The desolate rocky landscape belongs to the planet Mars. The vehicle visible in the lower right is the Curiosity rover, NASA’s spacecraft that landed on Mars in August 2012 and has since been on a permanent mission to explore the red planet. The three figures faintly seen examining a rock are avatars of scientists who (through the holographic technology OnSight, jointly developed by Microsoft and NASA, and the wearable HoloLens technology of the former) can conduct their research within a mixed simulation and reality environment. If these leading capitalist institutions were not known for their moderation, they would proclaim through every medium the definitive divorce of human intellect and activity from the zoological constraints of manual labor. It may have required millions of worker-hours before, but now creativity is ethereal and intangible, they would say; it produces results without the expense of labor, they would say…
But the image is an optical illusion, skillfully staged to hide the monstrosity of the truth. That there is a vital artery that connects directly this technological marvel (and every other) with the miners digging for “rare earths” and the workers melting away assembling computers, but also the slave migrants of the first world, the proletarians of the criminal economy who work with a gun to their head, the modern workers who work for a piece of bread, all of them who work under conditions of barbarism. Without them, hyper-technologized capitalism would collapse under the weight of the dead labor that overwhelms it.
Keep this hint in mind, because it is at the heart of criticism in technology.