Sixteenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge & Society

Abstract

The totalizing impact of the Internet is global. The globe is now connected to the network through satellites, cables, wireless. It is a capability designed to enhance human flourishing within the confines of capitalism’s logic. There appears to be no way out of the political economy of the internet. The totalizing power of digital technology is written in computer code, and appears as algorithms. It has accomplished what Marx prefigured in his political-economic theory of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism: commodification brings the entirety of human civilization into its orbit in an exchange-value system. This system is more effective at value extraction than Marx imagined, due to the combined logic of digital networking in alliance with financial schemes. The resulting ideology is fundamental to a type of capitalism that has injected itself into every aspect of everyday life, as argued by Martin in the Financialization of Daily Life. The Internet of (every) Things (IOT) is ubiquitous through the commodification universalizing finance. The consequence is that psychic life is negotiated through the structures of internet-based transactions, in such a way that every interaction is at once mediated with artificial constructs. As I argued in Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences the resulting, increasingly intensified proletarianization, is a phenomenon that removes otherwise regulated, modernist, and managed rational human life, and replaces it with irrational, unregulated emotional immediacy. At each iteration of proletarianization, the totalizing energy of communicative interaction incorporates more of human experience into an affective algorithmic landscape, drawing users into the market.