment through a hose to the surface, remove the metallic objects, known as polymathic nodules, and then flush the rest back into the water. Some of that slurry will contain toxins such as mercury and lead, which could poison the surrounding ocean for hundreds of miles. The rest will drift in the current until it settles in nearby ecosystems. (Hylton 2020)

Capital itself is now a magnetic field. In its wake, it leaves countless uninhabitable zones, vast fields of debris and toxins, waste heaps of humans ravaged by sores and boils (Jarrige and Le Roux 2017; Marder 2019). Now that everything is a potential source of capitalization, capital has made a world of itself: a hallucinatory phenomenon of planetary dimensions. Early twenty-first-century corporate sovereignty is therefore an unprecedented form of power, whose main aspiration is to free itself from democratic oversight. As a result, we might no longer live in an epoch when sovereignty was exercised by the demos (Brown 2015). Finance capital in the guise of a ubiquitous digital, extractive, and digestive architecture might have definitively become the new Leviathan (Bélanger 2018).

Techno-Molecular Colonialism

Meanwhile, unprecedented numbers of human beings are today embedded in increasingly complex technostructures, most of which are intervening in the dynamics of the earth system on a planetary scale. This has led to the transgression of planetary boundaries such as those related to anthropogenic climate change, degenerative land-use change, accelerated biodiversity loss, perturbation of the global biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, and the creation and release of novel entities such as nanoparticles and genetically engineered organisms (Donges et al. 2017). It has also resulted in the acceleration of processes of metamorphosis, decay, and extinction. Take, for instance, the metabolic life of whey powder, a pollutant in waterways and a multiplicitous substance used over the past two decades as a protein supplement in a multibillion-dollar industry. As demonstrated by Samantha King and Gavin Weedon (2019), whey pollution has long been the effect of the systematic overproduction endemic to agrofood industries. Whey's toxicity is known to persist through processes of metabolism and consumption. This not only highlights the co-constitutive relations between bodily matter and ecological life, and their entanglement with processes of commodification (King and Weedon 2019); it also shows the extent to which the technosphere is a part, or an extension, of the biosphere. Flows of matter, energy, and information are combined into complex networks and intricate webs of interactions. As a result, the body and flesh of the world is expanding. In the process, the earth is being redefined in a way that binds all species together: humans, technology, animals, fungi, plants, viruses, bacteria—the same life in disparate bodies (Laubichler 2019).

Over the last decade, numerous algorithmic forms of intelligence have been developed (Amoore and Piotukh 2020). Many are inspired by the natural world and by ideas of natural selection and evolution. Such is the case of genetic algorithms—a subset of evolutionary algorithms that “mimic actions inspired in biological operators, such as cells.” They “seek to optimize the responses to the problems of their environments by self-generating, and encompassing processes of mutation and natural selection” (Pasquinelli 2015). As Margarida Mendes (2017) powerfully argues, a shifting redistribution of powers between the human and the technological is unfolding. Technologies, in turn, are increasingly tied both metabolically and reproductively into complex networks of extraction and predation. Mendes shows the extent to which the genetic codes of humans, plants, and animals are being cracked and disseminated. This, in turn, is giving way to an exponential rise of biological patents. The human genome is in the process of being privately owned.

Life itself is more and more perceived as a commodity to be replicated under the volatility of market consumption. Mendes goes on to show how thousands of new molecules whose behavior cannot be predicted are produced and released into the ecosystem. Seeds, chemical herbicides, GMOs, and pesticides are patented by a handful of multinationals, she adds. Through widespread genetic modification of key elements in the food chain, corporations are intervening directly in the natural cycles of life and ecosystems. Patented GMO genes are absorbed into human bodies and the bodies of various other species, turning the latter into infrastructures and inscribing them into a proprietary relationship of biological subjugation, she concludes.

As algorithmic forms of intelligence grow in parallel to (and often in alliance with) genetic research, the integration of algorithms and big-data analysis in the biological sphere brings with it a greater belief in techno-positivism. More and more, statistical thought, regimes of assessment of the natural world, modes of prediction, and analysis treat matter and life itself as finite and computable objects. The idea that life might be an open, nonlinear, and exponentially chaotic system is increasingly behind us. We seem to have reached a point where the market is reimagined as the primary mechanism for the validation of truth. Since markets themselves are increasingly turning into algorithmic structures, the only useful knowledge today is supposed to be algorithmic. Instead of actual human beings with body, history, and flesh, big data and statistical inferences are all that count, and both are mostly derived from computation.

Through big data in particular, surveillance is expanded into the emotional registers of domestic and embodied experience. As Kirstie Ball and William Webster (2020) have argued, a nexus of the potential of analysts, the data practices themselves, and the newly configured intimate spheres is increasingly drawn into the commercial value chain (Ball and Webster 2020). Data extraction is itself a political economic regime driven by the perpetual cycle of capital accumulation (Sadowski 2020).

For Matteo Pasquinelli (2015), algorithmic reason is a form of rationality whose end is the understanding of vast amounts of data according to a specific vector, the recording of emerging properties, and the forecasting of tendencies. To some extent, the metadata society is characterized by the “accumulation of information about information.” Algorithms also mine metadata for the purpose of establishing patterns of behavior, detecting anomalies, and recognizing an enemy. The enemy is constructed as a reality via statistics, modeling, and mathematics. Power, thus, is increasingly about identifying patterns or connections in random data, in a context in which the opposition between information and knowledge, knowledge and data, data and image, and thinking and seeing appears to collapse.

Power, detection, and surveillance are nevertheless not all. Algorithms are interwoven with a multiplicity of relations and heterogeneous things, be they data, bodies, or objects (Amoore 2020). In this sense, they are in themselves a negotiated process. Their power derives from their capacity to dynamically combine and recombine them and in so doing to reconfigure different social and material heterogeneities (Burke 2019; Lee and Björklund Larsen 2017). How they fold and unfold these relations, and with what effects, is an open-ended matter.

Computational and algorithmic logic is now found at the very source of general perception. As a result of the conflation of knowledge, computation, and markets, contempt has been extended to anyone who has nothing to sell and nothing to buy, or anything that cannot be bought and sold. It is therefore correct to argue that there is a shifting distribution of powers between the human and the technological, in the sense that technologies are moving toward “general intelligence” and self-replication. They are being granted the powers of reproduction and independent teleonomic purpose rather than having them taken away.

Key to life futures is therefore the extent to which technological escalation has redefined the nature of speed, unshackled markets, and the economy. Important, too, are the ways in which various technological devices constantly monitor our behavior in attempts to reveal how it could be modified and optimized. As a matter of fact, some of the fastest-expanding markets in the world today are “markets for future behavior.” They rely on better understanding incipient future intent. This could be future voting intentions. It could also be the intent to commit fraud, the intent to buy life insurance, or the intent to stream a specific video (Amoore 2019). These markets also rely on the extraction and mining of new forms of raw material. Such raw material mostly consists of information and details about individuals’ behavior taken, as Zuboff (2019) writes, from the distant corners of our unconscious. It is raw material plumbed from intimate patterns of the self—our personality, our moods, our emotions, our lies, our vulnerabilities, every level of our intimacy (Zuboff 2019; Illouz 2007). The purpose is not only to heighten the predictability of our behavior. It is also to make life itself amenable to datafication.

A key feature of our times is therefore the extent to which all societies are organized according to the same principle—the computational. We are surrounded by ubiquitous computing, technologies that weave themselves into the fabric of our everyday lives; these devices, sensors, and other things we interact with have become part of our presence in the world all the time. How the boundary between us and these devices is enacted is a matter of open debate (Matzner 2019).

But what is the computational? The computational is generally understood as a technical system whose function is to capture, extract, and automatically process data that must be identified, selected, sorted, classified, recombined, codified, and activated. Yet we shouldn't forget that the computational is also a force and energy of a special kind, a speed regime with its own qualities and infrastructures. It produces and serializes subjects, objects, and phenomena; splits reason from consciousness and memory; and codes and stores data that can be used to manufacture new types of services and devices sold for profit.

Whether operating on bodies, nerves, material, blood, cellular tissues, the brain, or energy, the aim is the same: the conversion of all substances into quantities; the conversion of organic and vital ends into technical means; the capture of forces and possibilities, and their annexation by the language of a machine-brain transformed into an autonomous and automated system (Friederich 2020; Perény 2013). The computational is also the institution through which a common world, a new common sense, and new configurations of power, perception, and reality are nowadays brought into being. The globalization of corporate sovereignty, the extension of capital into every sphere of life, and technological escalation in the form of the computational are all part of one and the same process.

The Dialectics of Entanglement and Separation

The third megaprocess is what we should call the dialectics of entanglement and separation. All over the world, the combination of fossil capital, soft-power warfare, and the saturation of the everyday by digital and computational technologies has led to the acceleration of speed and the intensification of connections, creating a new redistribution of the earth and of population movements. To be alive, or to remain alive, is increasingly tantamount to being able to move speedily.

In the process, the human race has come up against terrestrial limits. Such limits are not only the consequence of the sphericality of the planet. They are also limitations on the expansion of life as such. As the planet increasingly seems bound to burn, it is not only individuated bodies that are imperiled. It is earthly existence, the fate of everything on earth, the fluidity of life that is at stake (Pyne 1995; Parisi and Terranova 2000).