from online to onlife: engineering everything

History and Machines

Can we perceive the ongoing parade of modern technological applications and wonders as something beyond a mere sum of “good and bad human inventions”? Can we perceive it as an ongoing transformation of social relations, so radical that it already makes it seem impossible that other social relations existed, a life worthy of being lived by everyone, just 20 or 30 years ago?
No matter how difficult this may be, we must do exactly that—before we are completely transformed into mere derivatives of this transformation. We must definitively leave Magic behind and re-enter History.

historical snapshot no 1

A little after the middle of the 19th century, in the 1850s, Karl Marx, among his other analyses of capital, devotes time and attention to the process of mechanization that would go down in history as the “first industrial revolution.” For Marx’s incisive critique, the mechanization he observes emerging in some capitalist spaces and times of production then is not purely a technical issue. Nor is it the natural expression of human inventiveness. Rather, it is a complex political-technical process that is implemented precisely because (and to the extent that) it strengthens the position of employers against workers, and the profitability of the former.
In the Grundrisse, in a way that could be considered “prophetic” today but was nothing more than critically penetrating, he says among other things:

… Integrated into capital’s productive process, the means of labor undergoes various transformations, with its latest being the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machines (system of machines: the automatic is nothing but the most complete, more adequate form of them, and only this transforms machines into a system), which is driven by an automatic, a motive force that moves itself; an automatic composed of numerous mechanical and pneumatic organs, so that the workers themselves are determined only as conscious members of it.
In the machine, and even more so in machines as an automatic system, the means of labor is transformed with regard to its use value, that is, with regard to its material presence, into an existence adequate for fixed capital and for capital in general… The machine in no way appears as the means of labor of the individual worker. Its differentia specifica [specific difference] is in no way – like the means of labor – to mediate the worker’s activity upon the object. On the contrary, this activity has been placed in a way that simply mediates the work of the machine, its action upon the raw material – it supervises and protects it from disturbances.
Not like the tool, which the worker animates as an instrument with his own skill and activity, and whose handling therefore depends on the worker’s dexterity. On the contrary, the machine, which instead of the worker possesses skill and force, is itself the artisan, which has its own soul, the mechanical laws that operate within the machine; and for its uninterrupted self-motion, just as a worker consumes means of subsistence, it consumes coal, oil, etc.
The worker’s activity, restricted to mere abstract activity, is determined and regulated in all respects by the movement of the machines – not the reverse. The science that compels the inanimate members of the machines through their construction to function purposefully as an automatic mechanism does not exist in the worker’s consciousness; on the contrary, it acts through the machine as an alien force upon the worker, as the force of the machine itself.
…
The productive process has ceased to be a labor process in the sense that labor dominates over it as its governing unity. On the contrary, it appears only as a conscious instrument, as separate living workers scattered at various points of the mechanical system; subordinated to the overall process of the machines themselves; and themselves a mere member of the system, whose unity lies not in the living workers but in the living (active) machines, which opposite to the individual, insignificant action of the worker, confront him as an imposing organism.
…

The evolution of the means of labor into machinery is not accidental for capital, but constitutes the historical transformation of the traditionally given means of labor into a form adequate for capital. The accumulation of knowledge and skill, of the general productive forces of the human mind, opposite the worker, was thus absorbed into capital, and hence appears as a property of capital; more specifically of fixed capital, insofar as it is incorporated into the productive process as the means of production itself.
…
In machines, knowledge appears as alien, external to the worker; and living labor appears subordinated to objectified labor, which possesses independent action. The worker appears as superfluous, insofar as his action is not determined by [capital’s] needs.
…
The appropriation of living labor by capital acquires, from this perspective, direct reality in machines: on the one hand, what allows the machine to perform the same work previously performed by the worker is the analysis and application of mechanical and chemical laws, which stems directly from science. The development of machines, however, in this direction occurs only when large-scale industry has already reached a higher stage and all sciences have been captured in the service of capital; and on the other hand, when the available machines themselves already offer great resources. Then invention becomes an enterprise, and the application of science to direct production becomes an aim that determines and motivates it.
…

Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie, 1857 – 1858. Greek edition: Stochastis, Volume B, p. 531 and onwards.

What Marx notes and analyzes in the above excerpts is the transition from the tool to the machine, and even more so to the system of machines. From the craftsman (master) to the machine operator and even more so to the subordinate worker (of the machine’s operation / of the mechanical system). However, he does not analyze this transition as the inevitable evolution of human inventiveness. But rather as a process of the evolution of capitalist exploitation of labor (since he analyzes production). At another point, subsequently, he explains exactly how this “improvement” of labor exploitation through mechanization takes place. However, we will not reach that point; it is not necessary for this particular reference.
The fact that Marx’s attention is focused on production should not lead to mistaken conclusions today. It was (then, in the mid-19th century) focused on production, because that is where mechanization (of labor) was unfolding. What if mechanization were occurring elsewhere, outside of labor?
This is precisely what we will examine next.

historical snapshot no 2

A century after the aforementioned observations, in the early 1950s, someone who could then be considered visionary but quickly proved to be among the pioneers (of the era we live in), Norbert Wiener, in his book Cybernetics and Society clarified from the outset:

… The position of this book is that society can be understood only through the study of the messages and communication facilities it possesses. And that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between human and machine, between machine and human, and between machines, messages will play an increasingly important role.
…
My position is that the natural function of the living organism and some of the new communication machines are exactly parallel in their analogous efforts to control entropy through feedback.
…
Cybernetics supports the view that the construction of the machine or organism is an indicator of the behavior that one can expect.
…

Cybernetics and Society, first edition in the USA 1950, Greek edition: Papadzisis Publications.

Undoubtedly bold views for the general public, in the middle of the 20th century! The machine is once again at the center; but which machine? At which center? Those heavy and bulky steel constructions of factories, with their gears, bearings, drive belts, the tremendous noise of their operation, their oils, their steam engines (which Marx had before him) or their diesel engines afterwards? Those machines which, even before them, workers were simply “their conscious limbs,” was that what Wiener was talking about?
No. He was talking about machines of a different kind. Such as, for example, “automatic valves” in water supply networks that open and close according to water pressure. One could encounter such different kinds of machines, again, in factories, in industrial complexes. However, Wiener also spoke about doors that open automatically as soon as someone approaches them… Those… those were not destined for factories, but also for offices or even homes… Those “different kinds of machines” for which Wiener partly worked and partly prophesied, and for which he coined a new word (for a new science: cybernetics) were not destined only for the space/time of production…
Indeed, the idea was so bold that it would be difficult to find someone to analyze it critically in a timely manner. New “components” appeared as constituents of these “different kinds of machines”:

… I wish to emphasize that language is not a property exclusively of living beings, but a property which can be possessed to some degree by machines constructed by man… We usually consider that communication and language are directed from person to person. However, it is equally possible for a person to speak to a machine, as it is for a machine to speak to a person, and for a machine to speak to another machine…

Strange machines did Wiener dream of or foresee, as a prophet of capitalist techno-science: speaking machines… But why?

historical snapshot no 3

At the time when Wiener spoke about “speaking machines,” primarily having in mind a new set of techniques for reliable (that is: efficient) “communication between humans and machines,” in other words, when electronic computers were still in their early (and bulky) stages, emerging from the “needs” of World War II, the dialectical relationship between “technological development” and the evolution of capitalist exploitation had been almost forgotten. “Technology” and “capitalism” had been separated. The former appeared as a self-contained process, the product of the continuous inventiveness of (scientific) thought, which was also conceived as self-sustaining and self-developing… And the latter as the domain where (workers’) demands could exist, but within an increasingly consensual environment.
Thus, when in the 1960s Italian workers began to reread Marx politically, they brought back to the forefront of critique not simply the capitalist exploitation of machines, but above all the fact that technological “inventiveness” was merely an expression of capitalism’s necessity for greater and, above all, more secure exploitation.
In their horizon, the spaces and times of production always remained central. The factory, and specifically the “large,” “mass” factory. Technological innovations and applications, the successive waves of improvements in machinery, were seen as occurring there.
Thus, Raniero Panzieri said in 1961:

… We could say that the two terms capitalism and development are synonymous. Capitalism lives by and through the promotion of the continuous expansion of economic capabilities, giving an unprecedented impetus to science and technology, to the applications of science and technology in the field of the economy. This very process of capitalist accumulation is dominated by continuous technical innovations, to use Schumpeter’s term.
The continuous introduction of new machines, the tendency for constantly new discoveries and their application, the impetuous and incessant technological development, is, if the use of this term metaphorically is allowed, the essence of the process of capitalist accumulation… Where the tendency for renewal is closely linked to the creation of surplus value…
…
Competition and the necessity of defending profit against tendencies of wage increases force the individual capitalist to resort to innovations…. During this process there is a continuous expulsion, release of labor power due to the introduction of machines that save (living) labor. When, however, accumulation is in motion it is possible to continue impetuously and to absorb more workers than those expelled by the introduction of machines.
…

Neocapitalism and the revolutionary movement, Greek edition: Communa.

The machines that Panzieri (and Italian workers in general) had in front of them were always those massive constructions for industrial use/production. However, the return to basics, that is to say, the return to the position that science, technology and their applications are not appearances and, above all, do not conquer positions within social relations simply and merely as modernisms but because they serve capitalist accumulation, this dialectical and anti-metaphysical position is what we need!
Meanwhile, the ‘60s and ‘70s were not the era that would allow one to extend this position to “speaking machines” or, even more so, to some expanded “relationship between humans and machines”… The mechanical arsenal of capitalist production was, for the most part, housed within heavy industrial buildings; very few machines existed outside, e.g. in offices (typewriters, telephones); while in daily life, household appliances (refrigerators, washing machines, electric kitchens) were simple applications of electric motors and resistors.
However…

historical snapshot no 4

In 1997, where meanwhile many and various things had changed (in relation to the decades of the ’60s and ’70s), academic Nick Witheford, influenced by the views and analyses of Italian autonomia, published a text in which he summarizes the final phase of capitalist development (or “growth”) as viewed through the expanded Marxist perspective of the autonomists.
Among other things, he writes:

… I use a concept from Marx that has been particularly important for autonomists, the concept of capitalist sequence. In simple terms, this concept shows how capital depends, for its operation, not simply on exploitation in its direct forms in the workplaces, but on the continuous upgrading of a whole series of social positions and activities.
Marx’s initial analysis describes only two moments of this sequence: production and circulation. In production, labor power and the means of production (machines and raw materials) are combined to produce commodities. In circulation, commodities are sold and bought: capitalists must on the one hand sell the products that are produced, thus realizing the surplus value that was extracted in production… and on the other hand buy the labor power and means of production that are necessary to restart the process.
…

Since the time Marx proposed this model, capital has greatly extended its social organization. This expansion, and the resistances it provoked, brought to light aspects of capitalist sequencing that had been overlooked by him and his contemporaries. Thus, during the 1970s, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, two feminist theorists of autonomy, made a crucial revision of conceptions of capitalist sequencing, emphatically showing that a vital moment of it is the reproduction of labor power—that is, all those activities related to preparing and maintaining workers so that they are able to work. These activities do not take place in the factory but in society, in schools, in hospitals, and above all in households, where they constituted (these activities) the duty of unpaid women’s labor.
…

More recently, another round of struggles has drawn attention to another aspect of capitalist succession, which until recently did not concern Marxists – the reproduction of nature. Capitalists must not only constantly find the labor power they will throw into production, but also the raw materials that this labor power will transform into commodities… It became clear that the idea that natural stocks of raw materials are unlimited was completely wrong. The extent to which raw materials are in practice available for accumulation depends on the size of the territorial extent and technological intensity of capitalist commands, on the degree to which ecosystems have already been plundered, and on the level of social resistance that this exploitation causes. The reproduction, or more correctly the non-reproduction of nature, thus becomes an increasingly serious problem for capital, and a field of confrontation with those who are its enemies.

Cycles and sequences of struggles in hyper-technological capitalism, ed. antischolio, 2000.

Instead of the two “circuits” that Marx had analyzed in his time, in the 19th century, for capitalist processes, four. We would add another one, which is the expansion of the “reproduction of labor power”: the reproduction of social relations overall. Thus, the mapping of the new capitalist paradigm includes, as distinct fields:
– production;
– circulation;
– the reproduction of labor power;
– the creation and reproduction of social relations;
– the production and/or non-reproduction of nature.
Witheford studies these “areas” in relation to technological developments; with new machines; even speaking machines… He does not do it in the way we will follow subsequently, because his attention is focused on the (until the ’90s) manifested contradictions within each one of them. However, indicatively, here are the titles of the relevant chapters of his article:
– production: the factory without workers;
– circulation: interactive media;
– reproduction of labor power: the virtual university, medical care, surrogate motherhood;
– the network of social relations: cyberspace.

This last one is what interests us here.

engineering…

Nearly 4 billion internet connections and over 4.7 billion mobile phone devices are “working” non-stop at this moment. The planet, as far as our species is concerned, is wrapped in an invisible network for transporting “information” of all kinds, which is becoming increasingly dense and thick. The false belief is that these electronically mediated “information” is transmitted directly from device to device, from machine to machine. Wrong. They are intermediated by monstrous in size and capabilities central machines that belong to a handful of monstrous in size mega-corporations. It is (let us be permitted the analogy) like half of the world’s water, or half of the planet’s atmosphere being concentrated and distributed by capitalist enterprises through huge absorbers and turbines. And this only as an intermediate state: the entire atmosphere or/and all the water (understood as communication) is about to “move” and be “moved” by capitalist terms and specifications – the “internet of things” is already unfolding.
The position of Wiener and the other pioneers of cybernetics is a fact. But it is not a technical fact. It is primarily a political fact! The “visible” machines, the various “computers” portable or not, the “smart machines” of all kinds, the sensors, and the “invisible” machines, the specialized algorithms, the hadoop clusters in the “centers” of enterprises, constitute a single global system of machines (in the sense of Marx) and the great mass of users is becoming more and more steadily the “living” part of it. However, it is not only about the discrete links of production, circulation or reproduction of labor power. The global system of machines intermediates and processes the creation and reproduction of social relations almost in their entirety.
Zeynep Tufekci writes, for example¹:

…The impact of big data in the public sphere through computational politics unfolds through multiple and interconnected dynamics…
Firstly, the increase in digital mediation in social, political and economic relationships results in an exponential increase in the volume and type of available data, especially available to large companies and organizations that are able to manage them.
Secondly, the emergence of computational methods allows political or/economic targeting to shift from analyzing vaguely defined sets to standardizing specific individuals.
Thirdly, this standardization allows questions to be asked about the individual without asking questions of the individual; thus opening the way to new techniques of concealment and opacity.
Fourthly, the development of behavioral sciences results in a shift from “rational human” models to more accurate, processed and realistic models of human behavior. Combined with developments in other fields, these new models allow improvement through social engineering networks.
Fifthly, digital networks allow these social engineering methods to be experimentally tested in real time, and to be directly applied, adding a level of dynamism unknown until recently to the control of the public sphere.
Sixthly, the data, tools and techniques that compose these methods require access to expensive and patented elements, and “work” through invisible algorithms. This is a kind of “black box”, algorithms that constitute “intellectual property” of a few internet companies, and are used by them. In other words, every ordinary user is unaware of their existence.

What is now commonly called data are the electronically encoded “traces” of everything that is said, shown or done through smaller or larger electronic machines for individual use. Initially, they constitute the raw material of social relations as these have been transformed into a flow of electrons. The global mechanical system begins from these individual-use machines and extends towards unknown (and certainly socially invisible) directions, performing all kinds of processing, and giving “final forms” of characteristic standardizations and groupings.
There are here perceptible differences from the kind of mechanical systems that Marx analyzed in the middle of the 19th century. Then the operators of the machines (workers) stood in front of them. Now they hold them in their hands and very soon they will be inside them (internet of things). In this way, the global universal (capitalist) megamachine is no longer conceived of at all as a “discrete” object. It has been transformed, rather, into a kind of general technical ecosystem.

There is already a relevant term for this universal technical ecosystem: ubiquitous computing; or, for short, ubicomp. Everywhere present! It refers to the historical phase of capitalist development where electronic recording, mediation, and processing become continuous and everywhere. The almost “absolute automatic.” According to a definition:

… In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing can occur using any device, at any point in the world, and in any form. The user interacts with the computer, which can exist in many different forms, including desktop computers, tablets, and stations, with any object, whether it is a refrigerator or a pair of glasses. The technologies that underlie and support ubiquitous computing include the internet, advanced middleware, operating systems, mobile coding, sensors, microprocessors, new user interaction techniques, networks, location determination technologies, and new materials….

According to Mark Weiser, one of Xerox’s top technologists, who coined the term:

… The ubiquitous computers will always be here and somewhere in the background, involved in the structure of everyday life until it becomes impossible to distinguish them from it; they will be permanent inhabitants of the human world and will have no limit to their interaction with people…

The establishment of cyberspace as the “social environment” in which we “want” and “must” increasingly, almost constantly (in the future, we assume, even during sleep) leave “traces” of life, actions, and activities means that the “living part” of the global universal (capitalist) machine systematically feeds both its own operation and its capacity to process these traces/raw materials. Every minute of the hour, on a 24-hour basis, seven days a week and 365 days a year, video content with a total duration of 72 hours is uploaded (according to today’s data) to YouTube. In 2013, Facebook had at its disposal for processing 2.5 billion “pieces” of content, 2.7 billion “like” actions, 300 million photographs, and 500 terabytes of “data” every day. In comparison to the limits in nature’s reproduction and especially certain critical raw materials that are endangered by scarcity, social reproduction and its electronic/mechanical mediation prove to be unlimited!
The only problem (in reality “the wheel of fortune” for the capitalist exploitation of this unprecedented accumulation) is the construction of even more powerful and faster “invisible” machines, even more powerful and faster processors (quantum computers, whenever they become technically feasible, will be a giant leap!), even more penetrating and sophisticated “invisible” algorithms, so that “big” and “very big” data do not remain as shapeless piles of unexploited (social) imprints.

What exactly are we talking about? A rather trivial example will help. Someone is sitting with their friend and they are chatting. What is happening is a social relationship: a friendly conversation.
However, that’s not all that’s happening. In fact: for this friendly conversation to take place, a technical basis is required. From a technical point of view, each mouth shapes sound waves in the air (which, as such, as sound waves, are outside the social relationship itself, constitute a physical phenomenon) that reach the friendly ear; they vibrate the eardrum; the physiology of the human auditory / sensory system shapes “neural signals” to the brain; etc. etc.
This specific technical basis makes possible this specific social relationship; this specific social relationship gives meaning, content, value, to this specific technical basis. But both, within their dialectic, are inaccessible to any third party. Someone who would try to eavesdrop would quickly be detected. This specific technical basis (direct orality) DOES NOT allow encoding by third parties; therefore it does not allow interception, recording, accumulation of the “elements” of this specific social relationship.
But if the technical basis changes? If the sound waves in the air are replaced by electrons moving through appropriate media and in an appropriate manner so as to be “transmitted” and “received” by appropriate machines? The example of the (old) telephone is known: the telephone, as a technical basis, facilitated something (conversations over very long distances), limited something else (bodily immediacy in relating), thus modified the social relationship “friendly discussion”… But mainly, because some “third parties” mediated / encoded the conversations through electrical movement, the telephone model allowed both interception, and recording, and accumulation (e.g.: tape recording).
A technical basis such as digitization and a type of portable machines such as computers (of any kind) allow universal mediation and uniform encoding… Then the “third parties”, as real (that is: functional) owners of the mechanical transmitters and receivers, exponentially in relation to the telephone era, become the real “lords” of social relationships. They achieve the universal mechanization of social communication. That is, of Social Being and Becoming.
What was once inaccessible is transformed into incalculable (though measurable), manageable, classifiable, processable quantities of electronic “traces”. This is the raw primary material of the social which, meanwhile, is modified to be compatible with its (mechanical) mediation.
What was once inaccessible is formatted into invisible “wires” to the naked eye. Each of us is already an intersection of an unknown (and constantly increasing) number of “wires”, in various forms. These “wires” are the physical form of electron circulation. Together with the encoding machines (smart phones, tablets, pcs, sensors), the decoding machines and, mainly, the mediation / retention machines (the servers and algorithms of companies) what was once inaccessible has been mechanized. Definitively. What remains for us is to constitute “the living instrument”…

extraction and processing…

Every electronic trace of cyber-mediated communication, action, research, etc. is “stored” and “accumulated” on the “hard drives” of the mega-machines of concentrated capital. Nobody knows and nobody can know (even if they were interested) what kind of processing is done on his/her traces. Indicatively: a pilot research study published in 2013 ² showed that “using” only facebook “likes”, and combining them with appropriate algorithms, it is possible to identify with high accuracy a range of personal characteristics, including sexual orientation, nationality, religious and political beliefs, personal interests, intelligence, emotional disposition, drug use, age, gender and marital status – on a completely individual basis. Person by person. The research, which processed the “likes” of 58,000 volunteers, had accuracy regarding sexual orientation in 88% of the sample, regarding race in 95%, and regarding political orientations in 85%. And this using only “likes”, which is a small portion of any such database.

Could something like this be achieved by any traditional “sociological research” through questionnaires, interviews, etc.? The comparison between the mechanization of the social and its capabilities on the one hand, and the old, “Fordist” mass surveys on the other, is overwhelming to the detriment of the latter.
a) The size of the “sample” is unlimited in the first case, whether the consent of the experimental subjects exists or not; so much the better (if this consent is not required) for the “researchers”…
b) The cost of collecting the “data” is minimal compared to traditional “field research”; while the time of collection is also negligible…
c) The collection and processing of electronic data takes place in real time and can be done continuously and indefinitely…
d) All this without asking even half a question to anyone, without giving even half an answer! This simply means, very simply: without the need for each “subject/user/experimental subject” to know anything about the alpha or beta “research”, about the alpha or beta identification/manipulation company, about the alpha or beta provocative information campaign…

There are other reliable examples; even if they seem tragicomic. Here’s one. For decades, the major birth and baby product and service industry has been exploiting a certain psychological state of mothers and fathers, which stems from the sudden and intense emotional change that comes with childbirth, in favor of wild consumption (and profitability). In order to pinpoint their potential customer base as accurately as possible, relevant companies in the US and elsewhere “got their hands” on data from birth registries and birth declarations. However, this was “public data” that competing businesses were required to share among themselves.
By utilizing/processing electronic traces, the large retail chain Target completely changed the game, initially in its favor. Its algorithms and the “profiling” they generated allowed Target not only to “detect” pregnancies early among women that none of its employees had ever seen in their lives, even in their second or first trimester, but also to predict (with minimal time deviation according to its specialists) the delivery date. All of this, of course, unbeknownst to the “targets.”
Accordingly, the relevant literature mentions the following amusing incident. An angry father went to Target’s headquarters and “demanded explanations” from the sales manager regarding the fact that (he randomly discovered that) the company was sending advertising messages to his 16-year-old daughter’s smartphone for maternity clothes, postpartum equipment, and everything related to babies. The manager apologized with the necessary professionalism, only to receive the angry father’s apology a few days later, after the argument when he returned home to talk to his daughter. Who was, indeed, pregnant.

The mega-mechanical mediation, that is, the electronic mapping and standardization, the processed data and their processing by the appropriate algorithms, had given a company knowledge that elsewhere would be primarily family-related to closely friendly. And this, let it be noted, without access (by the company) to medical records, examinations, etc. Simply (as simply as, after all) by exploiting the traces on “social networks”.
The scale of the collection / extraction and processing of electronic traces can be extravagantly unlimited. Just in the previous issue we referred to a large-scale “emotional manipulation experiment” conducted by Facebook and a university team, targeting 689,000 “users” of that particular company’s services.³ It is worth transferring some points from its conclusions:

…Emotional states can be transferred to others through emotional contagion ⁴ leading people to feel like those around them. Emotional contagion has been well documented through laboratory experiments, in which people transfer their positive or negative moods and emotions to others. Similarly, data collected from a large real-world social network over many years show that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can also spread through networks…

Whether from malice or from a wrongly understood “seriousness”, researchers do not say that it is not a matter of “transmission of emotions from person to person” but only in a secondary sense. What they did (and which is possible thanks to the generalized mechanization of social relations) is the undercover “broadcasting” of emotions, in such a way that it appears as “personal”, so that it does not appear as mass (as it was), so that no reactions, reservations or distancing measures are manifested, which would be expected when someone realizes that they are the target of mass, systematic propaganda.
In other words: the “transmission of emotions” falls under capital, mechanically, with the most individualized (even personalized) targeting and precision ever.

It is now worth adding this: the same encoding and the same mechanization/mechanical mediation concerns the “research” – for the purpose of control – of dna. Of humans, but also of any other living species. If, therefore, a vast continent has been colonized, that of conscious human (social) relations, it is colonized by capital and its machines, in exactly the same way, another one: that of unconscious, (let’s call them thus) primary animal processes.
So that nothing escapes the capitalist megamachines and their owners! Almost the entire “natural” and social existence, creation, reproduction becomes, primarily, raw material for capitalist accumulation.

return to basics

We take one of Marx’s initial paragraphs, adapt it appropriately; does it make sense? And if “yes,” what does this mean?

Social processes cease to be human relationships in the sense that human consciousness prevails over them as their dominant unity. Instead, they appear only as a conscious organ, as distinct living users scattered at various points of the mechanical system; subjected to the overall process of the machines themselves; and themselves merely a simple member of the system, whose unity lies not in living people but in the “living” and “intelligent” (algorithmic) machines, which, in contrast to the isolated, insignificant action of each individual, appear before them as an imposing organism.
…

Unfortunately, the modified paragraph is terrifyingly accurate, even though the “living users” angrily deny it! However, let no one hastily conclude, out of ignorance or carelessness, that we support the idea that the use of the universal cybernetic system constitutes some form of “work” (which, perhaps, should be “compensated” by the central owners of the system). No! Just as “nature” in general does not work, yet remains a target of capitalist exploitation, so too do people in their social relations not work; yet these relations no longer escape capitalist exploitation/utilization.
What is happening is that the core of capitalist exploitation, while originally developed within the spatiotemporal framework of labor/production (and circulation/consumption), has since the last decades of the 20th century begun to expand beyond that, extending now into the sphere of social reproduction, enriched with new capabilities and attributes. There is labor within the universal cybernetic system: from programmers to repairers, from manufacturing workers to porters (in warehouses and in the circulation of e-commerce goods). There is, however, much more involved than this labor alone.

The figures of the “users”, the billions of people who are in front of the billions of inputs of the universal governmental mechanism, do not “work” when they “communicate”, etc. etc.⁵ They live. They live (we live) in a mediated way, in a way that escapes us.
However, the process of alienation is the same as that which occurred when the craftsman (of one or another trade) was forced (to a large extent through violence) to separate from his tool, which he “animated with his own skill”, to fall into the hands of an operator of a machine (or a system of machines) who was the decisive factor, “representative of the boss” in various ways, imposing his/her own rhythms, his/her necessities, his/her “knowledge”.

We do not work at the edges, at the perimeter of the universal governmental mechanism. We live. We live having detached (not by force but by deception and “persuasion”) our own ways of life, contradictory sometimes and unproductive others, yet our own in the social sense; the ways of life that were animated by our own skill or ineptitude. To become (and this is increasingly massive, intense and deep) operators of the universal governmental mechanism that promises “success” and “accuracy” in social relating; suppliers of raw material in the form of electronic traces of the “communications of life”, of our life itself; and subsequently, objects of processing – objects of the more than ever organized continuous construction and reconstruction of behaviors.
There is already international technical terminology for this: engineering of consent.⁶ Mechanization of consent.

The mass familiarization with digital mechanization, the cheerful acceptance of new machines, proceeds alongside a new kind of, also mass, alienation: alienation from unmediated reality. It is the same thing that happened when the worker was violently separated from his tools and became an operator (and eventually a subordinate) of the “great machine.” Only now this process of alienation is much more complex, multi-layered, and universal. So much so that it evolves “as if it doesn’t exist”!
Amidst the mechanical inflation and generalized mechanical/digital mediation, a completely new (social) figure is emerging and being shaped globally and massively: men and women with abilities (to a certain extent) to operate the new machines; and constantly diminishing knowledge and life skills.

Ziggy Stardust
cyborg #09 – 06/2017