Capital Hates Everyone by Maurizio Lazzarato

Author:Maurizio Lazzarato [Lazzarato, Maurizio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2021-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

The Supremacist War Machine

In the USA, the government of behaviors appeared to have been integrated with the development of the new technologies, configuring in this way the “future” exercise of the power described by all the “cyber” theories. But Trump and his war machine decided such matters differently, by conjuring up that which tehnology was supposed to stave off with its pious habits, the “specters of civil war,” the “violence that founds” neoliberalism.

The great American corporations that are at the leading edge of technological innovation (the GAFAM: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) produce the subjectivity and “relation to oneself” needed for the functioning of their apparatuses and for guiding the behavior of the governed in general. This governmentality integrated with the technical machines would have the power to anticipate and control behaviors, framing the future (the possible and excluded human actions) in advance, by profiling individuals based on digital “traces” of their performances and calculated by the algorithms of superpowerful computers. These machines seem to embody a pacification of power relations, since, thanks to them, power would be exercised in a depersonalized manner.

The GAFAM promote a smart figure of “human capital,” that lives in a smart city, eats smart, and communicates smart, a subjectivity open to sexual and cultural differences as well as to the market. These companies, supplying the imaginary, the values, and the contents of contemporary capitalism and the models of its actualization, penetrate into the most intimate areas of everyday life, occupying subjectivities and their affects 24/7. By constantly soliciting one's attention—giving rise to an activity as absurd as compulsively consulting one's smartphone—they produce the apparatuses of the contemporary General Mobilization. They tirelessly fabricate an information designed to affect subjectivities, circulating through billions of telephones, televisions, computers, tablets, whose connections envelop the planet in a thicker and thicker net. They convey an uninterrupted flow of advertising displaying the same model of smart living for smart families.

The most depoliticized of the “cyber” critics assert that under these conditions all political action is impossible: the information is too rapid, too intense, too dense, and too complex for individuals and collectives to address politically. Political action presupposes a deliberate and collectively shared treatment of information which its digital circulation rules out.

And yet every day, in this “chaos” of information, the corporate boards, the big banks, the States, the mafias easily manage to select, elaborate, and extract strategies, political moves, and profits. The complexity, the overabundance of information, images, and discourses constitute a serious problem for an individual submerged by these flows, but not for a social machine capable of selecting and elaborating them collectively (a collective composed of humans and non-humans). The war machine assembled by Trump orients itself, chooses, and decides in this jumble. The problem is political before being technological.

The Silicon Valley firms contributed largely to creating the situation that allowed Trump to take power. The dizzying succession of technological “revolutions” (digital programs, platforms, smart cities, smartphones, bitcoins, bio- and nano-technologies, artificial intelligence, etc.) produced the most immobile

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