A World Computer structures all social relations through the financialization of worldly events, securitizing against volatility in the system by rendering all bodies a collection of data. This World Computer utilizes a divide and conquer strategy which relegates bodies to unending antiblack and settler colonial violence that culminates in extinction.

The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of information; the individual bit appears as its elementary form. Or so it appears to the machines that count, the machines of account.

Moreover, the rise of information meant—in fact is—the ability to write a derivative contract on any phenomenon whatever. Its emergence is one with the calculus of probability and thus of risk. What price information? We will show here how information becomes a derivative on reality whose importance comes to exceed that of reality, at least for those bound by the materiality of information’s risk profiles. Furthermore, the algorithm becomes the management strategy for the social differentiation introduced by and as information—a heuristic, becoming bureaucratic, becoming apparatus for the profitable integration of difference and, significantly, for any “us” worthy of that name, of that which and those who could be differentiated. The algorithm’s calculative execution on information, its “procedural” problem solving, was called forth and derived from the market optimization of the socially meaningful metrics (things somehow or other worth measuring) of difference. Recursively, the algorithm and its avatars multiplied its capacities of differentiation.

With its Boolean operators, and later with pattern recognition, algorithmic execution on socially derived information effects a tranching of the world that also shatters prior social narratives and ontologies, and allows for the placing of contingent claims on any tranche whatever without regard for the rest. How much does it cost to ship a slave? Insurance policies for slave traders? Reparations for proprietors of slaves? Predictive policing? For racial capitalism, Blackness becomes a junior tranche. The third world becomes a junior tranche. The global South becomes a junior tranche. All subprime, all the lowest tranche of a security, the one deemed most risky. “Any losses on the value of the security are absorbed by the junior tranche before any other tranche, but for accepting this risk the junior tranche pays the highest rate of interest” (Curtis). The brutal divide and conquer approach, on a continuum with the separation imposed by racial capitalist pursuits from settler colonialism, factory barracks and camps, to workplace alienation and Debord’s spectacle, effected the capacity to isolate certain phenomenon and then bet on the value of the outcomes while externalizing every other concern. Here too we find the distinction between signal and noise is in the first place a matter of political economy and its racism.

The slow nuclear bomb that is the covid-19 pandemic is but a case in point in the terrible unfolding of what one may hope is still pre-history manifest as racial capitalism. It is a consequence of the convergence of the global demos being relegated to noise, to “the poor image” (Steyerl 2012: 31–45), to volatility by the global compute. The virus is not just information on a strand of genetic material, and should not as Ed Cohen warned us years ago, be treated fetishistically, as if it were itself the cause of global suffering (Cohen 2011). Viruses are everywhere—the global pandemic is symptomatic of world-systemic failure on many fronts: health care provisioning and access, economic inequality, agribusiness, social hierarchy, racism, etc. Individual bodies are made precarious by a matrix of financialized “information” that differentiates among us while externalizing whatever might be left of our pre-existing conditions that could all too briefly be summed up as our real interests or even our ecological concerns—our connection to the bios in the broadest sense. We are subjected to and by a continuous for-profit reformatting by the various systems of mediation that overcode us as problems to be solved—including by the regimes of all the “estates:” the fourth estate that is “the press,” and particularly a fifth estate that has in fact absorbed all the others for its own calculus, namely “computation.” We observe that the reigning global calculus of profit, though invented by no one in particular, everywhere seeks to extract our value and mostly benefits those who believe in theory or in practice that they are shining examples of a superior race. Those who have almost unlimited access to the social product, and to us, to our information, to our time. How does this sense of superiority, of the greatness of our oppressors, come about? From their harvesting the outputs of the rabble and their self-satisfied accession to the violence necessary to keep us down.

Most recently, the global compute has involved off-loading systemic precarity onto individuals and where possible onto entire peoples to the point, just reached in 2020, when that strategy itself created radical systemic instability: causing deaths that will likely be in the millions, and not incidentally threatening global “depression.” Well, one person’s, or one people’s, Armageddon is another’s depression—or their joy. The algorithmic optimization of society for profit, an economics that, while sometimes unconscious, is these days never too far from the conscious mind of the creators of specific programs, collectively effects a wholesale compression of the sociosemiotic into what Friedrich August von Hayek (1945: 14) precisely called “a system of telecommuncations” capacitated by what he grasped as effectively the price signal. Money, or what, in a different key, Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1978: 28) perceived as exhibit A of “real abstraction,” relegates, wherever possible, everything else to noise.1 The “noise” of course, is the source of volatility. The suppression of noise is from the standpoint of communication theory a technical matter. Here we understand it as a matter of politics and economy. Noise suppression directly correlates to people’s oppression. In financial terms, volatility is a similar index—the expression, in prices, of decision making under conditions of uncertainty. Ironic then that volatility has become a major source of value creation for synthetic finance, and now for states. The U.S.’s Corona bailouts of over three trillion US dollars—responses to the volatility of the social rendered ever more precarious by the existing economy—represent more than 60 percent of the money ever issued in the history of the country.

What perhaps best characterized this period is a full-blown convergence of communication, information and financialization as computation; whether or not this convergence and all its incipient violence can be redesigned is an open question. This question is ultimately about a possible politics of the protocolization of these informatic networks within a literally universal system of computation that as hypostatic states looks like a virtual machine, what I here call the world computer, and as diachronic flow (processing) is nothing less than economic media. Can these formations that for their proprietors profitably collapse message and value be hacked or reprogrammed so that the command control centers that make the most (from) difference are not in the hands of racist plutocrats—do not in fact producethem? That question, though addressed in this volume will be taken up more fully at a later date, with a particular focus on the how and the who.2 Here in this book we consider the various social vectors and components sedimented into machine function and then reactivated by the dire co-articulation of racial capitalism and computation—rearticulated as computational racial capitalism and its virtual machine, the world computer.

Information as Real Abstraction Taking the notion that Capital was always a computer as a starting point (DyerWitheford, 2013), The World Computer understands the history of the commodification of life as a process of encrypting the world’s myriad qualities as quantities. Formal and informal techniques, from double-entry bookkeeping and racialization, to the rise of information and discrete state machines, imposed and extended the tyranny of racial capital’s relentless calculus of profit. By means of the coercive colonization of almost all social spaces, categories, and representations—where today language, image, music, and communication all depend upon a computational substrate that is an outgrowth of fixed capital— all, or nearly all, expressivity has been captured in the dialectic of massive capital accumulation on the one side and radical dispossession on the other. Currently the money-likeness of expression—visible as “likes” and in other attention metrics that treat attention and affect as currency—is symptomatic of the financialization of daily life(Martin, 2015a). All expression, no matter what its valence, is conscripted by algorithms of profit that intensify inequality by being put in the service of racial capitalism; consequently, we are experiencing a near-apocalyptic, world-scale failure to be able to address global crises including migration for reparations, carceral systems, genocide, militarism, climate racism, racism, pandemic, anti-Blackness, extinction, and other geopolitical ills. The colonization of semiotics by racial capital has rendered all “democratic” modes of governance outmoded save those designed for the violent purpose of extracting profits for the enfranchised. Culturally these modes of extraction take the form of fractal fascism. An understanding that informationalized semiotic practices function as financial derivatives may allow for a reimagining of the relationship between language, visuality, and that other economic medium, namely money, in an attempt to reprogram economy and therefore the creation and distribution of value—and thus also the politics and potentials of representation. In what would amount to an end to postmodernism understood as the cultural logic of late capitalism, our revolutionary politics require, as did the communisms of the early twentieth century, a new type of economic program. In the age of computation, putting political economy back on the table implies a reprogramming of our cultural logics as economic media for the radical redress of the ills of exploitation and the democratization of the distribution of the world social product. Sustainable communism requires the decolonization of abstraction and the remaking of the protocols of social practice that give rise to real abstraction.

Though in this section we will more narrowly address the issues of money, race, and information as “real abstraction,” and their role in computational racial capitalism, we note the overarching argument for the larger study: 1 Commodification inaugurates the global transformation of qualities into quantities and gives rise to the world computer. 2 “Information” is not a naturally occurring reality but emerges in the footprint of price and is always a means to posit the price of a possible or actual product. 3 The general formula for capital, M-C-M′, where M is money, C is commodity, and M′ is more money) can be rewritten M-I-M′, where I is information. 4 “Labor,” Attention, Cognition, Metabolism, Life converge as “Informatic Labor” whose purpose, with respect to Capital, is to create state changes in the Universal Turing Machine that is the World Computer—racial capital’s relentless, granular, and planetary computation of its accounts. 5 Semiotics, representation, and categories of social difference function as financial derivatives—as wagers on the economic value of their underliers and as means of structuring risk for capital. 6 Only a direct engagement with the computational colonization of the life-world through a reprogramming (remaking) of the material processes of abstraction that constitute real abstraction can secure victory—in the form of a definitive step out of and away from racial capitalism—for the progressive movements of our times. Such a definitive movement requires an occupation and decolonization of information, and therefore of computation, and therefore of money. Only through a remaking of social relations at the molecular level of their calculus, informed by struggle against oppression, can the beauty of living and the fugitive legacies of creativity, community, and care prevail.