Neurocapitalism

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* Book: Neurocapitalism. Technological Mediation and Vanishing Lines. By Giorgio Griziotti. Minor Compositions, 2019

URL = http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=887 download

Description

"Analyzes the changing politics of technology, charting out possibilities for autonomous cooperation

Technological change is ridden with conflicts, bifurcations and unexpected developments. Neurocapitalism takes us on an extraordinarily original journey through the effects that cutting-edge technology has on cultural, anthropological, socio-economic and political dynamics. Today, neurocapitalism shapes the technological production of the commons, transforming them into tools for commercialization, automatic control, and crisis management.

But all is not lost: in highlighting the growing role of General Intellect’s autonomous and cooperative production through the development of the commons and alternative and antagonistic uses of new technologies, Giorgio Griziotti proposes new ideas for the organization of the multitudes of the new millennium."


Contents

By Giorgio Griziotti:

"The Three Parts: Producing, Living and Organizing

The choice to structure this book according to three main aspects is functional to an analysis of how technosciences operate within each of them, producing diff erent eff ects and interactions. In examining the variegated spectrum of technological mediations, diverse registers in which they are inscribed appear: biopolitical, chronological and cartographic. Registers that are integrated and entwined with exis-tential aspects of production, life and organization. We have further-more tried to consider the shift in the perception of time and space in following the transformations that are underway. How can we not think about the fact that every entity that is connected to a network is geolocalized and transmits a pronounced time from its internal bi-ological or artificial clock?

This subdivision also poses the problem of how to delimit the sections when instead the separation between labor and life is increasingly unstable and confused, resulting in the passage from an industrial worker’s “producing to live” to today’s precarious cognitive worker “living to produce.” With the intention of allowing alternatives to reading this book sequentially, we have also tried to give each section its own autonomy in structure and comprehension.

The first section is dedicated to “Producing,” where the most con-sistent ties remain related to the recent past of industrial production that, although it has lost its central role, still endures today. We are still very much influenced by this period and by the notable presence of the tutelary deity of that era, Karl Marx, who allows us to begin asking the questions necessary for building a framework for biocog-nitive capitalism: how should we treat the weight of technology in cognitive production without putting the machines from the era of carbon and steel on the scales? How can we understand contempo-rary accelerationism without evoking the birth and implementation of the concept of real time computing born more than sixty years ago?

How can we comprehend the digital native’s* desire to escape without having lived through the stress of corrupted cooperation of capitalism where competition and fear are omnipresent? We have dedicated the second section to “Living.” Contrary to the modes of production that haven’t broken all ties to the past, bios and zoë* – i.e. conscious life and undiff erentiated living matter – move and are directed towards new dimensions through contradictory and divergent uses of technology. Among other things, the sphere where the process of blurring between living and working brings with it the seeds of the separation between income and labor. Interrogating “living” comes from the search for points of reference within this uni-verse: how can we explore the metamorphoses of subjectivities put through multiple procedures of normalization without observing the signs inflicted or revealed by our bodies? Which perceptive entities are affected by diff used technologies thus shifting the framework of life? What are the consequences on subjectivity?

The term “Organizing,” the title of the third section, is possibly even more generic than the two preceding: changes in social behaviors is evident in this field. One could ask if this appearance is not accen-tuated by the deliquescence of the historical forms of organization of the working class that, in Europe and elsewhere, has often passed from being an antagonist to being a political liaison with financial governance. Where can we begin in this situation? We have chosen as a starting point the comparison between the lifestyles of these two eras: on one side, that of industrial capitalism, characterized by be-longing and, on the other, contemporary capitalism, characterized by migration and nomadism and where ICT have brought the speed of hypermediatic ties to the heart of the matter. From here, we face the questions regarding the impulse to migrate toward spaces that the system tries to fragment, delimit or simply render inaccessible (like the dramatic circumstances of refugees and migrants who attempt to reach Europe by any means and risking their very lives). A separate reflection is dedicated to the antagonistic relation between technical and religious thought. Developing the writings of Simondon on this theme, a surprising relationship between the new paradigm of techno-logical mediation and the expansion of archaic and dogmatic religious forms emerges.Two “evasions” function as intermissions between the three sec-tions and a third at the end.

The first, between “Producing” and “Living,” evokes the hypothesis of a space devouring time.

Once the machine is able to interact in a “living” way with “real” time, it be-comes a part of the territory and devours it.

The second evasion closes the not-so-virtuous cycle of new postindustrial production. “E-Waste” is the term used to designate the technological dumps concentrated in “peripheral” countries that, in the capitalist subdivision, are garbage sites for the planned obsolescence of technological objects.

The final evasion is dedicated to Castel del Monte, a site that shares the foun-dations of digital technologies in that its architecture is entirely based on octaves, recalling the byte, the unit of eight bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer.

This monument has expressed for nearly eight centuries a conception of science and technology that opposes today’s dominant vision because it articulates the beauty of the notions that understand it as a work that seemingly avoids any finalism. Produced by a collective, the Court of Federico II, where heterogeneous cultures were represented, it has become an essential reference that allows us to understand how the power and the spread of contemporary technologies can become a key tool in the construction of the Common."