We will systematically follow Stiegler’s train of thought from chapter to chapter in order to then come to an assessment and critique. Let us begin with Stiegler’s quite contestable concept of the Anthropocene (see Jason W. Moore and his introduction of the term Capitalocene), which here refers not so much to the shaping of the Earth by all mankind, but to the conditions of generalized proletarianization that began at the end of the eighteenth century, reaching the phase with which the Anthropocene definitely becomes a geological factor, inhering a geological time, the reason for a massive and accelerated entropy of the globe. The Anthropocene, whose history for Stiegler cannot be separated from that of capitalism, begins with the “organological industrialization” in which calculation and accounting dominate every process of decision-making, while the algorithmic and mechanical processes materialize in the logical automation and the automation of a thoroughly controlled social body, with which the arrival of nihilism looms. The invention of the thermodynamic machine signifies a fundamental break in human history, inscribing processuality, the irreversibility of becoming and the instability of equilibrium at the center of physics. This machine, which poses the question of dissipative energy for physics, is at the same time a technical object that comprehensively changes social relations and organizations and documents the epoch of technoscience. The technical object that stands for combustion inheres the problem of fire and its pharmacology from now on both at the level of astrophysics and at the level of human ecology.
The Anthropocene ushers in the human geological period in which carbon and nitrogen cycles become significant on a cosmic scale. This overrides the guiding notions of a dualism of nature and culture. Latour writes in his new book “Gaia” that in view of the hollowness of our most precious values, it is not by chance that Deleuze/Guattari speak of a geological morality, and that means precisely that it consists in a devaluation or revaluation of values. Marx and Nietzsche can be read together when the economy becomes a dimension of the cosmos and thus an ecology, whereby the economic values and the moral devaluations lead to a transvaluation, which today ends in the nihilism of consumption, which, however, can be surpassed by a new value of all values, which Stiegler calls the negentropy or the anti-entropy or the negative entropy.
Since the industrial revolution, thermodynamics and the grammar of gestures, the theory of entropy insists and dominates in the question of the redefinition of values, with which for Stiegler, however, the problem of the relationship between entropy and negentropy continues to be posed anew. Today it is necessary to think organologically and at the same time pharmocologically (the English word, poison as toxic and gift at the same time), which is grasped under the concept of entropocene and negentropology, for which again the matrix of technology is essential.
Thus, for Stiegler, the Anthropocene simultaneously represents an exit that leads to the Neganthropocene, whereby the latter indicates that the time saved by the extensive automation of production must be invested in new capacities that serve de-automation, that is, spent on the production of negentropy, a liberated time that generates new values and reinvents labor. A culture of de-automation, made possible precisely by the extensive automation of production processes, must create new values of negentropy and relate to the free time of the population. Today, it becomes immediately apparent that the artifact is the origin of man’s becoming, and this leads Stiegler to the question of a practical organology or production that is essentially based on invention. A technological epoch is something that breaks with an already constituted automatism, long socialized, and has the capacity to produce its own de-automation through the appropriation of knowledge: The suspension of social automation occurs precisely when new asocial forms of automation appear. In this process, new forms of de-automation are released in the sense of negentropy in order to invent new social organizations. Knowledge is always related to these processes, while stupidity benefits purely from automation.
Stiegler refers here to the epistemology of Canguilhem, who discovers the knowledge of life not only in biology, but also in the system, the milieu, and the processes of individuation, knowledge being the condition and the future of life in connection with technology. This correlates with the knowledge of individuation (Simondon), an individuation that always knows that it is fragile. Knowledge as a condition of psychic and collective individuation is always late, it is not self-sufficient, it contains the knowledge of work and life that exceeds itself and is surpassed by technological individuation, which in turn generates generations of technological shocks to produce new epochs of knowledge. In the process, natural selection gives way to artificial selection. For Ziegler, technology is an accentuation of negentropy, the agent of a growing differentiation, but at the same time of the acceleration of entropy, and this not only in the sense of the combustion and dissipation of energy, but as industrial standardization that can lead to the destruction of life, to which the proliferation of differences is inherent, think of the reduction of biodiversity, social and psychological diversity (in the sense of singularities).
In general, the automation that we know since Taylorism has produced a high amount of entropy, and this on such a monstrous level that the humane and especially the young today have every reason to doubt their future. For Stiegler, with the worldwide introduction of the Internet in 1993, the Anthropocene has entered a new epoch, one of complete automation made possible by the industry of networked digital tracking. At the same time, however, automation also opens up negentropic possibilities, insofar as networking offers new possibilities for labor – indeed, as the end of the epoch of employment, general and complete automation is already indicated, leading to a transformation of values, whereby social labor time ceases to be the relevant means of measurement and exchange value no longer determines use value, and finally the value of value becomes negentropic.
The industrial exploitation of digital and modeled traces today condenses the entropic catastrophe of the Anthropocene, leading to nothingness. 24/7 capitalism and algorithmic governance inheres the hyper-entropic workings of capital that perpetually accelerate the rhythms of consumerist destruction, introducing a structural insolvency that consists in a general numbing and functional stultification (not unlike Metz/Seeßlen’s dumb machines), comprehensively destroying the negentropic capacities that emanate from knowledge. The current infrastructures of networking, based on mobile devices such as the smartphone, web-based television, and eventually the smart house and smart city, model a society of hyper-control. Networked television is a tool for totalitarian screening and spying on subjects. It collects enormous amounts of data, it registers when, where, how and for how long you use the TV, it sets cookies and beacons and records the apps you use, the webpages you visit and how you interact with the content.
The smartphone, in turn, has led to a real change in the hardware of digital infrastructures, insofar as operations, functions and some options are no longer accessible to the user, unlike the laptop. In this context, the baseband chip takes on an important function, insofar as any communication with the outside – SMS, email, data, phone – must pass through it. It will eventually become more and more fused with the inside of the microprocessor, which means that the user will no longer be able to control or know anything about the processors. Smartification, which is based on algorithmic regulation, is part of a new type of cybernetic governance. For Stiegler, this is the exploitation, storage, and reproduction of a ternary digital retention that seeks to eliminate all structural conflict, disagreement, and controversy.
The storage of a previous event in the present perception (Perzeption) is determined by Stiegler following Husserl as “primary retention”. From this, memory or “secondary retention,” which belongs to the past, is to be distinguished. While Husserl separates the two retentions, for Stiegler they are not only combined, but are complemented by “tertiary retention,” which aims at the retrievability of something at any time through technical storage, whereby different effects can be achieved through repetition. Tertiary retentions are produced by phonogrammatic, cinematographic or alphabetical objects. Finally, algorithmic governance opens up the technocratic utopia of politics without politics. Referring to Foucault, one can speak here of a transhumanist program that, through insurance and new forms of medicine, should lead not only to the reprogramming of the state, but also of the human body.
This second chapter, entitled “The Industry of Traces and Automatized Artificial Crowds,” is nothing less than an updating and rewriting of the chapter “Culture Industry” in Adorno/Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Social digital networks today produce a kind of economy based on personal data and metadata, cookies, tags, and other tracking technologies, with which, according to Stiegler, a new algorithmic governance can be traced. This development has become known as the “Big Data” system, built on networking, high computing power and capacity. The processes stored in it are, according to Stiegler, such of “grammatization.” This already begins with cave paintings and leads via cuneiform writing, photography, film and television finally to the computer, the Internet and the smartphone. The data paths and traces generated by today’s technologies of computerization constitute ternary, attention-reducing retentions or mnemonics that include specific time procedures and individuation processes, i.e. “industrialization processes of memory” or a “political and industrial economy based on the industrial exploitation of consciousness times.” According to Stiegler, the digitization of data pathways and processes, now generated and transported by sensors, interfaces, and other means as binary numbers and calculable data, creates an automated social body in which truly every dimension of life is transformed into an agent of the hyper-industrial economy of capital. Deleuze had already foreseen this development in his famous essay on societies of control, but the forms of control only come to full bearing when digital calculation integrates the modulations noted by Deleuze into an algorithmic governance that includes the automation of all existences, ways of life, and cognitions.
The fragmentation and at the same time standardization of everyday life described by Lefebvre leads, from around 1970, to a symbolic misery characterized by the dominance of the audiovisual, analog apparatuses of the mass media, which herald a period of strategic marketing implemented by means of the privatization of radio and television. The symbolic misery or de-symbolization heralded by these developments is, for Stiegler, the result of a proletarianization of sensibilities that leads in a structural way to the annihilation of desire, or, what amounts to the same thing, to a ruin of the libidinal economy itself. The speculative marketing of the financial industry represents the preliminary culmination of this development. Today, the mechanization of sensibility and the industrialization of symbolic life can be circumscribed in “communications,” in which, in turn, the distinction between the professional producers of symbols and the proletarianized and de-symbolized consumers is inscribed, leaving, however, all existences, both individual and collective, subject to the permanent control of the mass media, which short-circuit the mechanisms of identification, imagination, and transindividuation, producing specific forms of the deformation of attention. Consumer capitalism, Stiegler argues, leads to a complete annihilation of the libidinal economy.
Let us look at this in a nutshell: The object in which desire invests is what libido economizes. The object is desired to the point where the goals of the drives that support it are inverted, so that the object actually no longer exists, but persists in its endlessness and thus escapes any calculation – a problem that Bataille raised with his General Economy. According to Stiegler, the destruction of the desire that is currently taking place, as well as the investment in the object, lead to the liquidation of all forms of loyalty, friendship and responsibility.
Desire, which economizes the object by idealizing and transindividuating it, goes hand in hand with the artificialization of life, which thus always includes the technical. The technical life, which constantly glues prostheses to the body, normally also reinforces and intensifies the power of sublimation, insofar as individuals are endowed with a transindividual memory that Simondon calls psychic and collective individuation. In this process, vital individuation remains an economy of instincts that controls animal behavior with the rigor of an automatism, while through noetic life, shaped by libidinal economy (fetish, cult, ritual, etc.), instincts and drives are relatively de-automated so that they can replace, displace, and reshape desired objects. Instincts can thus be removed from contexts; as artificial organs, they are amenable to fetishization and thus reshape themselves into drives. At this point, Klossowski’s economy of drives, which he presented in the “Living Coin,” would have to be re-examined, and at the same time the bankruptcy of the Marxist theory of fetishism should be pointed out. Vital individuation always leads to collective individuation, in which the drives are constantly kept and at the same time changed, insofar as they can change the object of desire, and that is, the drives are accessible to perversion. Perverse drives are structurally fluid and attach themselves to artificial organs; they are fetishistic and object-oriented.
This economy of the libido has completely destroyed capital. Stiegler speaks of a modern capitalist economy of the soul built on commerce and industrial technologies, though we are now in a hyper-industrial epoch that amounts to an absolute and total (be)calculating and quantifying capital. In libidinous terms, it is a dis-economy that no longer cares at all about its objects. Klossowski had already pointed out in the “Living Coin” that industrial and serial mass production leads to the ephemerality and loss of the object, indeed eliminates any thought of the object’s durability. Thus, objects can no longer provide any support for psychic and collective investments, they are no longer displaceable and infinite, but in their commodity finiteness they are pure quasi-objects, that is, calculable and quantifiable and thus totally void as objects. The objects mutate into non-things. They are nothing, or, to put it differently, today every object is potentially garbage, indeed the object is garbage. (Only the price keeps the object still alive). In this respect, the objects are again something, namely projectiles that destroy the earth.
The absolutely calculating libidinal dis-economy is complete nihilism. Thus, for Stiegler, the structural effect of generalized full automation consists in a calculating nihilism, on the horizon of which a new totalitarianism emerges. The libidinal dis-economy can no longer economize its objects in the way described above, and thus at the same time destroys the subjects, transforming them into dividends, of which we have spoken at length elsewhere. Drive capitalism, Stiegler argues, alters the sublimation capacity of dividends, who become involved in a very dangerous desublimation process, with the automated digital industries of the desire economy having exorcised all desire.
The computerized industry of tracking includes nihilistic consumption. The proletarianization of the consumer began in the first half of the 20th century, in which objects and singularities were increasingly subject to calculability, although there were still areas that were not subject to this calculation. Global capitalization has sucked up all these resistant domains. The economy of data produces an irresponsibility and carelessness of subjects that is unparalleled in history. When the computerized and industrialized tracing unfolds by means of algorithmic governance, as an acceleration and crystallization of every kind of discrediting, ruin, and disindividuation, indeed of a general entropy, one has to ask whether a reversal is still possible at all, by means of which data and traces can once again become the object of a social investment.
Financialization since the early 1970s has led to a global consumerism that has completely destroyed the processes of tethering drives to all kinds of objects and to sublimation. This kind of unattached drives is now controlled by an industry of tracking by means of the automatisms and automation found, for example, in the social networks, where the drives are functionalized, that is, transformed into a personal stimulation of the consumerist drives, through mimetic mechanisms, but which ultimately make the unattached drives even more destructive, uncontrollable and contagious. The channeling of the drives through the application of mathematical algorithms implies an automated social control and must ultimately drive the drives to a highly dangerous level, precisely by de-integrating them, and nothing else characterizes the dividers we have described many times. According to Stiegler, writing and reading in the networks of the Internet leads to a new stage and epoch of proletarianization of sensibilities and cognition, a systemic or functional stultification. Consumers are now fully integrated into the global markets of an industry that degrades and destroys affects and consciousnesses, comparable to the extinction of animal species and plants.
The remotely controlled networks now enable, at the technological level, delocalized production processes and units, global value chains, financialized capitalization, and the correspondingly interconnected electronic financial markets that increasingly integrate mathematical models into the automated real-time processes. The automated decision processes are functionally coupled with the consumerist automatisms tied to the drives, with consumer markets controlled by an industry of data assurance. These quantifying data dispositives operate around the clock, comprehensively subjecting everyday life to standardization and calculation, while at the same time personalizing participants in consumer markets by addressing them with targeted desires and the products to match. The economy of personal data reduces the time needed for decision-making processes, eliminating the “useless” time of thought and contemplation.
Digital automation now short-circuits the deliberative functions of the mind with systemic stupor, and this now affects every actor without exception, from consumers to speculators; dividends can function libidinously precisely when financial capital hyper-rationalizes speculative activity. The systemic stupor has been enforced since 1993 with a series of technological shocks, the result of which are the hegemonic corporations on the Internet, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.
After the loss of workers’ knowledge in the 19th centuryudn of knowledge of life in the 20th century, the loss of theoretical knowledge now follows in the 21st century, that is, a proletarianization of theoretical knowledge is taking place, building on the fact that the inscription of the worker’s body in machinery has led to a proletarianization of workers’ knowledge and thus of their conditions of life, and radio and television have led to a proletarianization of knowledge of life (of affects and social relations, that is, of the citoyen). The descent of the “psychic value” now reaches its peak point: it now affects all thinking and feeling, indeed it affects thinking as such, its consistency, and thus also all sciences and their models and methods. Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno have described these processes as rationalization, which clearly lead to nihilism.
We all become more or less stupid, we even become plagued and troubled beasts. The stultifying mechanisms of the hyper-industrial epoch were already casting their shadows when Deleuze spoke of the societies of control, when disciplinary norms gradually lost their efficacy and television was transformed into a machine of total regulation, leading to new forms of subjectivation and subjugation. Guattari, in particular, with the introduction of the concept of the dividend, foresaw that the ultra-liberal mechanisms of control aimed at the mechanical liquidation of the capacity for decision and judgment. The mind has been automated and left to the analytical power of algorithms, operationalized by sensors and actuators through formal instructions.
Within the economy of forensics, automation virtually generates an art of hyper-control, a general proletarianization constituted by an outsourcing of thought to the digitized networks. Everything boils down to the exploitation of ternary retentions. All aspects of the behavior of the dividend now generate traces, which in turn become objects of calculation and capitalization. The dividends themselves mutate into triggers and into results of continuously running processes (crises in the classical sense or mutations and metamorphoses), whereby the triggering factor, the input is always also the output, so that we find ourselves in a spiral. The technical tendency of “grammatization”, which finds its perfect expression in digital technologies, leads on a global scale to an algorithmic governance, a specific rationalization of ternary retentions, which today also usurps biological retentions and their physiological automatisms. Precisely for this reason, a radical rupture and a comprehensive reconfiguration of the psychological, technical and collective individuations is needed.
The algorithmic disease, a concomitant effect of the epoch of hyper-control, disorientation: all the magnificent promises of the Enlightenment have today become inverted and toxic, indeed they have been transformed into processes of generalized hyper-control. This goes beyond Deleuze’s control-by-modulation, insofar as even the noetic faculties of theory are short-circuited with the current operators of the proletarianization of digital ternary retention. This ternary retention, whatever its matter and form, remains related to primary and secondary retention, to perception, imagination, expectation, and memory, factors integrated into the processes of collective transindividuation, each already different.
The treatment of data in the form of ternary digital retention in real time and on a global scale, executed with the capacity of trillions of gigabytes, requires ubiquitous systems that absorb, capture and capitalize on the data. When psychic and collective individuation are short-circuited with the digitized processes of an automated transindividuation, the individuations become unpredictable again, but the automated drives remain subject to the automated retentional systems that are formalized by means of mathematics and concretized by algorithms to capture and capitalize the data traces that one generates through individual and collective behavior. These processes take place through cybernetic feedback loops and the so-called network effects, in which networking through the artificial masses mutates into a mimetic herd effect that is managed, controlled, and capitalized in real time through the mechanisms of Big Data. However, Stiegler always maintains his notion of the “pharmakon”, which means that he is also always looking for traces on the Internet that indicate a new form of collective individuation.
,terms & condition.
In the third chapter of his text, Stiegler essentially traces Jonathan Cray’s descriptions of today’s ubiquitous 24/7 clock in the context of a globalized capitalism. So we follow them.
A 24/7 system continually generates asocial models of an automated functioning – the calculation, quantification, and exploitation of the living, motorics of exploitation that, however, want to leave unrecognizable at whose expense the busyness goes and who benefits from it. This 24/7 metric differs from what 20th-century Marxists like Lukács called the empty, uniform time of capital, insofar as the 24/7 beat itself still abandons the claim to connect exploitation-time with long-term enterprise or with notions of progress. Cray writes, “A radiant 24/7 world that casts no shadow is the capitalist end-time vision of a posthistoire, an expulsion of alterity as the engine of historical change. 24/7 is a time of indifference to which the fragility of human life becomes increasingly inadequate, a time in which sleep is no longer necessary or even inevitable. It makes the idea of working without rest, without end, seem plausible, even normal. Thus it connects with the inanimate, inert, or ageless.”
For subjects, it is now less about the accumulation of products and more about the consumption of identities, services, images, chemicals, etc., and this in toxic and often lethal dimensions. The 24/7 model of panicked consumption, which pursues expenditure purely for the purpose of self-preservation and self-exploitation, is the caricature of Bataillean excess and waste, and ultimately leads to the destruction of the cycles and temporal rhythms of the earth.
For Cray, it is ultimately only sleep in its uselessness and passivity that collides with the clocks, metrics, and demands of the 24/7 world, insofar as it remains liberated from the multiplicity of needs generated by the marketing industry; it is the uncompromising interruption of time incessantly robbed by capital. Existential needs and desires-hunger, thirst, sex, and friendship-are not so much transformed into commodity or monetary form today as they are perpetually capitalized. And sleep counteracts this capitalization, insofar as it insists on a time interval that cannot be exploited by capital and its profit machines, which, according to Cray, remains a bulky anomaly, a trouble spot in the global present, although with the existence of sleep laboratories sleep has long since also been subjected to the methods of effectivation. Nevertheless, in its dream dimension, it remains what Blanchot called the improbable. In this context, Cray points out that today the number of people who get up at night to check their mails, data and info on the Internet is increasing. Such an interrupted sleep mode, think of the Lenin sleep of bankers, seeks to reduce sleep to a delayed or diminished state of functioning and availability for work and capital. Cray writes of the 24/7 clock: “It displaces the “on/off” principle. Nothing is really “off” anymore. Never is there a true sleep mode. Sleep is the irrational, unacceptable confirmation of the fact that living beings are not limitlessly compatible with the supposedly irresistible forces of modernization. It is now one of the commonplaces of critical thinking that there are no constants of nature – not even death, if you believe the predictions that we will soon be able to store our mind data to be digitally immortal.” So there is a scarcity of sleep, so that when you buy sleeping pills, you buy sleep.
Crucial to the 24/7 clock, which particularly concerns the disruption, liquefaction, and flexibilization of daily routines, is no longer the dominance and accumulation of things, but the linear, expanding, and differential-similar stream of consumption, characterized by the loss of pauses, interruptions, and simultaneous standstill. Virilio’s Racing Standstill.
The metric 24/7 induces a time without time, an un-time that creeps or races along without drama, sequences, or differentiating repetitions, regardless, a timelessness or the expansion of a flat present. Ultimately, the insistence on the contemporary thus takes place, with which the present appears as eternally extended or stretches like melting cheese. The contemporary coagulates into a time that occupies the present, the past and the future. Time is then like all transit places – shopping malls, airports, museums and sports arenas: It has become completely interchangeable in all its dimensions (past-present-future), no matter what year we are in. By becoming interchangeable, it has also become standardized. The crucial thing about the 24/7 metric, however, is not standardization, but the redundancy of an un-time in which there is no longer any opportunity not to store, consume, work, or retrieve data. Moreover, today everything possible can be stored as an image or information, degrading the object to its simulation. Wireless technologies erase the specificity and singularity of places, landscapes and events. There is virtually a pull that forces one to continuously chase after the desires generated by marketing, which must remain unfulfilled because new products and upgrades are constantly appearing on the market, which not only stimulate and fuel the desires anew, but transform them at the same time. The subject motivated in this way wants nothing more than to have (that, that I want to have), to exploit, to gain, and to stare into a coma, locked into ubiquitous mechanisms of quantification and control that perpetuate its superfluity. Cognitions are outsourced, warehoused in mechanisms of ternary retention, and this kind of control is supplemented by statistics, normalization procedures, and state terror.
“The rhythms of life, the ebb and flow of nature and everyday life must disappear in this world; there is no longer room in the global-digital clock system for the weakness and inadequacy of human time, its diffuse and convoluted structures,” says Cray. The 24/7 mode generates a disenchanted world without any mystery, a world identical with itself, a world without ghosts, a world that on the one hand seeks to eliminate darkness, and on the other flattens and at the same time disrupts the day with its rhythms, periods and peculiarities, reducing things, states and events to their mere functionality and calculation, indeed ultimately to their usefulness for capitalization, so that contingencies, ruptures and eruptions of everyday life disappear.
The presence and acceleration, the redundancy and standardization that occurs precisely through the setting of trivial differences, the series of endless stimuli, images, and sensations also disempower the gaze. For Lacan, the gaze does not emanate from me, but comes from the Other and passes through me-this is gaze-seeing as opposed to eye-seeing, which for Lacan is only a physiological faculty. The gaze never belongs to us; it is an expression of the division of the subject. What is decisive today, however, is that the quite ambivalent gaze activity is shifted into a hyper-industrial circuit that modulates a motor response to electronic stimuli: The gaze mutates into a motor activity that is stimulated and can be controlled. Not a purely physiological activity, but not the Lacanian gaze either. A machine gaze.
The world becomes garish, there are endless streams of images and information that illuminate and simulate the catastrophic, the criminal, and the obscene, and so not only the objects but also the images degenerate into disposable products or simply trash. The permanent mode of the as-if reduces the mind function with its regulative capacity and glues it as a detail to the data, the image and infomation circulations of capital. It is not so much the workings of gagets and networks, but the 24/7 mode of speeds, metrics, and accelerations that endlessly circulate consumption that now punctuate, control, and quantify the perception, experience, and life of each individual. Every product is integrated into this maelstrom as a disposable product, the touchscreens of smartphones will disappear and give way to computers controlled by gestures – called a revolution, products are exclusively part of nonstop consumption, of things, events and states.
In the process, the decision-making times of the dividends are not only to be shortened, but preferably automated right away, so that it is not even necessary to feel that every novelty introduced is part of the naked repetition of the 24/7 clock itself. Into this consumption, modulated in this way, constantly flow procedures of work that are characterized by competition, envy, ambition and possessiveness – at the expense of others. The consumption of technology is completely built into the capitalized stratagem of power, while the management of personnel and behavior conceives what education is and generates subjectless subjects, compliant, obedient, and at the same time possessed of a barbaric narcissism. These characteristics are constantly reinterpreted by the dividends into individual needs, although they remain entirely linked to functional, ideological and normative programs in which every product, service and service is integrated.
The linear succession of novelties does not imply a repetitive mode of replacement alone, but each product simultaneously opens up new options and choices, the mode of generating optionality copied directly from the financial industry. However, this mode of optionality does not lead to freedom, but to adaptations to the functional requirements and operating instructions imposed by technical objects. Functionalization proceeds through the diversification of processes, products and offers to which dividends are not only glued, but which they actively promote without sensing that they ultimately remain pure applications of the 24/7 clock and its control systems. At the same time, capital generates a surplus population that is denied the luxury of integration into the 24/7 metric, so that it has nothing left but to be the spare parts store for the dividends living in the comfort zones, vegetating away as living corpses made of body parts and organs.
The dividend, in turn, is a shapeless figure, a conglomerate of uses, ratios and indicators – conglomerates that constantly evaluate performance, consumption and sex. Thus, the use value of the dividend consists in nothing more than the efficient operation of standardized applications, functions and states of techniques – it is no longer just a job advertisement come to life, but an operating application come to life, bearing witness to the fact that today not only work and technology, but life itself is consumed. In the process, the dividend is subjected to a short-livedness identical to the life cycles of technical products, which wear out at a rate that makes every high-tech product scrap metal from the outset. It is this short-livedness that the dividend would prefer to live forever – oscillating between the need for the object and the affirmation of the inevitable replacement of it, and so it must pant to exhaustion at the promises of the monotonous and at the same time differentially flowing 24/7 cycle, that is, perceiving the attractive incentives and improved functionalities is identical with the confirmation that one’s life and goals are fulfilled precisely in the technical applications, the gadgets and networks that are currently on the market. All events, experiences and things that cannot be represented and optimized through the smartphone’s display and its links not only lose their attractiveness, but they are void. To organize optimal self-management, every new product, gadget, and service must be registered and transformed into a need, thus transforming the metric of 24/7 itself into a habit that not only drags along freedom of choice, variety, and autonomy, but these modes can be applied exceedingly productively by the marketing and opinion industries.
Agamben has described the smartphone as a dispositive, a technopolitical apparatus that reconfigures the human subject. Foucault’s crucial reference to recent developments in visibility and control is again in the notion of the observation network: visual stimuli are now multiplied to provide information to improve techniques of control. Vision itself now becomes the object of observation. The eye movement scanner that observes the customer’s behavior in the department store was certainly already in Foucault’s view. (Today, one must look for the counter-figures among those who again raise questions of darkness, invisibility, and the imperceptible).
It is not the mass of images and information that is crucial here, but the structuring, speed, and organization of technical environments – metrics, format, network, measure, upgrade, and accessories. Movies, videos, pop, soccer, television, and porn constitute a system of audiovisual industrial production that leads to the mass synchronization of bodies, consciousnesses, and memories (Stiegler). These hyper-industrialized consciousnesses are neither inverted consciousnesses, as many Marxists still assume, nor does the operational logic of the capitalization of data traces take place behind the backs of the consciousnesses, as Hegel writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit, but rather this logic operates by taking over and overtaking the protentions (expectations) that constitute consciousness, in which one constantly proposes new prefabricated protentions that are then automatically caught up with by the dividers, with new protentions long since waiting to be consumed. Circuits of total idiocy. And the corresponding data streams are constantly tapped and exploited by a decadent, unsophisticated oligarchy operating on a global scale, an oligarchy that is absolutely corruptible, that is, perfectly nihilistic.
The left, on the other hand, has yet to find any concepts. Like the junkies stuck on heroin, the left is stuck on a canon of stereotypes, while the totally devastated cerebral systems of the masses, in the course of alternately taking tranquilizers and stimulants – functionalizing paradessences like coffee, which is supposed to stimulate and tranquilize at the same time – are stuck on the toxic needles that the automated consumption systems of capital, like their disposable technical products, deliver free 24/7. A global nightmare, from which, however, the surplus population is excluded, vegetating in the ubiquitous slums, in which the bodies at best still serve as spare parts storage for the dividends, who hang in their cells of the urban agglomerations on the screens, calmed and at the same time pulsating and fibrillating points of light, imagining the money. The latest craze then is the voice synthesizer on a computer that provides in detail, in a sexy female voice, all the information that the dividend needs for its sebst. The paradigm for this model is cybersex, where wives have long since been sent to the guest room.
Stiegler’s hyper-industrial age combines the logic of serial mass production with the production, dissemination of techniques and the processes of subjectivation. The modes of reception of the dumbed-down masses mutate into purely repetitive reactions, the notorious hearing and seeing of what is on offer, whereby the masses by no means remain passive, but rather continually contribute via social networks to produce data and information with free labor, which is quantified, evaluated and exploited by the large media corporations. The content itself mutates into interchangeable and ephemeral material, which only serves to somehow keep the dividend on the ball within the 24/7 cycle by discussing, liking, exchanging and archiving the material. Every act of consumption is marked by the acts of selection and endless feedback loops that are there for nothing more than to incorporate them into one’s self-management and make them profitable; video and gambling games, Internet porn, and really anything else, liquefy and intensify 24/7 consumption, while the illusions of profit, power, and possession built into it are continually disappointed. Thus, the flow of electronic stimuli must inevitably unite with the consumption of psychotropic drugs, the nervousness generated by the incentive systems of marketing must be tranquilized again and again, if the battered and self-mutilating individual does not want to snap. However, it is not just a matter of tranquilizing dividends, but of mobilizing their sensitivities, emotions and activities in order to increase competitiveness not only in the workplace, but also in consumption and in social networks, a ridiculousness of which the doped competitive athlete is both the best example and role model. At the same time, every life emotion and state of mind is now pathologized in order to create new markets for life counseling, pharmaceuticals and therapeutics. A fart is hyped up to a pathological disorder that must be fought with profitable drugs.
The 24/7 metric produces less manipulated and standardized dividends, but precisely via the staging of differences qua the constantly changing offers, differences that make the difference are honed and leveled, the spectrum of behaviors, experiences and events tends to be reduced to zero. Zero intensity. Thus, the modern dividend possesses the vitality of an earthworm. Yet the 24/7 metric inheres not a uniform time but a reduced and abraded diachrony in which differences are reduced to exchangeable and circulating – exchangeability is the normality. The 24/7 digital operation glues together working hours and free times, reduces and mobilizes every activity to the expertise in handling gadgets, info and data, which means nothing more than the adaptation to functional necessity in order to temporally condense every operation and communication, to optimize the technical know-how with which one can impress not only oneself but also the other participating dividers. With the technical operations one manages one’s bank account, one’s sex and one’s friendships all in one; the result is the anesthetized, harmless and docile Bloom as described by Tiqqun, truly the masterstroke of a species that claims to be the highest of all creatures.
Is there a way out by which automation and autonomy can enter into a qualitatively new union?
The 24/7 pace of capital leads to the progressive diminution of interruptions that have the status of sleep or daydreaming. The power to dream possibilities on which the realizable dream insists, possibilities that first and foremost always emerge as structural impossibilities, relates to experience, protention, and projection, to what Blanchot calls the improbable, and this in turn insists on the power to de-automate the automation that constitutes this power. The power to dream may very well de-automate the psychic automatisms, think of the drives that constitute desires, yet the latter contain and drive on the former and as such create the sublime by quasi-causally inverting chance, in that the drives exist as blind and as fatal necessity. This kind of desire production breaks with the speed, efficiency, and functionality of 24/7 capitalism, which intends total control of interactive and instantaneous trace-making through the data economy and its automatisms. Algorithmic governance disintegrates in advance any interruption, liquidating the impossibility of the possible (non-anticipatability and predictability) as an improbability that governance can neither correlate nor identify. 24/7 capitalism as an economic system for which algorithmic governance is an a-political reality tends to erase any possibility of the dream, which Stiegler understands as a primordial and collective form of experiencing and testing the improbable, as the improbable that is an elemental supplement consisted in the experience of interruption.
The dream program is a skeptical one and demands that ternary retentions continue a specific dream, namely the noetic dream, when it initiates thinking, a true thinking that is always negentropic insofar as it can think the conditions of its own realization within a negentropic process (in relation to the techniques of the self and to the collective that is destroyed by 24/7 capitalism). This requires a massive redistribution of the time of thought made possible precisely by automation, a redistribution that in no way takes the form of purchasing power as generated by wage labor. In Stiegler’s work, the organology of sleep is integrated into a programatology, which in turn is an organology of the cosmos, incorporating forms of the calendar that sui generis inherent interruptions. There is no everyday life without these forms of calendar that integrates the temporalities of an epoch, including the interruptions that are an important form of social life, think of collective transgressions, uprisings, celebrations and delinquent situations. Today one wants to objectify dreams and freeze them into discrete entities that can be recorded and downloaded through appropriate techniques, so that they mutate into stocks or electronic software, which in turn can be sent online as video. The 24/7 clock of capital precedes us today and it exceeds us, robs us of the right to dream and to sleep, indeed of the right to any form of interruption and thus of the time needed to think. It comes to the calculated maintenance of an insistent state of transitions in the name of technological development and innovation, but destructive and entropic.
There are forms of transition based on the forms of production and consumerism of Taylorism, which adjusts wages to productivity and generates producers who are also consumers, whom one equips with effective demand. Taylorism represents a specific stage of automation that brings about mechanical ternary retention.
Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Bern have shown in their essay on algorithmic governance that the performativity of algorithms, which relates to relational data, transcends human decision-making. They describe this governace as “a certain type of (a)normative or (a)political rationality founded on the automated collection, aggregation and analysis of big data so as to model, anticipate and pre-emptively affect possible behaviors.” As a spatial phenomenon, algorithmic governance produces “a colonization of public space by a hypertrophied private space,” a topology of relations that does not care about, and even annihilates, individuals and subjects. For Rouvroy and Berns, algorithmic governance is rhizomatic, its object being the rhizomatic relations themselves, and its “emancipatory” potential being its ability to generate multiplicities without alterity, a point thankfully reiterated by Anrew Culp in “Dark Deleuze.”
Algorithmic governance generates a political-economic field and a new regime of truth characterized by a new technological performativity, the permanent capture of data, the digital operations that perform these data and the digital doubles that are the result of these operations, these doubles (profiles) interacting with those who generate them. These statistical doubles are products of algorithmic systems of control that do not produce individuals at all, but rather dividends and populations in real time that are functionally and at the same time invisibly involved in generating the parameters of their own control in order to produce associated milieus. This kind of personalization is always also based on the user’s profile and free digital work in social networks. In the context of the probabilistic methods of Google’s business model, which was first propagated by Amazon, the social networks based on the trace production and security of one’s own users are a kind of horrifying remote expressionism that is exploited here. The power technologies of protocols underlying this are a-normative, insofar as they are never debated but are intrinsic to algorithmic governance. The subject here is always already late and cannot bear witness to what it is or what it wants in the future; instead, the user merges with a profile of his or her own that is automatically designed by the algorithms in real time.
Like any governance in Foucault’s sense, algorithmic governance implements technologies of power that are now based on statistics that no longer refer to the average and the norm. Instead, we are dealing with an automated, an atomic and probability-based statistic that does its tracking and data mining liberated from any medium – an automated computing collects, captures and mobilizes market participants controlled by means of the extraction of correlations (Big Data) with the methods of this new statistic. Continuously collecting data and reading and evaluating data traces, statistics mobilizes an a-normative and an a-political rationality that insists on the exploitation, aggregation and automatic analysis of enormous amounts of data in order to predictively model, anticipate and influence agents’ behaviors. This entirely future-oriented influence installs a new regime of affects within a regime of truth, transforming the power of the individual to act into the automatic production of algorithmic systems, with which to reduce the possible to the probable. We thus trace the transition from static governance to algorithmic governance, which also concerns the transition from the public governance of the state as the administration of public things to the privatization of statistics, leading to the destruction of both private life and the public sphere.
The new automatic systems model the social in real time, contextualizing and personalizing interactions in automatic productions, whether in health care, business, and administration. For Rouvray and Berns, algorithmic governance includes three ubiquitous, territorial and spatial technologies, which are applied and designed, for example, in the programs of “Smart and Sensored Cities”, based on “automatic computing” and “ambient computing”, on technologies whose invisibility makes dividends even more active and efficient, in which the technologies weave themselves unnoticed into the factory of life until they are indistinguishable from it. Algorithmic governance is also managed and exploited at regional levels, in a systematic and systemic way at all levels of time and space; it is based and focused entirely on relations, on relations of relations, which in turn are reduced to correlations that annihilate any potential for individuation (disparities of psychic individuation, with which the latter is integrated into social individuation, which rejects the former, which in turn is metastabilized in collective transindividuations), relying instead entirely on correlations that can be formalized and calculated. Artificial neural network models only determine correlations, never causes or explanation of causalites, and thus they extend the past into the future; they serve classification, clustering, and optimization, but are far from understanding.
Algorithmic governance contains the following levels:
1) The generation of the Data Doubles and the Big Data, with which the data are extracted and accumulated through processes of expropriation. It is about the exploitation of the unsorted data, which is constitutive of the Big Data.
- the treatment of this data, which follows the extraction of common characteristics of the dividends that one sorts qua relations, to be evaluated as correlations that exist between the dividends. This datamining appears as absolute insofar as subjects cannot intervene, thus resulting in the automated production of automated protentions (expectations) that liquidate the difference between performative and constative behaviors. The automatically produced protentions now process in automated systems characterized by condensed networks, integrating the dividers themselves as procedures into the algorithmized field, where they appear as autoperformative effects of correlations. The field into which these automated actions are integrated is situated not in the present but in the future. The power over individual and collective protentions generated by the production of automated, divisional protentions destroys any attempt to opt out of these protentions or to attribute the actions to psychic protentions based on secondary psychic or collective retentions. The perfect adaptation, virality, and plasticity of algorithmic governance attempts to reintegrate any disruption or error into the system to redefine and re-engage the models and profiles of behavior. It seems that the power of the algorithmic system literally and structurally cannot be troubled, cannot be disturbed by the improbable, the latter being not only that which does not relate to mathematical modeling and calculation, but that which defies calculation, demonstration, and probability. The algorithmic performativity, generated in real time by correlations and implemented in the feedback loops without perceptible delays, destroys the essence of politics.
- constitutive here is the algorithmic generation of profiles behind the backs of those to whom a profile is assigned. This profile is neither individual nor visible, but is assigned to the dividends, and with them they interact without knowing it. This kind of treatment designates them in advance and controls them remotely, with automated knowledge production operationalized by learning digital machines that generate absolute objectivity. The digital operations concerning behavior anticipate and empty the individual desires and assign them to the profile. The different stages and levels of the algorithmized processes mutually condition and intensify each other within the automated circuits, which in turn are generated by the calculation and capitalization, and this now affects not only the sciences (Big Data), but every form of decision-making, from everyday life to the financial system and the military. However, the calculation of risk that ties all vitality to the algorithmic governance of associations always remains related to an uncertain future, but its potential is fractured when risks are financialized and at the same time incorporated into racialized, classed, and gendered politics.
A fully automated society in which employment no longer exists and wages are no longer the source of purchasing power, thus the producer/consumer disappears, requires a new process of redistribution, but not that of effective demand, but that of time, in which new forms of knowledge can be created by the social. The production of knowledge needs time, the time of sleep and dream and the time of day, to act in and with it, to reflect and to order the good and bad dreams and daydreams in order to materialize and transcend them and to fight. We need to liberate time to decide again, putting ourselves in new cycles of transindividuation shaped by dreams and following their bifurcations that de-automate. In an economy where employment is dramatically declining (Zizek talks about how 80% of the world’s population is already useless to capital today) and the “essential value” is knowledge, it is necessary to think about the right to know and the law of knowledge as a function of the conception of any productive function inherent in the power of de-automation sui generis. This leads to the question of the relation of law and work, where the problem of work must be reposed as a question of interpretation, because otherwise the difference between fact and law disappears.
The transitions that inherent specific interruptions require the supplement of a political organology, a new social organization that can be supported by the digital organs. In the next twenty years, digital integration will lead to a general automation and robotization in all sectors of the economy and administration. This full automation includes the computerized control of robots, integrating design, development, production, logistics and consumption in a feedback loop that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week on a global scale. In contrast, we need to develop studies and concepts that work towards an organology and pharmacology that allow us to rethink the relationship between automation and autonomy, a relation that philosophy has so far mostly understood as an opposition. Organology is about the industrialization of modes of organization, similar to protocol, while pharmacology emphasizes the duality within which something is both a poison and a cure, which can produce both the suffering and the cure (Derrida). And transindividuality refers to the realm of culture, the cultural unconscious, a machine memory that passes through individuals and generations (Simondon).
We need a redefinition of rationality that is not reduced to capital, calculation, and scientistic apodicticity, but instead cares about the improbable. Real novelty has an economic function, it constitutes a production of negentropy, in which pharmacology is always involved, which can be toxic and curative, that is, entropic and/or negentropic. Innovation, as an originally negentropic factor, has long since become entropic today. Therefore, we must ask the question: How can the revolution find its way back to negentropy, to a thinking, technological differentiation, to become an innovation that is at the same time social, that reinvents the relations between technical and social systems, which requires a sharing economy, a renewal of politics that encompasses all new technological tendencies.
And this movement remains highly improbable, with the rational less probable than improbable and ready for supplementary invention, which in turn requires a delayed time of transindividuation, which is always too late compared to digital real time, which always leads us into the trap of automated quasi-causality. Ultimately, automated governance eliminates any quasi-causality, any event or occurrence that interrupts, unsettles, or disturbs the system; it negates the improbable, which evades any proof and refuses any display in time because it never appears in the field that proof demands.
The improbable has by no means a higher or lower probability, because it does not remain in the horizon of probability and its calculations (it is precisely this remaining that Badiou is accused of, Laruelle has pointed out in his book “Anti-Badiou”). Algorithmic governance makes users completely blind to the improbable, insofar as it integrates in advance any interruption in the context of 24/7 capitalism, but also dis-integrates it because it is the improbable and the milieu of the noetic soul, Plato’s khora, which can only be experienced in interruption, just as, for example, a flying fish can only observe its milieu, the water, when it leaves it for a short time in order to return immediately and continuously to the water. The flying fish experiences for a moment a surreal world, as Haruki Murakami described it in his novel “Kafka on the Beach” with the fish raining from the sky, without mentioning, however, that the flying fish are always related to the real, insofar as they must continually dive back into the noetic milieu, which is the real, the water, which for the fish always remains un-perceivable. See David Foster Wallace.
The elimination of errors in the course of algorithmic governance is the result of the transformation of relations into correlations and the integration of the latter into performative networking in real time. The relation or correlation now acquires the rank of being. For Stiegler, at least, the relation always represents something beyond what holds it together as elements, existing precisely when there are errors in the relational processes and compensations for the errors qua inventions, with new errors occurring again and again: There is a third term in the relations, a factor in the phase-shift that constitutes the relation but can also ruin it, and this, for Stiegler, is the pharmakon that seeks to suspend the probable calculations of capital or to bring into play a fundamental delinquency. If it is true that we constitute ourselves through our practices, and capitalist automation takes these practices out of our hands, then we are not only made fools of, but we are made crude, coarse and vulgar, brutish and uneducated, and we then become something only when we become nothing, and thus we are exposed to nothingness, emptiness, and the devastation of the self. We already find this phenomenon in Guattari’s machine unconscious, where the relationship between humans and machines also holds possibilities for the development of daydreams – a condition of noetic knowledge – ínsofar as automatism here is always accompanied by moments of de-automation. Such an integrated politics of de-automation would be at the same time a politics of education, a cultural politics, a politics of science, an industrial politics, a politics of non-employment, a politics of interruption, and a constitutional politics of law. The latter is imperative as algorithmic governance today increasingly exploits data and information in the legal vacuum of fact, even generalizing the terms of the non-legal in some areas, see for example the U.S. government’s drone policy.
Serving the consumer with services via smart marketing is nothing more than adapting the individual need to the offer, assuming that the desire is adaptable at all, while it remains the expression of a non-adaptable singularity – it is always in a shifting phase, if it individuates and participates in transindivíduation in multiple ways. We should really not adapt the desire to the offers of the capitalist companies, rather we should assume that it is destroyed by the self-fulfilling anticipations of the fantasies driven by the culture industry (voyeurism, exhibitionism, the mimesis of the artificial crowds, the profile with which one wants to promote oneself, and the short-circuiting – via the calculation of correlations – of the social processes with the transindividuation as well as the automation of the transindividuation).
Algorithmic governance does not revolve around the question of anticipating desire, but algorithmic automation intends the destruction of desire and short-circuiting by automatically triggering the drive-based behavior as a desire to buy and channeling it through self-fulfilling protentions, induced by the famous feedback loops (personal values are matched with static normal distributions). For example, Walmart uses an app for “predictive shopping,” which creates new shopping lists of algorithmically determined desired goods based on the registration of previous purchases that automate and finalize the desire by mapping individual preferences qua pattern formation, to bring about future decisions, but which the algorithms suggest, so that ultimately machine-organized decisions lead to the addition of further machine-organized decisions, based on data profiles resulting from the machine processing of the customer’s purchases and search engine input. The more data trails the customer leaves, the more precisely self-learning algorithmic machines can process to not only make decisions, but also gently massage customers’ protentions, but ultimately hard-core determine them, meaning that the optimized autonomy Walmart promises is a pseudo-autonomy.
The transindividual (not transindividual) tracking or trafficking of the dividuated data of individuated mental organs needs to be described in more detail. Both the psychic organs into which the dividers are dissected and the disintegrated psychosocial elements of the psychic apparatus and the social system, mutate today into non-objects and non-subjects. One has to refer here to the often proclaimed market segmentation, whereby the invoked individualization is tantamount to a divisiveness, an infra-individual division and a decomposition of individuation. The destruction of desire by automation, which releases the bad drives and triggers driven automatisms that link the drive to network effects, is compatible with the models of neuro-marketing, neuro-economics, and the mathematical models of artificial neural networks. Neuromarketing tries to generate actions without the formation of an autonomous desire. And this is based on the elimination of interruption by generating a sensorimotor loop in which there are no more delays and social differance, thus creating a purely functional circuit or feedback loop that operates with descriptive and prescriptive methods and that is controlled by the algorithmic governance of 24/7 capitalism – the time interval (delay) that separates reception from effect is nothing. The functional integration of psychic individuation through an automatically associated milieu that processes at the speed of light constitutes a factual naturalization of the technical milieu and an artificial naturalization, mutating individual and collective individuations into collective and psychic dividuations that function like a 24/7 insect society. However, it is important to note at this point that it is the experts and the users who repair the machine processes when they malfunction and who also largely control the processes of the systems, but also examine them for their meaning, so that management, as Cornelius Castoriadis has repeatedly affirmed, continues to face the problem of how the exclusion and the participation of human actors in the machine processes relate to each other. Users control machines that they themselves apply.
Deleuze/Guattari write that for a social machine to function, it must never function too well. Thinking of algorithmic governance both as an immanent system and as a new possible regime of truth requires thinking straight back about error and dysfunction – about shifting phase or incompatibility in Simondon, delinquency in Esposito, pathology in Canguilhem, and supplement or differance in Derrida. In Simondon, two different views of a single world generate a third dimension of incompatibility precisely because of their incompatibility, the specific case of an individuation with which the order of magnitudes change. In this context, the relation of the individual to his milieu must be thought not as adaptation but as individuation, which is possible only when the condition of incompatibility is present in the mutual relation of two entities; if the disparities are too strong, there will be no common perspective, but transductive forms can also occur, leading via differance to co-individuation and to significations that actualize the respective potential of a situation. This involves pre-individual potentialities. However, algorithmic governance has no need of disagreements, of individuals and significations. In and through the networks and their effects, the conditions for disparities are today equalized, that is, redirected and short-circuited by algorithms, so that psychic and collective divides occur and a new order is produced in which meaning and signification are lost altogether. Automated transindividuation produces a new form of transdividuation, and it does so through dividuation, a feature of control societies that generates the A-normativity of hyper-control. When the processes of psychic and collective individuation that imply the improbable and produce non-calculables and imponderables are destroyed by algorithmic governance, the toxic rebirth of an electronic Leviathan occurs. Meaning and signification are the result of a transductive augmentation in which information leads to individuation, to information beyond information, whereby through its circulation information changes, strengthening or weakening its potential so that alterity can transform information into meaning and signification, into a metastabilization that leads to transindividuality that no longer has anything to do with information. The transindividual is a metastable relation between carriers whose instances are the nervous systems of psychic individuals. The carriers of the transindividuation are up- and distributed to psychic individuals (psychic retentions and protentions) and to collective individuals (collective secondary retentions metastabilized by ternary retentions). In this sense, transindividuation produces a collective knowledge that is not simply information; rather, meaning and signification constitute the transindividual by signifying it. The formation of this common dimension is produced by disparity, which is the very process and circuit of transindividuation, in which circuits the organs (psychosomatic, technical, social) and their arrangements that presuppose them form a regime of truth. This can also take place in the unconscious and today can take on a machinic dimension that is sui generis organological. Noesis is always a technae that comes about through the interiorization of artifacts. The passage of the noetic act is not the becoming conscious of what was previously unconscious, but the adoption of the unconscious as an individuation of the pre-individual materials of which it is composed.
The three-dimensionality generated by disparities mutates today into a flat two-dimensionality generated by algorithmic govornance; the flattening of psychic and collective individuation occurs, while people become so deformed that they see themselves only as profiles. The technical individual is the fully computerized system that produces an oligarchic organization that controls the implementation of the algorithms, whereby it is we who serve the oligarchy with data, while at the same time we are dis-integrated, and the oligarchy, however, remains by no means excluded from the disintegration, so that the system becomes totally entropic and altogether subject to disintegration, that is, fragmented and decomposed.
What remains is the Net as a desert that has been subjected to the imperatives of calculability since 1993 and that is now subject to the logic of platforms. Originally, the Internet was constituted by networking and the technology of hyperlinks via peer to peer, as well as by the web pages made possible by URL addresses and HTML, although from the year 2000 onwards it came to the development of Web.2.0, the combination of a collaborative production of metadata, the page ranking algorithm of the Google search engine and the network effects of social networks, factors that together have created a vertical flatness and an invisible digital wall that operates in top-down mode. Google`s rank algorithm leads to an extreme hierarchy and verticality, i.e. there are only a few hubs or nodes that dominate the network, and in this respect the differences to traditional media are small. The communitarian activities on the platforms are fragile and can be switched at any time according to the commercial interests of the operators, insofar as all these systems produce data that the operators exploit by means of algorithmic governance and integrate into a fully integrated computer system that is self-contained. It should be noted that data represent information that only becomes legible in pragmatic contexts, i.e., the models, calculations, and diagrammatics based on data that Stiegler summarizes under correlation analysis and Big Data contain instructions that have a pragmatic status, i.e., in which human actors, usually a large number of experts, are also involved via checks and encodings of the references integrated in the data.
In the correlation analysis, the Artificial Neural Networks, which are usually explained on the basis of the functioning of nerve cells, play an important role. With them, the difference between the desired outputs and the actual outputs is repeated in the calculations of the models until the model is stable, and this means that the software learns independently which criteria and indicators are important for a particular issue. In addition to improved algorithms, their success is based on increased computer speeds, although the KNN’s modeling as black boxes buried deep in the number matrices is not comprehensible to most stakeholders. KNNs only identify correlations but not causes and causal relationships, extending the past into the future. They tap into data in all sorts of ways, but they don’t comprehend it.
Cloud computing is not localized in the clouds themselves, but in the data centers, which are located in high-security zones, sometimes even in bunkers or under mountains; think of Switzerland being at the forefront of cyberbunker business. These infrastructures, because of their high speeds and scale, allow exclusive access to data, with a few companies like Google, which is a separate network, creating a parallel world to the Internet. Then, at a smaller level, there is the world of blogs, evaluated by the search engines, whose reputation and recommendation are based on network effects, which allows the platforms to channel expressions and functionalize them integrally.
For Stiegler, a third stage of the Internet must be achieved, based on a new organology . derived from a supplementary invention as a political technology that repotentializes the disparities, diachronizes the network and provides interpretative tools for the disparities. There is a need to build a new depth in the web, through collectives that produce new knowledge. Today, software infrastructure curtails users more than legal prohibitions by indicating how users should view information, simultaneously creating a new invisibility that keeps regulation, rules, and carriers in the dark-a flat desert that not only controls but anticipates all behavior, or a two-dimensional sky where everything is already written in advance and everything is calculated, as if the universe operates independently of any possible interpretation.
Here, Stiegler, like the authors Berns and Rouvrey, refers to Maurizio Lazzarato, who revisited Guattari’s conception of a-signifying semiotics and made it fruitful for the analysis of contemporary digital machines; machines in which affects, emotions, and perceptions function as functionalities equal to the elements of a machine. The resulting divertissement is the result of a proletarianization, although the possibilities of a de-proletarianization, which is always related to negentropy, do not entirely disappear, insofar as the intelligent environments in which we find ourselves constantly solve trivial tasks for us and thus also free our thinking to some extent from unnecessary ballast. However, these automatisms must be put at the service of de-automation, and this should not simply lead to an increase in free time, rather the invention of a new creative form of activity is to be demanded, which uses the software with strategic skill and precise knowledge, indeed coaches the computers and thus makes them usable as intelligence amplifiers. Just when the machines become intelligent, we can de-automate them and become intelligent again with them.
Consciousness selects primary retentions without being aware of it, and when experience occurs, selections are made on the basis of secondary retentions, and criteria for these retentions are produced, the primary retentions resulting from these selections encoding an individual life experience, while both forms of retention are in turn processed by ternary retentions and protentions, with digitized networked ternary retentions now not only controlling but anticipating all primary and secondary retentions at the speed of light, emptying them of any content and subjecting them to backup. In this context, the machine body without organs, as developed by Deleuze/Guattari, seems quite compatible with Turing’s abstract machine, while a-signifying semiotics are more likely to belong to concrete machines such as the automobile. Moreover, rhizomatic networking also seems to provide a perfect description for algorithmic governance.
Today, the real wealth of an economy is based less and less on labor and wage labor, but on the power of agencies set in motion during working hours; it is also based more on the general congestion of the sciences and the progress of technology or applications that put science in relation to production. If labor ceases to be the general guarantor of wealth, then labor time also ceases to be the measure of general wealth. For Marx, labor constitutes the relations of production through which people produce their means of production and the means of their existence, and in doing so they not only interpret the world but transform it, that is, they artificialize the world and realize their organological fictions in processes of psychological, technical, and social individuation. Marx hardly examined technology or the artificial as such, nor the relationship between fiction and technology…,
Labor is always also a production of retentions, it organizes or contributes to the organization of the inorganic to form the ternary retentions that support the secondary retentions, to finally form the circuits of transindividuation in which those are metastabilized. The operations of the work transform the materials, in which the elements of the system of traces are already inscribed and distributed. The elements are formed, on the one hand, by the organized inorganic matter that constitutes utensils, machines, tools and instruments, and, on the other hand, by organological synaptic circuits inscribed in the brains of manual workers and mental workers, and finally by social rules (institutional, corporate, private or public) that coordinate, predict, regulate, program and standardize the moments of a trace on the basis of ternary retentions related to grammar. The operations of labor open the world as a system of inorganic and cerebral lines and traces, themselves organic and organological, to form and sediment the elementary layers of the processes of transindividuation. From the beginning, the individuation is connected with the technologization of life, insofar as the bíological organs of man do not secure life, so that artificial organs must be found which, conversely, reorganologize the cerebral organs. Here arises the technical and artificial memory, the ternary retentions.
The proletarianization of manual labor began at the end of the 18th century, when the first machine ternary retentions appeared, due on the one hand to the formalized and automated movements (Vaucanson), and on the other hand to the possibilities of transforming heat into the power of motors (Watts). The transformation of the inorganic, organic and psychic material, in which the psychic, collective and technical individuations are consistent, are now functionally dis-integrated and excluded from individuation. This implies that the proletariat is reduced to employment and wage labor, with retentions no longer passing through the brains of workers, who are therefore no longer the producers of workers’ knowledge. With their de-singularization, workers degenerate into mere labor power and a specimen that can be replaced by any other specimen in the labor market, while scientific intelligence is removed from and, moreover, controls the concrete work processes. Taylorism, with its time studies, rule instructions, and modeling catalogs, consists in nothing more than the separation of the conception and management of work processes from their execution. Employment is now set as a function of training.
Already Wiener spoke of the devaluation of the human brain and today the systemic stultificationin the context of 24/7 capitalism reaches each one of us, reaching all the more those, according to Stiegler, who are higher in the hierarchy, a hypothesis that remains to be investigated. The subject is now a result of protocols constituted by means of the machines, apparatuses, procedures, management controls, and further systems, and even when the subject is not employed, it remains short-circuited with algorithms that overtake the psychic and collective individuals and exist and process without any control or reason. In Taylorism, the workers were connected to the machines to execute repetitive and fragmented works, with the assemblies and tools already prepared, the details set in advance by time and motion studies. The functional stupidity in particular of the unskilled workers is today part of the algorithmic governance and pervades even the intellectual professions, insofar as in them no collective secondary retentions can be produced, rather they are dominated by time studies tied to automation. Collective secondary retentions, in turn, can be transformed into ternary and automated retentions, into technologies of all kinds, and thus prove to be both invisible and unthinkable. In the course of full automation, according to Stiegler, there is also a decrease in the labor force necessary to control, operate, and maintain the machines; machines that are increasingly fully automated must be understood as externalities that produce lines and traces mediated by networked psychic individuals who manage the parameters of production and distribution systems according to the parameters of algorithmic governance. Machine systems today are integrated autonomous complexes,operated not by producers but by consumers, Stiegler said.
It is today more and more the unpaid labor of consumers, which is not actually labor, but purely a divertissement, the employment of unpaid time, that feeds, sets, and reinforces the parameters of the automatic and performative collective protentions and retentions produced by computerized capitalism. This was preceded by a period in which consumers faced mass individuation, the proletarianization of knowledge of life. Marketing companies produced the collective secondary retentions that carried out what certain research departments demanded. In the 21. Century, the analog was replaced by the digital-networked cultural industry that integrates the proletarianized consumers into the digital technical system through networking, as well as dis-integrates them psychologically and socially, to produce a divsion resulting from the networking that constructs the proletarianized consumers and producers in the sense that they become executive organs of the information systems, of capitalization: In 1993, the Internet established an infrastructure that fundamentally changed telecommunication technologies and led to the total networking of any territory, all of which were now transformed into digital territories, equipping their inhabitants with mobile or fixed devices that are in turn compatible with the networks. People and machines are now networked 24 hours a day, seven days a week, across the globe, moreover with the global players and the security and intelligence services of the imperialist states.
Today, it is necessary to call not so much for the reduction of working hours, which will only lead to an increase in digitized leisure time, but for the end of wage labor and employment, which must be accompanied by a redefinition of labor as a force for de-automation, in order to produce a neganthropic future in a new industrial age. One must base algorithmic governance on a new law of labor linked to a new status of knowledge. Today, the Internet kills more jobs than it creates.
The absolute automaton is shifting the world of work from manpower to brainpower. Just as there was a coupling of hand and machine at the beginning of industrialization, today the brain and the machine are being coupled in a new economy that Stiegler calls “Iconomy.” This transformation involves a transductive relation, whereby production is no longer based on labor time but on machine time. Already with the coupling of hand and machine, it is the latter that works, and it does so blindly and automatically, which means that this process can hardly be described as work anymore, insofar as it always contains an opening, while serial and automated production is always completed. In this respect, the products are then ready-made goods.
The question today is whether the (alleged) escalation of productivity achieved with automated production should result in free time or in liberated labor. If automation liberates time in general, how do we avoid that this liberated and thus available time becomes an available brain time, a time that is no longer tied to Television but to Google, Amazon and Facebook. The French sociologist Andre Gorz already wrote the following in the 1970s: “If “mass society” tends to develop in the direction of increasing atomization of individuals, then it is nevertheless uncertain whether this isolation will lead to a simple accumulation of isolated individuals in the large organizations, for it could well be that it will promote an extremely close networking of individuals, who will be obliged to a constant exchange of ideas and mutual monitoring under the care of those manageable groups in which they have to participate. Therein lies perhaps the secret goal of this “general self-management” so passionately advocated by some of our contemporaries,” Today the group is materialized in Facebook, in its invisible algorithms, and has given rise to a group addiction of unimaginable proportions.
Attention today is captured by algorithmic governance, which Stiegler describes as either a reading industry or an entropic economy of expression that intensifies the proletarianization of consumers, while wage labor has long since become employment, dissolving the interest inherent in labor. With Taylorization and later with the organization of consumerism and the constitution of mass markets by the culture industry, proletarianization congeals labor into a job industry and defines skills only in terms of employment, which now coincides with adaptation. Proletarianization today denotes not only economic impoverishment and precarity, but also the loss of control over knowledge, savoir-faire, and production. Work knowledge and knowledge of life have been replaced by machines and information systems communication to transform all knowledge into automation, with the proletarianization of all knowledge long ago capturing even the forms of planning and decision making.
Jobs today are emptied of any content and no longer give satisfaction to workers, leaving as their purpose only the increase of demand with purchasing power, which now becomes the concern of both labor and capital, although this may well take different forms. Capital needs the demand to sell goods, and unions negotiate wage levels to achieve the appropriate compensation.
For the most part, the left continues to relate positively to labor, advocating for labor and social security rights, but also for the right to consume sufficiently. Wages hereby remain central, and they must be defended at all costs, because it is precisely they that supposedly make work desirable. Instead of abolishing wage labor, social democratic discourse turns wage labor into an instrument with which wealth can supposedly be distributed fairly and with which greater social justice can be achieved. Today, in contrast, we are confronted with the end of employment, the structural uselessness of a large part of the workforce, and therefore with a liberated time, which, however, does not liberate labor but mutates it into a brain time that is completely available for the fabrication of the products of the consumer markets. All behaviors, procedures and models are no longer constituted by the social system, but by the time and emotion studies oriented to marketing.
Liberated time must be liberated work, not abstracting from energy and its potential, hand, brain and energy must be connected. Today it looks quite different. Maurizio Lazzarato writes: “In order to guarantee growing revenues for financial investors, availability must be total for precarious and deficient employment as well as for poorly compensated unemployment, for austerity as well as for “reforms.” To refuse work today is to deny this availability, which financialization would like to have, without limits or quid pro quo. To practice the refusal of labor in the conditions of contemporary exploitation means to invent new modalities of struggle and organization, not only to preserve the inherited rights of the historical struggles against wage labor, but also and above all to assert new rights, adapted to the new modalities of the exploitation of time, to construct forms of solidarity capable of preventing the expropriation of knowledge and savoir-faire, and to avoid the modalities of production being dictated by the requirements of financial valorization, which neither art nor cultural industries can escape. ” It is necessary to look outside the system of employment for activities in the Marxian sense that create sustainable wealth and abolish wage labor in favor of knowledge materialized in machines, a transformed knowledge, insofar as time is liberated by the work of de-automation to achieve a free time of transindividuation, in the sense of otium or sholhe, a leisure, techniques of the self and the other, that is, to work for oneself and through the other. This requires an organological revolution, the invention of new instruments of knowledge and publication, an epistemic and epistemological revolution, and this then precisely cannot be reduced to the expansion of the service sector or the creation of new jobs or to a minimal basic income that remains subject to capitalization, the market and money. Wealth is time and time is also available for interruptions, the quantum leap for psychic and social individuations, which in turn are formed and metastabilized by transindividuations. This time of interruptions is important to invent another form of work, different from entropy and promoting negentropy, an energeia, a passage towards action, where the energies such as fossil energy can always be only a condition for the neotic energy, not this itself. “The possible, the becoming, and the event open up realms that are not governed by time or space and that are animated by other speeds (infinite speeds, Guattari would say), whether of the highest speed or of the greatest slowness (Deleuze)… Automation has just produced a decline in the division of labor and a transformation of labor. The sharply demarcated net division between employment and unemployment (of unemployment as the flip side of employment), whose institution goes back to a quite different regime of accumulation (standardization and continuity of production, consequently stability and continuity of employment), has been transformed into an ever closer interlocking of periods of employment and periods of unemployment. That unemployment has become structural does not mean that millions of people are waiting for a permanent contract: they are working while simultaneously registered as unemployed. Unemployment is now part of the norm of employability. To be unemployed is to be available and immediately employable, not for an open-ended contract, but for a fixed-term contract with a duration.”(Lazzarato)
Gorz assumes a two-part income, on the one hand an income from creative labor that falls with duration, and a basic social income. While Hegel synthesizes labor with abolition and therefore does not know proletarianization, Marx knows very well this negative aspect of deproletarianization, but synthesizes labor again in communism, eliminating the pharmakon, considering also that it is not the proletarianization of labor, but the end of employment combined with the organological mutation (freely available software) made possible by the digital ternary retention, as a care-bearing of a pharmakon transindivudualized by the objectified knowledge. Today, the power of the computer -determined by the speed of microprocessors and data transfer- empties the creative work and the energeia, although Stiegler does not want to return to an original intuitive intelligence, because the intelligence sui generis is artificial, that is, organological, i.e. coupling of life with inorganic organs. At present, the real is conceived as a mode of access to possibilities that must be actualized as money, an organological and technological mode of access in which the potential for transformations is a matter of the endless actualization of possibilities, and this within the framework of probability theory. This specific form of becoming without end possesses precisely no future, whereby today the difference between facts and law seems to have been eliminated; only the rule of facts, represented by the fake, exists. To this, Stiegler, in order to be able to distinguish entropy and negentropy at all, opposes Whitehead’s speculative cosmology, a non-human situation in which becoming is transformed into the future as an improbable síngularity in order to de-proletarize labor, leisure, and knowledge.
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