The aff’s investment in capitalist and technological governance creates incidental governmentality.

Furthermore, these critiques should also be read in connection with a broader examination of the epistemological and ideological violence underpinning capitalist culture in all its facets. In addition to the earlier mentioned frames of necropolitics and slow violence, an acknowledgement of the “cruel optimism” and “slow death” (Berlant 2011) at play within contemporary society is necessary. These components are identified through critical challenges to the mindset of superficial optimism10 inherent within contemporary capitalist society. They become evident through critiquing ideological outlooks which romanticise the aggressive and accelerationist nature of the capitalist episteme, blur the destructivity of militarised economic apparati, and close an eye to the oppressive hegemonies and interpellations of capitalist life.

The current moment retains the spectre of past traumas and the phantoms of unrealised hopes; it is a time of technological change and social attritions. The era of the 4IR and reformulated, reproduced, or repackaged neo-liberalism and death capitalism is a stage for experiencing war by diffuse means, spread across all temporalities and spectrums of living. Poets react to this changing and yet simultaneously static climate through their use of language and by harnessing a diversity of poetic techniques, allowing and stimulating aesthetic modes that are able to critique the status quo. A pertinent in situ example would be Gqeberha-based poet and artist Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta, who in 2019 published a volume titled skeptical erections. In a poem titled “violent seed” (2019, 32), the narrator holds forth from the scene of a location neighbourhood, mustering and gathering a series of concrete images that display psycho-geographical violence and mass media permutations and replays of slow death—not forgetting the simmering traumatic content of post-apartheid society, a depiction of relational fracturing. The narrator reveals:

i am from a violent seed—a legacy of vulgarity a suitcase packed with stones and bullets across the railway line things may seem different but on the tv and in the neighbourhood the temper is boiling11

We are the “violent seed” of capitalism. The technocratic society and its violence is a seed of capitalism, and capitalism is also, in fact, a vast machine, a hyper-object (Morton 2013). Technocracy and capitalism are inseparable: a predominant “legacy of vulgarity” whose essence cannot be defined as existing or being in one space, but whose attributes are everywhere and, furthermore, with varying temporations, issue unequally across different spaces and times. For those living in neo-liberal environs, war has changed substantially, from a concentration and mobilisation of forces on land, sea, and air, to an infiltration of mass being, a discordance of experience, a mobilisation of the processes and affects of mass and social media, and a slow violence of submersion into capitalist realism. The latter is a realism that has evolved through different permutations of the industrial revolution, to one that is framed by signs, symbols, and the representative world of the technological, driven by a technocratic worldview and directed by the roles and forms of surveillance capitalism which act as a conditioner of behavioural looping.

I am one, and I am many; this is the power of the body of capitalism. It is an essence which is one thing, but moves and flows into different modes and substrates. This capitalism can also be called death or thanatic capitalism (Pettman 2020); its other side, which is the side that we buy from—the beautified packaging of this slow death—I have called romantic capitalism (Allan n.d.[b], unpublished). 12 Romantic capitalism is the romanticisation of the processes of production, consumption, exploitation, and extraction, as well as the celebration of entertainment above culture. It lies in acknowledging and according value to the spectacular versus the everyday, 13 and the promotion of innovation and accelerationism at the expense of slower, more sustainable, approaches to society, ecology, and even the body. 14 Essentially, romantic capitalism is a libidinal investment and self-participation (motivated through advertising and consumer culture) in the death culture of capitalism. It is also, accumulatively, in our recent moments, an addictive immersion in social internet culture, with social media intrusions and data gathering being factored into the increasing coerciveness of political surveillance and forms of necropolitics.

In-between these terms is real capitalism: what we live with in our everyday lives; the fundamental boringness and mundanity, but not overwhelming visual or emotional horror, of living in capitalist society. Paying taxes, inflation, having to work in stressful environments, the slow death of ambition and hope; not abysmally killing us, but grinding us day by day. We are put off by our immersion in the entertainment of our various drug environments (narcotics, alcoholism, television, social media, ideals, and hashtags); mentally distracted by focusing our frustration on isolated scapegoats of incompetence and corruption and the grandeur of conspiracy theories; and, emotionally, constantly appetised by the religion of mass advertising. Hope dies last. What is below our feet, and on the margins of the suburbs, in the decaying zones of obsolete modernity—which a sudden catastrophe can launch us helplessly into—is death capitalism. This is where one witnesses the political triaging of reality. In these situations, the economy is frequently placed above the value of human lives; banks and corporations are bailed out; poorer citizens are criminalised in a failing economy by becoming debt-ridden or unable to obtain basic daily sustenance. 15

Furthermore, in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, all of the fracture points of technocratic society, predicated as it is upon capitalism as an economic ideology centred upon production, consumption, wastage, extraction, and spectacle, have been brutally exposed. Countries and populations which were already suffering from unequal access to healthcare services and products found themselves disproportionately challenged by Covid-19. Global under-spending on health and social welfare budgets, in accordance with the neo-liberal push for privatisation and the slow erosion of welfare rights, led to large sections of populations finding themselves vulnerable to the pandemic’s ravages. People in overcrowded areas either could not effectively practise social distancing, or found themselves under heavy and brutal armed surveillance in the early stages of lockdowns in many countries across the world. Locally, gender-based violence and violence against marginalised groups increased. The ripple effects of the outbreak included massive increases in unemployment, a growing sense of alienation, and a loss of optimism and faith in the democratic project. The state of Covid-19 has been experienced as a state of total war upon populations worldwide. For future historians, related as the pandemic is to an overall period of upheaval and conflict, and as part of a broader intertwined ecological-economical crisis, Covid-19 may actually be a reasonably strong candidate for the name of the Third World War.16

How do we define the ultimate success of war? It would be achieving victory without firing a shot, without a declaration of war, subjugating a population without a murmur. In the search for victory, if not ultimate success, nations approach war very differently now; they apply soft aggression, pre-kinetic tactics, and slow pressure. In China, there is the pre-kinetic “three warfares” approach. The People’s Liberation Army invokes as strategy the three warfares, “san zhong zhanfa” (Raska 2015), a very successful method involving intelligence gathering and cognitive mapping. It leads towards the influencing of nations’ policies through shaping key decision makers and media perceptions. Other world powers have strategised and are either implementing or have begun utilising similar approaches. Most countries are both developing their capacities for cyber warfare and using a variety of methods, not simply diplomatic, to pursue war by other means. And not just the nations, but the organisations and the corporations as well, in various ways, transmigrate into pre-kinetic war. 17

While political thinkers and activists frequently base their approaches on an older model of the nation state as the battleground for politics, this old model has less and less relevance and applicability in a world of planetary economic totalitarisation. In this world, real power is located not in powers that were created through legislative-political movements and developments, but rather in powers that define their value and purpose in economic terms. We increasingly witness a shift from nation bodies to corporate bodies being the defining forces of control and conflict. The use of pre-kinetic warfare becomes a seemingly soft doctrine of pre-emptive movement(s) used by corporations. This warfare extends into the manipulation of voting publics and buying publics through mass media ownership, social media dominance, and technical methods of coercion. 18 Furthermore, this type of warfare escapes notice, or is perceived as being relatively everyday and harmless. 19

Mass media and social media play a crucial role in relaying either critique or subservience. With Brian Massumi (2002, 269) suggesting that “what the mass media transmits is not images, but event potential”, what if this transmission is not of event potential, but of non-event potential? (And ten years later Tom Cohen [2012, 13] intimated that “the event of the 21st century is that there will be no event, that no crisis will disturb the expansion of consumption beyond all supposed limits and peaks”. 20) This evinces a transmission of brief, superficial affect, a disrupted consciousness of lived-in-time and being, moments of outrage at hearing reportage of some infliction or cruelty, followed occasionally by brief mobilisation of protests and hashtag campaigns. However, before long the cause is almost forgotten, reduced to virtual oblivion, the mental detritus of the age of attention deficit. The catatonic onslaught of images, trends, and hashtags on social media leads eventually to a feeling of exhaustion and being overwhelmed. It frequently contributes to an increase in mental health challenges, as it produces a simultaneously overwhelming array of affecting and triggering appearances, while remaining disembodied and eerily remote and apprehensively unreal with its repetition. This exacerbates a situation whereby trauma and alienation are mixed together in the vulnerably receptive spaces of mass embodiment, existing within memory regimes (Cohen 2013) that either ignore or attempt to defer the growing sense of ecological-economical catastrophe. This is part of the domain and purview of the technocratic paradigm.

Technocracy and Its Frameworks

Diderot’s brilliant and original conception [for the encyclopaedia] was to make the technology carry the ideology.

—Charles Coulston Gillespie, quoted by Jan Zwicky (2014, 56)

Why is it seemingly so hard to discern the shapings of power and the manifestations of slow conflict across public and ecological spheres? And why is it seemingly so difficult to write about? I think the key cause here is the submersion of the mass intellect into the technocratic worldview, and the fact that technocracy is a perpetuation of slow conflict and a disruptive insinuation into social relations, expressed through everyday precarious life. Furthermore, it is also partially due to the resilience and morphability of the technocratic paradigm, which possesses the qualities of a hyper-object (Morton 2013). As such, Mbembe has urged a reasoning that allows for “different modes of seeing and measuring to appear … [that] will open up the possibilities of different aesthetics, of different politics of inhabiting the earth, and we may add, sharing the planet” (2019, n.p.). To this may be added the urgent need to rethink and revitalise the movements of sociality, in a world that becomes more alienated in its mass notions of the isolated human self.

I define the technocratic worldview slightly differently to the original popular use of the term. A technocracy is not simply a society ruled, or where decisions are basically taken, by elites with technical or elite knowledge; a technocracy is a society whose rules, mannerisms, and patterns are shaped by technology and technological processes, interfaces, and developments. It is a society where there has taken place a “onedimensional reduction of reason to its operational and functional forms” (Berardi and Mecchia 2007, 61); an instrumentalisation of discourse which has limited the possibilities of alternative thought; and the “flattening out” (Berardi and Mecchia 2007) of technology, causing the society to be increasingly driven forward in relationship to capitalist formulations of utility. It is also a world whose real is increasingly defined by its virtual, as virtual objects and markers begin to gain an increased significance in economic, social, and political transactions. The psychological shift is thus from an interface of reality–imagination (one sees reality, and one uses imagination to imagine other possibilities) to that of reality–virtual (one sees a limited reality, with the role of imagination taken over by the continuous, but flat and rectangularly bordered, spatiality of the online and constantly streaming world, which overwhelms or hypnotises the alterity of the imagination’s spatiality).