key: cord-0046812-5vnrll1v
authors: jagodzinski, jan
title: Introduction: The Paradoxes and Worries in Contemporary Times
date: 2020-07-04
journal: Pedagogical Explorations in a Posthuman Age
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-48618-1_1
sha: cde6e1dcb70464e040f5d0a572672113dfa33bd8
doc_id: 46812
cord_uid: 5vnrll1v

In this introduction, I attempt to map out what I have previously called ‘designer capitalism.’ The way media and technologies in a digitalized world structure existence in what Gilles Deleuze called ‘control societies’ and theorists like Bernard Stiegler continue to develop through an expansive theory of technics, more specifically through his two-volume work on Symbolic Misery. In many respects, this introduction is consonant with Gregory Ulmer’s theorization of ‘electracy,’ which crops up now and again throughout the chapters that follow. Ulmer develops his own ‘electorate transversal,’ a remarkable combination of Spinoza with Nietzsche where pain and pleasure (or sadness and joy) as experiences are theorized within this changed contemporary digitalized world. My emphasis, however, rests with Deleuze and Guattari who play a dominant position throughout this book. In this introduction, I review several important developments to grasp ‘designer capitalism,’ the most prominent being ‘the stack’ by Benjamin Bratton and ‘surveillance capitalism’ by Shoshana Zuboff. Both help us grasp the power of platform capitalism and the place of Big Data in it. This forms a backdrop to my own involvement with South Korean culture and my concerns with (art) pedagogy, technology, and visual media in the chapters that follow. The last part of this introduction offers a hint of what becomes more and more apparent as the book progresses: the questions that surround the Anthropocene, which is explored in the third part of this book, stated sensationally as ‘the end of the world’ as we know it.

event should not go unnoticed. What climate advocates desire, and those of us who argue against the inequalities of a capitalist system are being realized, at least during this special moment of the event: air and cruise ship travel is down, meaning less pollution filling our skies and oceans; dolphins have been spotted in Venice canals now that boat traffic has stopped; emission of toxic nitrogen dioxide drastically cut in Beijing has saved lives; the economy has tanked forcing governments to think in more 'socialist' terms, even in the United States where, with reluctance, those who must stay home and isolate because of the virus, or who have had their small businesses suspended as the service sector is placed on hold are to receive (reluctantly) monetary benefits of some kind, which will never be enough. Concerns for the aging and at-risk populations (homeless, disabilities, the unemployed, and the uninsured) have entered the public discourse via government spokespeople, if only by recognition. The Anthropocene era has its first 'confirmed' global case, so to speak. As numerous ecologists and environmentalists have shown, zoonotic diseases have increased due to the constant destruction of ecological niches and biodiversity (Vidal 2020) . We now live in an era of chronic emergency and global bioinsecurity, an unprecedented turn from 'business as usual,' and an ontological turn that is only beginning to be recognized. The oeuvre of Bernhard Stiegler (2010 Stiegler ( , 2014 Stiegler ( , 2015 Stiegler ( , 2018 is crucial here as he maps out the capture of 'tertiary memory' via contemporary digital grammatization. COVID's nonhuman agency, a 'classical' case of biopolitics infused with biopower (following Foucault), requires an account of "noopolitics of psychopower," supplanting Foucault's 'care of the self' (Heideggerian Sorge) with soin (the care of something or somebody) (Stiegler 2016, Webpage) .

Unquestionably, the technological marvels of digitalization, the so-called third industrial revolution that is constantly 'progressing' in computer speed, the constant upgrading of smart technologies, and commodity capitalism since the 2018 economic crash in the United States (so many thought that this was the knell toll of capitalism!) were steadily recovering globally, but with COVID-19 the knell tolls once again, it seems. Trump gloated as his corporate tax cuts increased profits through right-wing conservative 'trickle-down economics.' The problem is that very little 'trickles down.' The top 1% simply become richer as they buy back their own stock with new profits. Financial capital reigns along with a state capitalism. Yet, a global recession is now at hand, and markets are sent into a fever pitch; presidential hopefuls like Bernie Sanders present this uncomfortable truth to many Americans.

It seems technocratic governments are pervasive globally. With the ascendency of Trump, with the help of Russian electoral interferences and Cambridge Analytica, there is no pretense left that this was not the case, and state and business have become One. Trump has begun to privatize government under his oligarchy; he has attorney general William Barr, an evangelical, in his pocket, along with Ivanka, Jarred, and his sons in tow. Trump has infused US politics with a sycophant GOP under his brand of bullying, temper tantrums, and above all a new means of communication for political advantage: the Twitter platform that targets his minions of followers and believers in the 'cult of Trump.' It's a machinic assemblage capturing affect to divide and polarize their country: you are either a Trumper wearing your red hat and shouting 'Make America Great Again' at his rallies, or a non-Trumper or even a never-Trumper is in danger of being scorned by the president of the United States, maligned and then fired. Quite extraordinary.

Too many have pointed out the fascism of Trump and his White House with West Wing figures such as Steven Miller, a known xenophobe and white nationalist, advising him regarding immigration policy. But his train keeps rolling along. The experiment known as 'democracy' is slowly fading as the judicial branches in countries like the United States, Poland, and Hungry are usurped of power. Trump and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell continue to stack as many conservative judges as they can muster. The US Supreme Court as an impartial body for the people has lost its credibility with the appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Cavanaugh. This was always a tenuous question ever since the Supreme Court, with the help of conservative judges, spearheaded by Antonin Scalia, and then joined by William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas, sided with Bush against Al Gore in the 2000 US presidential election concerning the 'hanging chads' of punch cards in the Florida election, which eventually resulted in the country's turn to conservativism, a turn away from climate reform and warmongering on Iraq that assured Bush Jr. a second term. Chief Justice John Roberts has favored the Trump administration, exempting Trump for his indiscretions to interfere with court trails (especially regarding the trial of Roger Stone), yet castigating Chuck Schumer, democrat senate minority leader, for questioning the political bias of the Supreme Court. Adam Cohen's (2020) book, Supreme Injustice, charts the history of the ups and downs of the Court's record.

According to Alain Badiou (2019), a mere "264 people have the same amount of money as a total of 7 billion other people" (15). Capitalist ethics and corporate responsibility, as Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2014) has long argued, come too late and too little as politics has been overshadowed by business management. Luciano Floridi, Director of the Digital Ethics Lab at the University of Oxford, provides a wide-ranging discussion on information ethics, concluding that AI is a force for the good when used responsibly via a 'soft ethics. ' Floridi (2002) has been on the forefront on what has been called the philosophy of information (PI) (Floridi 2002) . The turn is toward computational methods to shine new light on philosophical problems. Any philosophical question, he states, can be repositioned as being informational or computational. Information is this case is organized into three domains: first, information as reality; that is, information is ontological and corresponds to the philosophy of communication. Second, information is also about reality. This descriptive link addresses semantic information with actual objects and concepts. It covers the philosophy of the linguistic sciences. Third, there is information for reality. This last domain is pragmatic, which is operational in character where philosophy of computing science comes into play. Floridi's (2011) neologism for this PI paradigm is "demiurgology." This is a comprehensive and ambitious philosophy that is to harness the powers of AI for human well-being. Floridi draws from the Greek word demiourgos, which literally refers to a 'public worker,' an artisan who practiced his (sic) craft or trade for public use. A demiurge is an artisan who extends ontic powers of control, creation, design, and so on over oneself through a variety of dimensions. Floridi has ethics, genetics, neurology, narratology, and physiology in mind. But, this is not all. This ontic power must be extended to society as a whole: culturally, politically, economically, and religiously. If that is not enough, Floridi also includes the domains of natural and artificial environments that require physical and informational care of humanity's use. Hence, the combination of these three forms of information is to provide for a comprehensive ethics informed by computing sciences. It is the ultimate anthropocentric dream of stewardship of the planet.

If only it was that easy! As if there will be no bad actors like Cambridge Analytica in the future! Despite Floridi's plea and vision for AI's use for a social good, ethics are breached daily by platform capitalism.

Machine intelligence is the new 'means of production' for capitalism. The trajected irony here appears complete: keep replacing workers with automated AI technologies until there is no more need for them. If there are no workers, then there is no longer the need for profit to be made. The success of this technological revolution leads to the very elimination of profit and accumulation. The capitalist machine will then 'stop' its relentless cycle of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. Such a trajectory is but one claim by accelerationist theorists like Nick Land. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek (2014) state in their May 14, 2013, Manifesto in section 21: "We declare that only a Promethean politics of maximal mastery over society and its environment is capable of either dealing with global problems or achieving victory over capital." Their idea is to revamp technology and develop an accelerationist politics for a post-capitalist society built on self-mastery and self-criticism that completes the Enlightenment project, a more rational society. Perhaps the nihilistic realism of Ray Brassier (2007) is the best example of such a philosophy. Such a scenario seems to be a farce and should generate skepticism. For instance, the fascist tendencies of twentieth-century Futurism with its celebration of technology are well known, as if technological control was possible (Noys 2014) . Given the COVID-19 pandemic, where there are shortages of intensive care units (ICUs) and respirators in rich countries like the United States, the idea of generating a 'rational' society that will come together for the common good seems far-fetched as the panic buying of food and (of all things!) toilet paper, beach gatherings (rather than practicing isolation and distancing), and major airline carriers gouging passengers for seat prices to fly home seem to be impossible behaviors to outright stop. Significant global unity is an unrealizable goal. Sadly, nationalism increases only when an outside invader threatens borders. Perpetual war presents this paradox in countries like Israel where the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud-National Liberal Movement) has managed to enrich the country's economy at the expense of its democratic ideals. But what if the invader is molecular, invisible, not burdened by identity politics, and knows no borders?

The capitalist perpetual machine is like the 'glorious' train in Snowpiercer; it seems to go on without end, yet it needs the children of the lumpenproletariat to run it; or as Karl Marx put it in The Grundrisse (The Divisions of Machines): [it is] "an automatic system of machinery … set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself" (1993, 692) . The scene is not changed in contemporary times: the brightest young minds end up as programming engineers for platforms such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Hyundai, and Sony. Creon is 'Eating his Children' yet again, as I have argued in another context (jagodzinski 2008) . Even the best hackers of the Free and Open Source Movement (Richard Stallman) or the Maker Movement are persuaded by wealth and the good life, and are drawn into the corporate world once their wares have been recognized and their 'startups' lucratively bought up. A television series like Mr. Robot is an exception in this case, giving the hacker a paranoid profile, flawed by schizophrenia; or in Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) terms, a schizophrenic who has insight into the capitalist system itself (jagodzinski 2016). Gregory Ulmer (2005 Ulmer ( , 2012 ) developed a neologism for such changes: electracy, and Jan Holmevik (2012) brilliantly shows how a "hacker noir" is possible. Of course, there are many dystopian sci-fi movies where the revolutionary underground must work with an undetected networked communication system that flies under the radar of state surveillance, as in Blade Runner 2049. Such is the projection of globalized and monopolized capitalism with the Tyrells of the World sitting on top of their pyramidal and ziggurat-like buildings of the future as in what has become a 'Blade Runner World.' Or, better still, living in floating cities in the clouds above the earth as in the Netflix sci-fi series Altered Carbon. But what of the Replicants? …. and the Terminators? Is there a clamor that goes unheard? Of course, all of this can be viewed as a farce. Workers will not be eliminated just yet, merely constantly enhanced and supplanted with economically viable AI; the auto industry via the 'Toyotism' of Taïch Ohno already provides the paradigmatic model. But more to the point, as discussed below, we all have already been harnessed into a 'Matrix World' to keep the supercomputer operating, supplying it with the battery power it needs to keep running.

South Korea, Asia's fourth largest economy and twelfth largest in the world, a country that I draw on throughout this book, is dominated by family-owned conglomerates-the chaebols, who shape the country's economy and have their hand steering the country's political elections, as well as its industries. Both Hyundai and Samsung CEOs have been involved in scandals to bring down President Park Geun-hye. This is but one incident of many around the world. The nation-state is constantly weakening, unable to provide the social services to its electorate. Designer capitalism, as I have called it elsewhere (jagodzinski 2010), has the uncanny ability to target and cater to select populations' desires, needs, and wants, using Big Data, the 'new' oil, that is able to mobilize algorithms with greater and greater specificity. The oxymoronic term, spoken in complete irony as 'mass customization,' sees to it that 'prosumer society' sustains itself by cybernetic feedback loops that prevent the horizon line for the next cycle of goods to be sold from ever closing. It is a perpetual machine: everything now becomes 'smart' or 'personalized' with 'digital assistants' to help manage the increasing complexity of social life. Amazon's delivery system of goods and Wal-Mart's innovations in supply chain logistics pretty much assure that the commodification of goods will be sustained via on-time deliveries. As Jeremy Rifkin wrote in 2014, this is an Age of Access, but access limited to a privileged population globally, and even within this privileged group, the access divide to technology is obvious as to who is 'wired.' We are our own oppressors, as Maurizio Lazzarato (2015) reminds us, as debt and credit climbs.

Platform capitalism, as Nick Srnicek (2017) aptly maps out, comes in many forms: advertising platforms (Google, Facebook), cloud platforms (to rent out hardware and software), industrial platforms (converting traditional manufacturing into Internet connections), product platforms (transforming traditional goods into services-like Spotify), and lean platforms (these are businesses that require minimal ownership such as Airbnb and Uber). Together, they are able to cater to a broad crosssection of users: "customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers, and even physical objects" … (43). As intermediary digital infrastructures, they further empower this range of users "with a series of tools that enable to build their own products, services, and marketplaces" (ibid.). To increase network activity and generate more data, free products and services are offered. Through cross-subsidization, platforms expand their reach, and in this way, a 24/7 platform is able to constantly garner users and dredge up data, a perpetual machine that never sleeps.

What Srnicek did not elaborate in his short book has been brilliantly explored earlier by Benjamin Bratton's (2016) The Stack, subtitled "on software and sovereignty." Bratton provides a comprehensive grasp of the contemporary computerized global situation as a megastructure (the titular stack) through six layers: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User. From the Earth, the geological demands for computing are harnessed through materials. The Cloud layer names the sovereignty of platform capitalism such a Google and Facebook, whereas the City layer is the lived experience of cloud-computerized daily life, as explored, for instance, by Simon Gottschalk's (2018) concept of the 'terminal self.' With the Address layer, Bratton tackles identification as a form of management and control, with the Interface layer coupling users to computers. Finally, User layer refers to human and nonhuman [I prefer inhuman as we shall see] agents that also interact with computational machines. The dispositif Bratton maps out is the new form of governance and sovereignty that has blanketed the globe with dire political consequences, "a possible new nomos of the earth linking technology, nature and the human" (Bratton, in Terranova 2014b: 390) . Bratton presents a form of Accelerationism as well. There is some hope for a 'Red Stack,' as Tiziana Terranova (2014a) presents it, which would require the reappropriation of fixed capital in the age of the networked society, based on the use of technology for a Commons, thereby overturning this capitalist nightmare through a new currency (such as bitcoin), social networks that increase participation and education, and via bio-hypermedia that try to refigure subsumption of the human body made possible by a myriad of wearable smart devices so as to generate a new breed of imaginary apps via Maker Movements and artistic movements like Electronic Disturbance Theatre who develop hacker apps to skirt border controls (Dardot and Laval 2019) . The question emerges as to how a nonhuman other, like the current pandemic virus, so easily disrupts and puts to flight this established dispositif of capitalism to such an extent that it begins to collapse? A Red Stack would have to rethink the established assemblages by recognizing the nonhuman and inhuman (AI) emergent interactions for any future hope for a Commons to be imagined.

The implications of Bratton's 'Stack' are alarming. It is remarkable that Shoshana Zuboff's (2019) seven-hundred-page book on 'surveillance capitalism,' which works out the politics of 'The Stack,' yet makes no mention of Bratton's extraordinary achievement! If Bratton's analysis is dense and theoretically difficult, Zuboff's makes what's afoot more accessible. From my point of view, Zuboff analyzes how designer capitalism has now morphed into 'surveillance capitalism' (or cognitive capitalism) via the pervasive influx of algorithmic platforms. Zuboff offers this as a shift in emphasis given the capitalist digital platform's emphasis on Big Data that changes the capitalist 'game' ever since the dot-com bubble burst took place at the turn of the twenty-first century. "Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as 'machine intelligence,' and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets" (2019: 14, original emphasis). This dependency on platform mediation is addictive. When Facebook crashed in the Los Angeles County and in other US cities for a few hours in the summer of 2014, many Americans called their local emergency services at 911! (Mosendz 2014) .

And what of love when it comes to platform capitalism? I am reminded of Anna Longo's (2019) study of algorithmic dating online to find the perfect partner and the risks involved. I quote her first paragraph in length as it captures so well as to what is at stake in contemporary postmodern order.

Once, the purpose of knowledge was to give form to reality; then its aim became the production of possibilities; now it has become nothing but a risk manager. Once, we were producers; then we became consumers; now we are products. Once, the body's strength was exploited to produce goods; then the energy of desire was exploited to consume goods; now one's creativity is exploited to produce the self as a commodity. Once, we had children; then we desired children; now we have become children. Once, love was a pact of mutual support; then it was a desire; now it is the price at which we sell ourselves. Once, machines were a means to our ends; then they were the ends for which we were the means; now they are oracles that interpret signs and whose prophecies we interpret. Once, we were in a disciplinary society; then we were in a society of control; now we are in a risk society. (Longo, online) We search Google only to have Google searching us; we naively thought that digital services were free, but it is us who are 'free' to be used by capitalist platforms. Digital surveillance capitalism is a perfect form of 'algorithmic governmentality' with a surprising inflection of pastoralism (Cooper 2020) . The focus is on populations shaped by well-defined signifiers according to the usual sociological litany: age, gender, sex, race, religion, district, state, and so on. This way cities can be surveilled and gerrymandered, even entire societies evaluated by intergovernmental agencies like the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Developments (OECD) and World Bank to asses loan risk, and so on. With COVID-19 amongst us, now it becomes even more worrisome as an invisible enemy is evoked, national emergency declared, and 'war' measures are talked about. Trump even bloats himself as becoming the new 'FDR' to politicize the pandemic. Recession and depression are on the horizon as the Trump administration continues to use 'disaster capitalism' (Klein 2007) to benefit the corporations (especially travel, entertainment, and pharmaceutical sectors) at the expense of the working poor (less than 20% of American workers will receive assurances of paid sick leave), an economic play that has repeated itself often enough despite alternative economic visions as generated by the most left progressive voices (like US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders), and even the more moderate ones who advocate for 'progressive capitalist' policies like Nobel laureate recipient in economics, Joseph Stiglitz (2019).

Zuboff, in effect, presents us with an inverse panopticon model of the discipline society and a better mapping of Foucault's biopower that Deleuze continued to articulate as a 'society of control' with its refinement of the third phase of social cybernetics (Deleuze 1995: 180) . Surveillance also applies to the entertainment industry in such an account (Andrejevic 2007). Only a very few are elevated to be read, watched on screens, and heard: actors, singers, writers (mostly popular fiction writers, not academics who form a very small and (perhaps) insignificant voice in the larger picture), politicians, newscasters, and talk show radio hosts. State surveillance and its capitalist platform counterpart divide society into those who are watched and those who are the watchers (sitting behind the scenes). The entertainment factor must not be forgotten as 'work becomes play.' Trump's success cannot be imagined without the performative aspects of his rally speeches (recall Hitler practicing his facial expressions in the mirror, and the passion and vigor of his speeches). Affect (as emotion) has been captured through our screen cultures. Nature seems to have become culture or second nature as some critics have put it, like the fable of the King, or usually his daughter, who lives in a golden cage. She must disguise herself and go out among the peasants to experience 'true' nature and 'real' life. But, in the contemporary scenario, the virtual and actual have already collapsed into one large infosphere so brilliantly captured by sci-fi films such as eXistenZ and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Google-incubated Pokémon Go, an interactive mobile game, uses a smart phone's GPS data and location tracking that sets kids chasing and capturing these 'creatures' electronically. Jason Wallin (2018) persuasively argues that the experience of 'real' animals has taken a back seat to these virtual imaginary ones. Well-documented scientific studies now on 'emotional contagion' (Kramer et al. 2014) show how Facebook is the perfect platform to manipulate emotion. Long-lasting moods like depression as well as happiness can be transferred through networks. What is unnerving is that such emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people and with the complete absence of nonverbal clues. The amazing BBC television series Black Mirror is perhaps as good as it gets to show these near-future technologies that plunge us into dystopian worlds that are being shaped at the unconscious bodily levels through the ecological assemblages shaped by desire as the intra-actions of human, nonhuman, and inhuman agencies. COVID-19, for example, is an intra-action of the virus with the human, discourses on China (especially conspiracy theories of them inventing a synthetic virus to ruin the global economy), role of politics, news channels, fear, and so on. COVID-19 is not 'just' a virus but an emergent dispositif of intra-actions that shape the global noosphere. Nature (nonhuman), culture (human), and technology (inhuman) as an assemblage shape an array of differences that structure those who are most vulnerable to those least, including which animals are to be consumed according to 'westernized' standards. So, 'wet markets' that serve the poor for much of Africa and Asia that include pangolins, live wolf pups, scorpions, civets, salamanders, crocodiles, and so on, are now prohibited or perceived as the next source of a pandemic.

One of the contributions Zuboff makes in her book, which parallels such theorists as Bernhard Stiegler's (2010) concern over the transmittance of 'tertiary memory' or mnemotechnics via media technologies, is the "industrialization of memory" in terms of the "division of learning in society" (176) that is produced. Knowledge is shaped by Google and company by reducing it to its lowest common denominator: as information, or as 'facts' within well-defined narratives that can be 'communicated.' These narratives are then deeply politicized. Controlling and steering the 'narrative' shape public opinion and affect. Narratology as a scholarly pursuit has exploded, as each group and culture enlist the repertoire of its storytelling to establish its identity. Who distributes such knowledge, who decides which information is distributed, and who ultimately decides which knowledge is to be made available become the contested questions. Knowledge distribution, authority, and power triangulate to determine what screen-platform technologies are able to shape a consuming public. Such public experience is easily shaped and manipulated as we have seen in countries like the United States and Italy who have networks to spread their ideology as 'opinion' rather than news: Trump's The Fox Network, or Silvio Berlusconi's Media S.p.A (Gruppo Mediaset); his family still owns more than a third share of Italy's largest commercial broadcaster. As Bratton (2016) puts it, these 'social bubbles' generate new forms of "doctrinal cognitive fundamentalisms" (239). And, Rifkin (2014) notes on the 'end of the nation states': "The deregulation and commercialization of the world's telecommunications and broadcasting systems is stripping nation-states of their ability to oversee and control communications within their borders. Global media companies are establishing a worldwide network of communications that bypasses political boundaries altogether and, in the process, changing the fundamental character of political life on earth" (223). Such is the state of affairs in 'democratic' countries where media shapes thought and behavior below the level of consciousness-at the level of affects, feelings, and emotions.

In Deleuze (1992) terms-we are now reduced to 'dividuals'-or 'digital subjects' (Goriunova 2019) , where behavior patterns crunched by the algorithms provide insights as to what desires and needs are so as to both stabilize and hedge a futures market, a form of divination as Joshua Ramey (2018) argues. Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) Body without Organs (BwO) is now read as so many data points. They become "values, dynamically re-instantiated correlations, rules and models, shreds of actions, identities, interests, and engagements, which are put into relation with each other, disaggregated, categorized, classified, clustered, modelled, projected onto, speculated upon, and made predictions about" (Goriunova 2019: 133) . The BwO now becomes the 'digital subject' as mediated by AI technologies. "Digital subjects are future orientated. Computationally, they span different spatio-temporal scales; they can differ in length of alphanumerical strings, in complexity, in forms of composition and proposition, in proximity of evaluated parameters, in number of units, in frequency of occurrence, and in types of future they propose" (133). A digital subject never corresponds to a classically constituted individual: "it is always more and less than a human" (133, original italic); that is, inhuman. They are "pulled together in plastic aggregates of subjects, which are sets of associations, propositions, and probabilities" (134). The picture that emerges is like Star Trek's transporter system: as if an individual (as a bundle of big data) could potentially be totally deconstituted into 'bits,' which could then be reconstituted in another place via a computational infrastructure; although impossible now, the principle is the same as this now happens in 'real' time via FaceTime, Skype, and many other forms of tele-imaging. Zuboff (2015) offers yet another frightening scenario to what is already a dark picture, which she calls the Big Other. "Surveillance capitalism thus qualifies as a new logic of accumulation with a new politics and social relations that replaces contracts, the rule of law, and social trust with the sovereignty of Big Other. It imposes a privately administered compliance regime of rewards and punishments that is substituted by a unilateral redistribution of rights. Big Other exists in absence of legitimate authority and is largely free from detection or sanction. Big Other may be described as an automated coup from above: not a coup d'état but rather a coup des gens" (83). In this scenario, AI Is now running us. "Unlike the centralized power of mass society, there is no escape from Big Other. There is no place where the Other is not" (82).

This inhuman Big Other is not the symbolic Big Other of psychoanalysis popularized by Slavoj Žižek (1989) . In my terms, it is inhuman rather than nonhuman. As Bratton (2016) warns, Google's famous mission statement to organize the world's information has dire consequences. It "changes meaning when the world itself is seen as being information, such that to organize all the information is to organize all the world" (87). Such an apparatus of planetary-scale computing enables a "full-spectrum governmentality" (101). Google is basically building a contemporary Tower of Babel. Besides scanning every possible book that Google could get its hands on (with or without copyright), their project is one of universal translatability. Google Translate attempts to make this a reality-to smoothly translate any language into any other, where all surviving languages form a lingua franca. This is now superseded by Babel Fish in their attempt to link all their communication platforms together: Google Talk, Hangout, Google Plus Messenger, and other communication tools. This is again a crass form of knowledge translation, hardly poetic, but certainly useful on certain pragmatic levels. It shows, however, the gap between algorithmic AI and a human translator who must grasp structures of feeling and thought in another tongue, something AI is far from doing. Google's PageRank sorts the results of search queries, while Facebook EdgeRank automatically decides in which order users get their news feeds; there are a host of other programs whose functions are equally specific: Appinions, Klout, Hummingbird, PKC, Perlin noise, Cinematch, and KDP Select. John Durham Peters (2015) sums Google up in his chapter, 'God and Google': "Google inherits the narrative of the priestly class that discerns the universe, renders order out of chaos, answers our entreaties, and invites us to take part in manic arts of divination. … Google is a clergy defined by its control over the means of inscription and retrieval -as clergies and priesthoods always have been" (333-334). Basically, Google has become the Big Other of surveillance capitalism, materializing, reifying, and concretizing Žižek's symbolic Lacanian Big Other.

Mark Andrejevic's (2013) 'Infoglut' provides a review to show how the market forces see the 'brain' as the frontier to be mined so that its advertising engineers can write the music and make us dance accordingly; the 'emotional' brain, which is habitually structured and easily manipulated shows a plasticity for constant change. Giorgio Griziotti (2019) maps this out in 'neurocapitalism,' in a section "what Foucault could not predict" (166-170) has become standard fare now. Through neurosciences, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and robotics, the dichotomies (separation) between humans and machines, nature and cultures have become a continuum, with 'genetic capitalism' around the corner as "the perfect complement to the qualitative ranking algorithms" (171), closing the circle of "political, social and biological domination over the whole of society" (ibid.). The COVID-19 vaccine, estimated to be 18 months away at the time of this writing, will prove to be a test as to whether the pharmaceutical sector will score unprecedented profit.

Neuroplasticity leads to 'brain-hacking.' It sets the tone for experimentation; millions of dollars are spent on negative political adds in the United States because they are effective. It is no longer a question of 'facts' (if there ever were naked facts), but manipulating the narrative, reaching the next level of 'spin' doctoring. Colin J. Bennett (2015) has pretty much mapped out how such micro-targeting works in the way affect is channeled. So much for the self-determination of the people's Will in a democracy, a tentative experimental myth that never was, but has now become obviously apparent, and no longer hiding in the shadows. All this is done without direct coercion, entirely self-authorized. It addresses as to how and why Deleuze and Guattari (1987) maintained that the masses are always subject to oppressing themselves, transferring their hopes, fears to dictators, cult figures, and priests to their own detriment. Desire, which itself is revolutionary, can easily lead to fascism-that is, desire turning on itself when its revolutionary trajectory becomes blocked. We see this phenomenon over and over again; yet it seems today especially pernicious in countries like the United States and Britain. The utopian impulse of 'make America Great Again' and Brexit is bringing back the mythic glory days of US leadership and UK's colonial rule and self-sufficiency. These populist movements become a way to mobilize repressed desire by the working classes in both countries. Some, however, claim that such movements are not entirely negative, presenting the promise of a renewed democracy (Eklundh and Knott 2020). Hillary Clinton and Jeremy Corbyn become despised for blocking their utopian ideal-that is, their desire which escapes their social conditions. Fascism signifies the blocking off desire. Coming from 'below' it turns into a love for the state by its supporters for the form of power the state creates (Trump is a 'businessman' not a Washington politician. He is draining the 'swamp' and so on). In this way, 40% of the country that are his 'base' supporters ignore his pathology. Boris Johnson's performative rants and acting out were also dismissed by 40% of the population that voted in the conservatives to ensure Brexit. As Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 367, 380) maintain, fascism reveals both sides of desire: both its revolutionary form and its self-destructive suicidal one as they can no longer be distinguished. The GOP now blindly follow Trump as do the conservatives blindly follow Johnson as each leader makes the necessary purges for those not following party policy and loyalty. Alain Badiou (2019) calls this new development, 'democratic fascism.' Both leaders have been severely criticized for their mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Both are politicizing the pandemic for their own gains. Trump, for example, attempted to secure a future vaccine development by the German pharmaceutical firm CureVac exclusively for the United States, as reported by Die Welt.

Big Data is some sort of Big Other where a flat ontology emergeswhere everything is harvested (extracted), including 'data exhaust,' seemingly inconsequential data that then is crunched to see if it reveals new unseen useful correlations. The Big Other as "a ubiquitous networked institutional regime that records modifies and commodifies everyday experience from coasters to bodies, communication to thought, all with a view to establishing a view to establishing new pathways to monetization and profit" (Zuboff 2015: 81) . It appears that Object-Oriented Ontologies (OOO), like that of Graham Harman (2018) , seem perfectly suited to surveillance capitalism (and its cognates: designer capitalism, neurocapitalism, cognitive capitalism) with its parade of never-ending objects as infinite data information along its flat ontology. I am reminded here of Alexander R. Galloway's (2013) explicit critique as to how such theory supports the spirit of post-Fordist capitalism. While it may have brought on the ire of some, the question remains as to why there is such a close connection, if not a mirroring between object-orientated computer languages such as Java or C++ and philosophies of speculative realism such as Bruno Latour, Quentin Meillassoux, and Alain Badiou's numerology (existing outside of history), and more to the point, especially Graham Harman focus on non-relationality. Bratton (2016) for one is not so convinced: "Flatness here refers not to ontology or the withdrawal of objects, but their functional communication and their mechanically withdrawn relations" (205). Yet, Harman's 'aesthetics of allure,' which posits the transference of communication at a distance, seems to suggest otherwise, quite different than Bratton's recognition that "relationality between things … exceeds the relations they might already possess as natural objects" (ibid.).

This last claim is consistent with theorist of assemblage theory like Deleuze and Guattari. In this sense, there would be a distancing from Ian Bogost's (2012) 'alien phenomenology' with his flat ontology maxim: "all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally" (11). Zuboff's Big Other is also a 'realist notion.' She maintains an external world exists independently of ourselves and our languages, thoughts, and beliefs. As Zuboff (2015) puts it: "Big Other is the sovereign power of a near future that annihilates the freedom achieved by the rule of the law. It is a new regime of independent and independently controlled facts that supplants the need for contracts governance, and the dynamism of market democracy. Big Other is the 21st century incarnation of the electronic text that aspires to encompass and reveal the comprehensive immanent facts of market, social, physical, and biological behaviors" (81). AI becomes the new God that divines reality.

Can it get any gloomier? Yes, it can! Paul B. Preciado (2013) outlines what she calls the pharmaco-pornographic era, which builds on Foucault's analysis of biopower as the introduction of new chemical, pharmacological, prosthetic, media, and electronic surveillance techniques for controlling gender and sexual reproduction. In her scenario, we find ourselves in the strange landscape of the opiate barons of the dystopian film series, Into the Badlands. I am exaggerating, of course, but we are taken to extraordinary 'architectures' of the medical professions where cybernetics meets the neurosciences, meets the genetic sciences, meets the biosciences, and so on. In the twenty-first century, analytic companies such as GNS Healthcare amass data from genomics, medical records, lab data results, mobile health devices to provide information about users to health insurance companies. It then becomes a question of manipulating the costs of health insurance given the different categories of applicants. Data collected about one's emotional stability, happiness, and the likelihood of having a baby influences the job market in terms of hiring, being retained or promoted. Perhaps one of the most frightening figures of such machinic production is Oracle, the largest consumer data broker acquiring any number of data companies: Datalogix, BlueKai, AddThis, and CrossWise. It lists 100 data providers in its directory, providing some 300,000 different data categories that may be assigned to consumers. The Oracle data cloud provides information to Visa and MasterCard (Christl 2017) . It is a social hyperobject that can't be fathomed and would seem to satisfy Zuboff's description as an instance of the AI Big Other, raising the anxieties of control, a narrative that is repeated in the Terminator film franchise and the television series On the other side of the ledger is the 'life' of inorganic matter that is being put to use for the development of AI: lithium and silicon being especially important minerals, but all kinds of rare minerals as well are required for the production of smart technologies. Jussi Parikka (2015) has called this development the 'Anthrobscene' as technological waste accumulates. He shows how closely media is wedded to nature. Natureculture has now become a common trope to be used when dealing with the new phase the Earth is entering given the added global input of anthropogenic labor by our species. As AI slowly pushes into the realm of wetware and, as developed above, smart technologies are continually used to harness life of the human species for capitalist ends on the grounds that this offers a 'better' life, the distinctions between 'life' and machine have effectively disappeared. Gilbert Simondon's basic insights overcoming hylomorphism, and his notions of individuation and creative invention that link technology, culture, and organization, as furthered by the numerous writings of Luciana Parisi (2013 Parisi ( , 2017 , lead to a machinic understanding already nascently developed by Deleuze and Guattari in the 1970s. What the human 'becomes' is shaped by these forces-both organic and inorganic as harnessed in various capitalist assemblages. The category 'human' has had a long history of exclusions and what is being prepared for in the future is no exception as transhumanism dovetails with the current modes of global capitalism. Such pronouncements like Timothy Morton's (2009) 'ecology without Nature' that has received so much attention seem short sighted/sited/ cited as the excess of Nature can never be controlled, although that is the grand narrative that is shaped today.

Our species extinction is certainly a strong possibility, and an apocalypse is not out of the question, which I have struggled with elsewhere (jagodzinski 2018). This side of the problematic, namely discourses that are not fixated on 'life,' has received less attention. Given this situation, something else has emerged that now draws our attention. Elizabeth Povinelli's (2016) notions of geontology and geontopower were developed to mark a distance from Foucault's biopower and Achille Mbembe's necropower to recognize that the event of the Anthropocene in late settler liberalism has shaped a "distinction between Life and Nonlife" (4), which itself seems to be a looming dichotomy. A form of death has emerged that ends in Nonlife -"the extinction of humans, biological life, and, as is often put, the planet itself" (8). This "takes us to a time before the life and death of individuals and species, a time of the geos, of soulessness" (9). NonLife as geos (as the inorganic and inanimate) takes on this added nuance. It conveys the paradox of human extinction, yet at the same time, the planet (Geos) will simply continue on without us. We see this in 'atopic' areas like Chernobyl, the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea, and (as mentioned earlier) the effects of halting human production on the climate during the COVID-19 pandemic. One might just as well call these developments AfterLife.

This predicament of bios (human life) is analyzed by Povinelli through three figures of geopower: the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus, the last one being the most prescient given COVID-19. These seem to be three diagnostic and symptomatic levels of entanglement between Life and NonLife. Carbon forms the central imaginary of the Desert so as to restabilize the Life vs. NonLife distinction. The Desert stands for denuded Life (perhaps bare life) that can be revitalized through technologies. The fossil plays a special role here: not only by way of fossil fuels like oil, but also by the possible reviving of extinct animals through fossil DNA via bioengineering. The figure of the Animist (Indigeneity) presents no distinction between Life and NonLife; rather, it is a bridge figure. Lastly, the Virus has the Terrorist as its central imaginary, a disruption of Life and NonLife in such a way that the dichotomy itself is put into doubt. The obvious figure here is the zombie: the living dead who mark the existential crisis of late liberalism. A pandemic like COVID-19 changes the landscape into the 'walking dead' where a paradoxical reversal takes place: the anxiety of not becoming infected disrupts the everyday routines of Life, which slowly begin to transform into NonLife. In this view, our species horizon is closed via extinction, unless a contingent event takes places that can initiate global transformative change. Given the pandemic, the outcomes are far from certain.

The chapters that follow draw on this backdrop that has been presented here in various direct and oblique ways. My experiences in Korea are very much part of the interface between popular culture, media, and visual art as related to my (mis)understandings of Korean culture. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari created concepts that offered me significant ways throughout this book to theorize the 'wired' world in a 'post-way.' We have been launched into an era of Big Other algorithmic governmentality where art, media, and education demand more of us than ever before to grasp our condition in the twenty-first century. We are immersed in a society of 'control,' which is overshadowed by the Anthropocene: a tension between posthumanist projections of planetary control and a posthuman unknown, better to be called an ahuman unknown (MacCormack 2020) that points to species extinction. We all are digital subjects (dividuals); the electronic body that we possess is constantly captured by and within the circuits of data. This 'shadow electronic self' remains visible, ready for categorization by Facebook's Lookalike Audiences advertising service, and a host of other devices to position and track our movements. Rosi Braidotti's (2019) excursions into critical posthumanities are perhaps indicative of where we must proceed in the future. Perhaps this book has some worth when considering such a direction?

reFereNces Andrejevic, M. (2007) . ISpy: Surveillance and power in the interactive era.

Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Andrejevic, M. (2013) . Infoglut: How too much information is changing the way we think and know. London: Routledge. Asafu-Adjaye, J. et al. (2015, April) . An ecomodernist manifesto. Available at:

http://www.ecomodernism.org/.

Trends in voter surveillance in Western societies: Privacy intrusions and democratic implications

Alien phenomenology, or what's it's like to be a thing

Cognitive capitalism (E. Emery

A theoretical framework for the critical humanities

Nihil unbound: Enlightenment and extinction

The stack: On softwar and sovereignty

Corporate surveillance in everyday life

Supreme inequality: The supreme court's fifty-year battle for a more unjust America

Pastoral power and algorithmic governmentality. Theory, Culture & Society

Common: On revolution in the 21st Century (M. MacLellan

Postscript on societies of control

Negotiations

Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia

Thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia

Economy and the future: A crisis of faith

The populist manifesto

What is the philosophy of information?

The philosophy of information

The poverty of philosophy: Realism and post-fordism

The digital subject: People as data as persons

The terminal self: Everyday life in hypermodern times

Neurocapitalism: Technological mediation and vanishing lines

Object-orientated ontology: A new theory of everything

Inter/vention: Free play in the age of electracy

Television and youth culture: Televised paranoia

Visual art and education in an era of designer capitalism

Interrogating the anthropocene: Ecology, aesthetics, pedagogy, and the future in question

The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism

Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks

Governing by debt

Love in the age of algorithms

The god species: Saving the planet in an age of humans

The ahuman manifesto: Activism for the end of the anthropocene

London: New Left Books, Penguin Books

Ecology without nature: Rethinking environmental aesthetics

When it goes down, Facebook loses $24, 420 per minute. The Atlantic

Malign velocities: Accelerationism and capitalism

A geology of media

Contagious architecture: Computation, aesthetics, and space

After nature: The dynamic automation of technical objects

The marvelous clouds: Toward a philosophy of elemental media

Geontologies: A requiem to late liberalism

Testo junkie: Sex, drugs, and the biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era (B. Penderson, Trans.)

Politics of divination: Neoliberal endgame and the religion of contingency

The zero marginal cost society: The internet of things, the collaborative commons, and the eclipse of capitalism

Platform capitalism

Technics and time

Symbolic misery

The catastrophe of the sensible

Biopower, psychopower and the logic of the scapegoat

The neganthropocene

People, power, and politics: Progressive capitalism for an age of discontent

Red stack attack! Algorithms, capital and the automation of the common

Red stack attack! Algorithms, capital and the automation of the common

Internet invention: From literacy to electracy

Avatar emergency

Destruction of habitat and loss of biodiversity are creating the perfect conditions for diseases like Covid-19 to emerge

Interrogating the anthropocene: Ecology, aesthetics, pedagogy, and the future in question

# Accelerate: Manifesto for an accelerationist politics (2013) reprint

The sublime object of ideology

Big other: Surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization

The age of surveillance capitalism: The flight for a human future at the new frontier of power