The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (Thought in the Act)

In The World Computer Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression—language, image, music, communication—into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle. "The World Computer offers an analysis of the conditions by which computable information colonizes semiotics in racial capitalism's global calculus of who may access how much of the social product and who may be made to die. Taking the notion that Capital was always a computer as a starting point, The World Computer understands the history of the commodification of life as a process of encrypting the world's myriad qualities as quantities. Formal and informal techniques, from double entry bookkeeping and racialization, to the rise of information and discrete state machines, imposed and extended the tyranny of racial capital's relentless calculus of profit. Currently the money-likeness of expression-visible as "likes" and in other attention metrics that treat attention and affect as currency-is symptomatic of the financialization of everyday life. All expression, no matter what its valence, is conscripted by algorithms of profit that intensify inequality by being put in the service of racial capitalism"-- Provided by publisher Contents Acknowledgments i Computational Racial Capitalism Introduction: The Social Difference Engine and the World Computer 1 The Computational Unconscious: Technology as a Racial Formation ii The Computational Mode of Production 2 M–I–C–I′–M′: The Programmable Image of Photo-Capital 3 M–I–M′: Informatic Labor and DataVisual Interruptions in Capital’s “Concise Style” iii Derivative Conditions 4 Advertisarial Relations and Aesthetics of Survival 5 An Engine and a Camera 6 Derivative Living and Subaltern Futures:Film as Derivative, Cryptocurrency as Film Appendix 1: The Derivative Machine:Life Cut, Bundled, and Sold—Notes on the Cinema Appendix 2: The Derivative Image: Interview by Susana Nascimento Duarte Notes References Index "Jonathan Beller traces the history of the commodification of information and the financialization of everyday life, showing how contemporary capitalism is based in algorithms and the quantification of value that intensify social inequality."-- Provided by publisher