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< | Surveillance Capitalism: A Lacanian Perspective | >
> | Surveillance Capitalism: An Accelerationist Perspective | | | -- By CalebMonaghan - 22 Oct 2021 | |
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< | The internet plays a central role in our lives. Yet, despite the innumerable benefits it has brought to human civilization, many recent developments are cause for concern. This paper explores the internet through the lens of French psychologist Jaques Lacan to show the potential for manipulation and to explore the possibility of maintaining freedom.
Lacan’s most meaningful contribution is commonly referred to as “The Mirror Stage.” The Mirror Stage refers to the child’s realization that it is itself, that the image in the mirror represents it. This stage, Lacan claims, is alienating, for the Subject self now has an objective form. From this point forward, the subjective self begins to attach signifiers to its objective form: boy, in first grade, etc. Yet these signifiers can never give us anything close to a complete understanding of the Subject. As a Freudian, Lacan believes the “I” is necessarily hidden by conscious thought about itself. (Lacan, Lionel Bailly) | >
> | Marx gave a speech in 1848 titled On the Question of Free Trade, in which he stated: | | | | |
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< | Lacan was deeply inspired by the work of the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The latter believed that language was composed of Signs, which, in turn, were composed of signifers (words) and signifieds (meanings). Building from the (perhaps erroneous) assumption that language differentiated us from other creatures, Lacan believed that studying the structure of language could reveal the structure of the human unconscious. (Id.) | >
> | …in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade. | | | | |
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< | Following the Mirror Stage, the subject comes into being by means of its relationship with otherness. The Lacanian “other” has multiple meanings. The “other” comes from the Mirror Stage; it refers to the projection and identification of the ego. The “Other,” by contrast, refers to that which predates the birth of the Subject (language, law, and society); it is beyond the realm of identification and consists, by contrast, of the unconscious organization of human society. These hidden structures control much of our unconscious action. We, according to Lacan, attach Signifiers to our objective self, while the Subject is subsumed by Signifieds. A student of Freud, Lacan believed the Subject surrounds itself with Signifieds in order to protect itself and, as a result, much of our speech has a secondary meaning. (Id.) | >
> | This conceptualization of free trade as a means to quicken the path to revolution forms the basis of a school of thought commonly known as “Accelerationism.” Key Accelerationist thinker Nick Land summarized this concept in his 2017 essay, stating: in this germinal accelerationist matrix, there is no distinction to be made between the destruction of capitalism and its intensification. The auto-destruction of capitalism is what capitalism is.” (A Quick-And-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism) Capitalism, according to this school of thought, is inherently unstable and will ultimately be its own undoing. Yet, accelerationist thinkers differ from others bemoaning the ills of capitalism in that they believe “that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, or critique, nor to await its demise at the hands of its own contradictions, but to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.” (#Accelerate: The Accerlationist Reader, Robin MacKay? + Armen Avanessian) | | | | |
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< | The parasite with the mind of God functions as the capital-O Other. The entire world is connected through it and we interact with it from the moment we are born until we breathe our last breaths. The internet is not a thing or a space. Rather, the internet is “the name of a new social condition,” it is a way people organize themselves. In much the same way as language, the law, and society predate the birth of the subject, so too does the internet following the close of the 20th century.
The ubiquity of this new sociological condition makes sense when considered in Lacanian terms. The internet, in very general terms, is composed of software. Software, in turn, is language. Language, as was previously mentioned, reflects the structure of the human unconsciousness. Thus, from a Lacanian perspective, the new social condition known as the “internet” is a reflection of the human unconscious.
As a manifestation of the Other, the internet must be a source of both expressed Signifiers and repressed Signifieds. The anatomy of the internet suggests that the services we consume function as Signifiers while the data these services provide to technocratic oligarchs function as Signifieds. These conclusions are even more concerning when considered in relation to other portions of Saussure’s linguistic paradigm.
Saussure is known as the father of structural linguistics. He believed that words could only be understood in terms of their relation to other words. These comparisons could be done across time, which he referred to as its “Synchronic” meaning, and among all other words at a given point in time, which he referred to as its “Diachronic” meaning. A word means what it means because it is not another word. In both modes of interpretation, the key features of the Sign are both its immutability and mutability. A sign can change across time but this change cannot be affected by any one person.
The Signs of the internet-Other adhere closely to this framework with one important exception: the Signs appear much more mutable than is the case with language. Whereas no one person can unilaterally alter the meaning of a word, the same does not hold true for any of the internet services we consume. Our unconscious is, in short, readily affected and thus would seem to be controlled by those who control the services we consume.
We can perhaps take some comfort by the fact that the market and regulation both provide some measure of protection against the utter destruction of personhood. Yet, even though our relationship with this Other is not as injurious as that seen in the People’s Republic of China, we should not place our trust in the malevolence of the masters of machines. Rather, the Lacanian perspective counsels for a deep psychoanalysis of our condition on a societal level. Fortunately, the mutability of the internet’s Signs seems to indicate a new relationship can be achieved and thus a restructuring of our relationship with the internet-Other is possible.
Maybe this can rightly be titled a "perspective," but I think what the draft offers is actually one extended metaphor. Forty percent of the draft, charitably measured is used to explain ideas of Lacan and Saussure, not by referring to their writing, but from secondary sources. The other sixty percent of the draft maps some of the resulting vocabulary onto a topic called "surveillance capitalism" which contains no actual specifics of technology or law. The only apparent conclusion generated by this mapping is "counsel[] for a deep psychoanalysis of our condition on a societal level," as one might expect, but which does not—needless to say—occur. But, we find out in the last sentrence, change is possible.
No, Saussure did not invent the distinction between synchronic and diachronic analysis of linguistic phenomena, but even if he did what has that to do with our shared interest? I invented the description of the Parasite with the Mind of God in order to achieve the other-ing you are noticing, in order to take advantage of the physiological effect on the reader of a description of "the nausea accompanying metamorphosis." One might summon Kafka as well as Lacan if the purpose is literary criticism of my own artistic works. But if that can't yield more learning than the rather jejune conclusions reached in this draft, the game's not worth the candle.
The best route to improvement is to leave behind reasoning by metaphor altogether. Let's push Lacan aside and find out what your idea is, put in the vocabularies of law, technology, and politics. When we know that, we can decide what Lacanian psychoanalytic theory might add to it.
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> | Capitalism has infiltrated the extraskeletal nervous system known as the internet. This nervous system embraces the full compass of human experience and soon every mind will exist within it. On one level, the internet is a collection of services, while at the same time functioning as “a new social condition.” No technology determines its own future, and what we have today is not what was designed: rather than promoting its initial purpose of equality, the internet provides services in exchange for knowledge about every aspect of its users’ lives, knowledge which it then uses to modify our behavior. This parasitic paradigm inhibits freedom on fundamental levels and, in many ways, those who control the internet control how people think.
Accelerationist thought would counsel toward treating these evils in the same way as any of the other ills of capitalism: escalate and deregulate the objectionable practices so that we can more quickly see their destruction. Though perhaps shocking on its face, there are several reasons why this course of action might be preferable to other proposals. | | | | |
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> | The internet as a sociological condition is ubiquitous. In much the same way as language and laws predate every being’s birth, so too does this sociological condition. Surveillance capitalism has become so normalized that it has been integrated into educational platforms (Courseworks). Having arrived at this position, “it is ceasing to be a matter of how we think about technics, if only because technics is increasingly thinking about itself. It might still be a few decades before artificial intelligences surpass the horizon of biological ones, but it is utterly superstitious to imagine that the human dominion of terrestrial culture is still marked out in centuries, let alone in some metaphysical perpetuity.” (Land, Fanged Noumena, 441.) There is a sense in which we cannot turn back the clocks, and attempting to do so only delays the inevitable and prolongs suffering. | | | | |
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> | Moreover, when viewed more broadly, there is a sense in which destroying the tools used by big tech limits our ability to effectively handle other problems threatening the future of the planet. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, in their essay #Accelerate: A Manifesto for Accelerationist Politics, point to “a new breed of cataclysm” (the breakdown of the planetary climate system) facing the global civilization that today’s politics are unable to address. (Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, #Accelerate: A Manifesto for Accelerationist Politics, p. 1) They point to the failure of neosocialist regimes such as those created from the Bolivarian Revolution to advance beyond mid-century socialism as evidence of impotence of even more “radical” forms of political action. (Id.)
Pointing out that even Marx recognized the importance of embracing the gains of capitalism, Williams and Srnicek note a division between “those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure.” (Id. 3) The latter (Accelerationists) would unleash the latent productive forces of technology, noting that the true potential of such technology has yet to be realized. The tools used by big-tech (social network analysis, big data analytics, etc.) show great potential if they could be harnessed for purposes beyond surveillance capitalism. With the population set, by some estimates, to reach 11 billion people by the end of the century, these repurposed technologies could be essential for the continued existence of humanity on this planet. | | | | |
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> | As Williams and Srnicek state: “The choice facing us is severe: either a globalized post-capitalism or a slow fragmentation towards primitivism, perpetual crisis, and planetary ecological collapse.” (Id. p. 6) Our culture of convenience, combined with the already deeply entrenched nature of this sociological condition strongly indicate that courses of action which do not allow capitalism to kill itself will lead to more suffering. Accelerationism is an admittedly terrifying proposal, but, as philosopher Ray Brassier noted, “fear is precisely what must be overcome first in any emancipatory project.” (#Accelerate: The Accerlationist Reader. p. 526) | | |
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