To rob existence | poster

The colonization of bodies and senses is at the heart of the discourse of Jonathan Crary, interpreter of digital technologies and capitalism. In 2013, 27/7 in Italian Capitalism published The Assault of Sleep (Einaudi), a volume on production speed and the cognitive processes that alter sleep/wake rhythms. Acceleration pushes us into the “Thing” dimension, where activity occurs without interruption, where the body and senses work without interruption, disrupting the connection with the circular harmony of the Earth. Sleep is not only for rest, but also for dreaming and fantasizing. Creating worlds and thinking about living in them allows us to assume other horizons, which is an essential step in devising solutions to our problems, different from those we consider inevitable. The control of vital rhythms organized according to rituals in which individuals have lost all their power ends up limiting alternatives and the possibility of change and adaptation of man.

Now, into the text scorched earth (Meltemi, pp. 143, euro 14, translation by Jacopo Foggi) Crary – who studies modern art and theory at Columbia University in New York – questions the destructive nature of the practices of abstraction and extraction promoted by digital communication technologies. The planet’s natural resources are the object of accumulation by expropriation and also include biological, animal and human resources, in a logic that increasingly calls into question whether there is anything external to the appropriating power of capital. His outlook as an art historian and theorist offers an original view of the mutations in progress, even if we are forced to struggle not to succumb to his pessimism with a cosmic flavor about the consequences of technologies.

The Three Seasons The composition of the book is interrelated but independent. The first is focused on resource extraction. The original title of the book Scorched Earth refers to the French word écorcher meaning flaying, to tear off the skin. The practices of this abstraction include speed, but also abstraction and fragmentation. Abstraction introduces generality without properties, we might say with Musil, and, thus, negates any possible recognition or respect for original properties that must be protected and preserved.

Indeed, only these individual actors can be an obstacle to the unconditional allocation of shared resources by a small group of entrepreneurs, engineers and computer scientists. The segmentation of the digital representation provides another tool for impedance control. Fracture processes, in fact, make them invisible and lead to the incorporation of fragmentation even into forms of resistance, which, through communication through social media, activate identity niches, and create boundaries that distinguish them from other movements. Unbridled individualism is actively reflected in digital. There isn’t a lot of group surveillance that counts as self-segregation.

The second chapter focuses instead on the effects of capital that uses technology not to increase human productivity, but to replace it: just as horses are replaced by the steam engine, so humans are not made more powerful by machines, they are replaced by machines. Replacement does not happen because machines are more efficient, but because a transformation of the production infrastructure removes certain human characteristics, rendering cognition unusable in the rhythms of technology. This process would be the cause of the large number of suicides among the working population and mental and psychological suffering. This part is the least compelling in the book, because it feeds off an overly ideological view of computing technologies. Not all of the human labor required by large technological infrastructures is taken into account.

This is absolutely true That these are activities subject to exploitation and decentralization, which the capitalist system uses, precisely by reducing and disguising its existence, thanks to the infrastructure of platforms that deconstruct and separate the concrete need for human skills. Remote working is another feature of digital technology that is intervening to modify perception and question the reality of the body experience. This aspect is the focus of the third and final chapter which analyzes biometric technologies, not from the point of view of surveillance and police operations, but from the point of view of the disintegration of the so-called phenomenological world of life. Voice, face, and gaze become prey to a process of reproduction, reflection, and reconfiguration that overwhelms human perceptual methods of recognition, in order to establish relationships.

Exploiting attention technologies to capture the attention of social media users is just one of several forms of speculation about human physiology to extract, enslave, and manipulate behaviors. The mental and physical resources of human beings are put at the service of producing surplus value just as rare metals are used to build electronic processors.

it’s new Colonization that – yet Earth grab It intrusively measures and thus separates all human activity: from tracking eyeballs, to vital parameters, to facial recognition technologies to identify people or their sexual orientation, right through to using device usage habits to diagnose psychological problems such as depression or stress. These are the actions of regulation, standardization and manipulation, which feed on quantification.

The result is the impossibility of using human experience to communicate with the outside world, turning it into an uninterrupted, decaying series of stimuli. In other words, this colonization of human resources will not pass through violent appropriation, but rather will be the result of weak cognitive and cognitive abilities and weak desire, due to dependence on devices that isolate and weaken the senses.

but, we can imagine that this scenario – which also defines a continuous practice – causes resistance from precisely those skills that he intends to disable. We can observe an implicit struggle against the process of standardization and discipline that begins in the body, and then takes place in cognitive and psychological activities. If only for the greater complexity of perceptual interaction, as primitive and pre-verbal.

Karary shows us a line of intervention, an orientation to a particular use of technology, aimed at denying the critical spirit and human autonomy. However, this power/knowledge process does not interfere with anything, it can be regulated and must be negotiated. It is urgent to rethink our community relations policy. The book can be interpreted as a warning. A push to work to restore society’s initiative regarding the technologies we want, and their plurality, in order to protect the cognitive, psychological, and perceptual freedom of the pluralistic self that makes up humanity.