ENTER; SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM by Akin Askinoglu
ENTER;SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM
Glossary:
AO : Anti Oedipus (D&G)
ATP: A Thousand Plateaus (D&G)
SM: Signs and Machines (Lazzarato)
SC: Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff)
Surveillance capitalism plugs us into its omnipotent extraction architecture without any possibility of logging off. Can we escape the masked machine lurking in the subterrain beneath the ones and zeros? In 1994, Nick Land dubbed Capital as an alien Artificial intelligence coming from the future that is poised to eat your TV, infect your bank account, and hack xenodata from your mitochondria. While today most of these overblown technophilic fictional claims made by the father of accelerationist theory-fiction (with the help of 90s techno-euphoria accompanied by meth abuse) falls flat, it still gives a good idea of the pervasiveness of capitalism in our lives. Our actions, thoughts, and identities produced by our desires in our private, social and work lives are intrinsically linked with the capitalist machine.
In “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the widespread pathologisation of desire, as well as desire’s revolutionary potential of creating new “lines of flight” which are able to call the status quo of a society into question and at the same time demolish established social sectors (AO, 139). They name the amalgamation of all social and economic relations “the socius'' which are produced through the flows of desire.
A flow of desire for example, can be a sexual act or gender expression that, if out of the accepted norm, would have been overcoded and corrected by the despotic state apparatus. Up until the recent past, any deviation from the christian marital norm of a “union between one man and one woman” or deviation from the “biologically” and socially accepted ways of gender expression would have been penalised and the subject would have been tried to be “corrected” through the combination of punishment (castration) and mental asylum imprisonment, as well as being overcoded and inscribed as “mad and perverse” upon the socius (and this still happens in many places around the world). However, the objective of capitalism being capital accumulation, as a system it is tasked with decoding and deterritorialising the flows of our desires, (AO, 47) meaning it accommodates any identity category for the sake of accumulation.
The integration of the radical roots of Pride, of queer culture, and identity in general into rainbow capitalism is a prime suspect in this case. Of course you can slap a rainbow on your brand logo, sponsor the Pride Parade, and most of us will eat it up because many of us in developed countries can exist in an assimilated fashion and are spoon fed commodities and content that reinforce our “authenticity” in addition to having historical amnesia. At the end of the day the firms laugh their way to the bank while the anti-capitalist, anti-police and pro-black roots of Pride are buried under a rubble of shattered hopes of liberation.
The task of wealth accumulation requires the deterritorialisation of the old socius - that being the dissolution of old social norms, values, religions, traditions and economic relations as Marx famously said in the Communist Manifesto that with the advent of private property and industrial capitalism “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, were swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” However the dissolution of the old socius by the capitalist machine into a new dismembered one is not absolute, in fact, there are many reterritorialisations in the various segments and strata of the socius in the form of the state, laws and family structures, and socio-economic phenomena such as racism and fascism which all function and must function as regulators, generators and recorders of the flows of desire within the socius for the proper operation of the capitalist machine. On the one hand, we perceive and experience our own identities and the world from the images and ideas we find around us in our engagement with media, technology, politics and the economy, and on the other hand, we reflect those ideas and images - for some partly, for most entirely - when we express and behave ourselves in regards to our identities and the tools we use, making us a “collective assemblage of enunciation” in the capitalist semiotic operator where there is no longer an identifiable subject (ATP, 144). We are rendered to machine organs in the full body of capital.
Nonetheless, being “a machine organ” does not mean you as an individual do not exist, it only means that a subject exists in an assemblage with objects around itself, meaning there is no subject/object binary in the concept of the “machine”. Machines are thus not products of technics but parts of what makes humans humans, or post-humans in this case and they are required as a prior condition to the creation of technics. Lazzarato explains this excellently: “Guattari's machinism does not oppose man and machine, "in order to evaluate the correspondences, the extensions, and possible or impossible substitutions of one for the other," but instead brings them into "communication in order to show how man is a component part of the machine, or combines with something else to constitute a machine. The other thing can be a tool, or even an animal, or other men." ” (SM, 81). The machinism that flows through us is nevertheless a double edged sword as it can be as easily hijacked by cybernetic control mechanisms to integrate human behaviour, health and culture into the functions of the capitalist apparatus, as it can be utilised by us for our own liberation - or so we thought.
Now, let's explore how capitalism as a semiotic (visual and signifying) operator produces wealth and points of subjectification through functions that Deleuze and Guattari dub “machinic enslavement” and “social subjection”. Social subjection assigns us with various identity categories such as a nationality, a gender, a profession and more, manufacturing our consciousness, behaviours and representations as “individuated” subjects for the necessary social division of labour in capitalism. Whereas, under the grips of machinic enslavement the individual is not seen as an individuated subject but rather as a functional and operational machine part of the assemblages of finance, politics, media, business and their institutions (schools, internet, television, corporations, etc.). Throw in a dash of state sanctioned user data extraction and Google’s Artificial Intelligence algorithms, and we have the newest kid in the block; Surveillance Capitalism, or as I’d like to call it the surveillance and control stage of capitalism with its almost magical behavioural prediction and manipulation which utilises the twin functions of machinic enslavement and social subjection. So, every bit of our identity, be it private, social, or economic is and can be utilised for capital accumulation with the grace of these twin functions and surveillance capital as its operator. Afterall, “the strength of capitalism resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones.” (AO, 287).
The next dish on the menu for capital: you.Shoshanna Zuboff observes a new function of capitalism that has mutated surveillance elements into its DNA - which she calls Surveillance Capitalism. By extracting ‘the human experience’ as a raw material to translate user behavioural data that is collected through our various online engagements with content and is processed by artificial intelligence algorithms, which can then accurately predict our future purchases and content engagement behaviours both online and in real life producing a continuous machinic - and behavioural surplus value. This means that capitalism now anticipates, predicts, and coaxes our behaviours and feelings towards profitable outcomes. So, at the present stage of capitalism both our private and social identities are in the process of being anticipatingly pre-packaged and literally sold to us. Our desires that we deem as our own are in the process of being animated, functionalised and enslaved into the machinic extraction architecture of capital. A new form of capture apparatus unique to surveillance capitalism is looming and it just might be bound to swallow up all the lines of flight necessary for a radical break.
“There where the flows are decoded, the specific flows of code that have taken a technical and scientific form are subjected to a properly social axiomatic that is much severer than all the scientific axiomatics: the axiomatic of the world capitalist market. The flows of code that are "liberated" in science and technics by the capitalist regime engender a machinic surplus value that does not directly depend on science and technics themselves, but on capital—a surplus value that is added to human surplus value and that comes to correct the relative diminution of the latter, both constituting the whole of the surplus value of flux that characterizes the system. Knowledge, information, and specialized education are just as much parts of capital as is the most elementary labour of the worker.”
Unlike human surplus value, machinic surplus value is neither quantifiable nor is it assignable because it is extracted through unquantifiable variables such as knowledge, information, and specialised education which in the sphere of societies of control begins from a very young age. I have personally seen toddlers probably not older than 2 years fully holding and operating a smartphone to watch kids shows on apps and play games. All of this is a part of the unassignable specialised education and accumulated knowledge that capitalism requires from us to operate and understand its complex technical operational language besides our native language. If we want to be a part of this world and the society - not that we are given any choice in - we need to be able to understand the “language” of the semiotic systems created by the present social and technical modes of production which are interwoven and indivisible from each other and from our lives and identities. As Lazzarato, also expresses the productivity of capital depends on the mobilization of our body parts (fingers, arms, eyes and hands for the iPhone operating toddler) and our human faculties (perception and muscle memory of the toddler), as well as on the intellectual and physical performance of machines, analytics, algorithms, artificial intelligence, organizations, or systems of signs.
It is inevitable, after all, it is capitalism that creates machines with its hegemony on science and technology, which in turn introduces breaks in the technical modes of production. In this case, the axiomatisation of the entire online terrain to the world capitalist market brought new means of production in the form of “means of behavioural modification and production.”
Yet, it appears to be that to most academics including Zuboff, that the perversion of “real capitalism” is a heinous crime and betrayal to humanity, as if the logic of capital accumulation ever cared about anything “human”.
At the intersection of surveillance capitalism and the postmodern identity crisis something very peculiar is starting to develop. With hundreds of millions of teenagers and young adults’ part of Gen Z - myself included - glued to their phones and regularly on social media where they look for a place to belong to and construct the majority of their identities by engaging with each other and with social media content, machinic enslavement kicks up a notch. In the sphere of social media, artificial intelligence algorithms utilised in marketing and targeted ads generated by the socio-technical machine of surveillance capitalism recommend us commodities and content associated with the specific subcultural-, racial-, and political identity categories that are being constructed for us by extracting and processing our behavioural user data. The cherry on top is that the illegally extracted user data is also illegally bought and sold between ‘Big Tech’ and other parties who consequently start to construct a speculative “machinic identity” based purely on the data processed by AI algorithms, that can merge with and take over our existing self.
We become flowing capital personified.
Are you really into K-Pop? Or was it the Google algorithm that led you into that rabbit hole of K-Pop content and “BTS” merchandise purchasing spree? Can you really be sure? How much of your political identity is influenced by the dominant discourse? Is representation and diversity going to save us? If you browse online and are a regular user of social media platforms, it is most likely that your user data was illegally processed into behavioural data by the omnipotent online extraction architecture that influenced your identity formation.
A PRELIMINARY ON MACHINIC IDENTITIES AND THE FERAL ESCAPE THEREFROM
I call these types of artificially manufactured identities “machinic identities” which are a special type of capitalist point subjectification in the process of becoming. They are artificially produced and marketed to the individual by AI algorithms (or “means of behavioural modification”) for the profit motive creating the individuation of machinic identities around vectors of commodification. As well as enslaving those artificial commodity-identities to the machinic forces of the markets of behavioural futures through a process of de-subjectification as functional and productive variables, to manage them for the proper functioning of the whole technical profit machine (or the “extraction architecture”). The consequences of an identity which exists in the form of pure data for the profiteering parties look bleak for those of us who still want to shake up and demolish entire social sectors with our radical desire to break through every categorisation. Sadly, generation Z (and most millennials) cannot even help it, we are hooked on social media and online browsing, as we are the first generation of digital natives who possess no memory of life before the rise of surveillance capitalism and rely on a range of social media for psychological nourishment. It’s debilitating domestication and cyclical catatonia in Cyberia.
Capitalism’s capture apparatus - in this case the extraction of user data and accompanying AI algorithms - has found a conveniently profitable way of sublimating any radical political or artistic act into vectors of commodification and pure aestheticization. Just a semiotic jungle of emptiness. The revolutionary potential of our desiring machines is being properly integrated into the extraction architecture of capitalism as functional and operational parts for profit’s end… and are being turned into commodities to be bought and sold by third parties. It is not possible to assign or quantify how much or from whom we were being animated by. I am not implying someone at Google or Facebook is puppeteering us in an Illuminati-esque fashion by sending us subliminal messages and symbols. This is much less human. Technocapital’s cyber voodoo is already leaking into reality but it won’t give us the future we saw in Cyberpunk 2077. Land might have been right about the importance of AI, yet capitalism in reality is much cruder and less sophisticated than what the technophiles thought of back then, as well as now. What these AIs lead to is our machinic integration into cybernetic control mechanisms and biopolitical governance for the shareholder dividends at Big Tech and rather than a post/trans-humanist liberation and the Singularity. Hence, almost all participation in political and cultural life has become nothing more than a collection of meaningless gestures that prolong spectacular society and techno-capitalist anaesthesia. Since all perceived radical identities can be recuperated by capitalism, for me the answer was to completely negate all the identity categories I fall into towards a nothingness that is itself ultimately creative because it defies anything that is not my own property, so any categorisation assigned by the outside. Afterall, to break away doesn’t mean just producing difference and affirming it anymore, but to set on a journey for the queerest, most feral attack of negation to smash the black mirror, an all-out offensive to set every branch of capital ablaze with our desires armed.
ARTWORK: by Mitch (@mp5pm on IG)