2 – The link proves mutual exclusivity – the mere framework of biopolitics corrupts alt solvency

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).

Arguably, the virtual world has now increasingly taken the place of the subconscious; in fact, the virtual world of social media is our new subconscious. Proof of this can be found in the following: how often does one in an idle moment automatically go to social media and scroll through, absentmindedly? Social media has filled the space of the bodily imaginary; 21 social media is a mirror image in which the self is shaped; 22 the self is fed its jouissance from a mass virtual sphere. We are also part of the data of this new world—whether through the information that is daily harvested from us by Google, Facebook, and others (which also will play an increasing role towards predicting and channelling future human behaviour, the maximalisation of Skinner’s behaviouralism in nightmarish proportions), or simply through the increasing tendency of all jobs and roles to focus on an audit culture and data collection.

Resistance to power often struggles to take form, and this resistance all too frequently exists only in brief chaotic outbursts which exert a fleeting gravitas upon the public imagination and are then slowly cleaved apart or distracted or diverted into other apertures. This phenomenon has led critical thinkers to lament the inability of populations to mobilise organisationally into effective political changemakers, as opposed to units that adhere only through the passing viscerality of a certain trending issue (Fisher 2020). The reason for this is, at least partly, that the formulation of biopower is frequently misunderstood, viewed predominantly as a power over the body exercised by other bodies who possess power. Herein lies the fundamental error. Biopower, over the last few decades, has moved more and more into the field of cyborg politics: a biopower exercised predominantly through the frameworks of systems. The state of exception continues to brutalise marginalised populations and to apply the rules of exception and emergency to larger sections of society. The structures of power have themselves become increasingly disembodied; this is especially exemplified in the power of corporations, with the word “corporation” ironically deriving from the word “body”. Now, these disembodied bodies are the powers which exercise mass upon physical bodies and even countries. Corporations are steadily becoming more powerful than countries—especially those corporations that deal with virtual commodities. (Companies such as Meta are able to exploit the dominance of neo-liberal economics which views free exchange as a prime value; Facebook is seen as a service, not as a product promoting socio-economic exploitation which calls for, at the least, regulation and, at the fairest, competition with local social network providers.) Even space exploration is being privatised (and from a billionaire entrepreneurial point of view, space travel as a desire seems to be a new form of looking for an escape from national taxation). How appropriate that the word “corporation” derives from the word for a body—a mass body that interpenetrates power and becomes the driver of mass intellect. 23