Jonathan Beller

 

 

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.

 

 

Acknowledgments  xi
I. Computational Racial Capitalism
Introduction: The Social Difference Engine and the World Computer  3
1. The Computational Unconscious: Technology as a Racial Formation  63
II. The Computational Mode of Production
2. M-I-C-I'-M': The Programmable Image of Photo-Capital  101
3. M-I-M': Informatic Labor and Data-Visual Interruptions in Capital's "Concise Style"  139
III. Derivative Conditions
4. Advertisarial Relations and Aesthetics of Survival  175
5. An Engine and a Camera  206
6. Derivative Living and Subaltern Futures: Film as Derivative, Cryptocurrency as Film  222
Appendix 1. The Derivative Machine: Life Cut, Bundled and Sold—Notes on the Cinema  255
Appendix 2. The Derivative Image: Interview by Susana Nascimento Duarte  267
Notes  285
References  301
Index  315

 

 

 

Information capital markets are commercial markets for the buying and selling of information and data. These markets connect data aggregators with organisations and individuals who need information for business, scientific or any other purposes. Regulating acts such as Data Protection Act 1998 and Data Protection Directive are imposed to control information capital market and prevent inappropriate usage of personal information by data aggregators or any other individuals and organizations. Although information has been bought and sold since ancient times, the idea of an information marketplace is relatively recent.[5] The first Information market has formed around the Credit bureau type of organization for the exchange of personal information in the financial industry.[6] But since that time Information market have changed radically. Nowadays Information markets are mainly hosted on electronic based data aggregation systems. Vast majority of them are accessible for both governments and organizations within corporate or any other sectors.[7] Some information capital market platforms can be accessed directly by the public, for example SocialSafe Ltd which is social media backup tool that also allows users to download their content from a variety of social networks to their own personal data store and then sell this information directly

 

 

 

---

Informatic Labor in the Age of Computational Capital

 

ABSTRACT     Jonathan Beller expands conversations about the role of the digital and the digital humanities through attention to the mechanisms by which the digital image is instrumental in neoliberal capitalist accumulation and colonialism. Beller argues that the digital image itself exploits the attentive labor of those who see it, organizes profitable patterns of spectatorship, and links communication directly to financial speculation. Through scrutiny of examples that attempt to disrupt the profitable, algorithmically-capitalized flow of data and attention through the interface of the screen, Beller's article makes a pointed critique of the ways that fascism manifests in and might be combated via digital economies.

 

 

The new situation of culture as means of production (and here we should probably say “cultures,” even though, given the situation, inclusivity is the last thing some of us want) is that it has been largely functionalized by political economy. This historical repositioning of culture as on a continuum with the shop floor and the factory is an economic and technical result and raises the question of a technics of fascism as a technics of computation, or of what I call “computational capital.” 

 

 

This financialization of culture, as we shall see, requires the informationalization of social practice, indeed, of the social metabolism. Managed by means of screens, information flows from users (and the used) to capital in a pattern that can be described by the sequence Image-Code-Financialization. If it can be said that fascism and/or other contemporary antidemocratic state-formations legitimating hierarchizing modes of production depend upon leveraged value extraction, and that much if not all of that value passes through/as data and its organized transmission (number of hours worked, links clicked, pages viewed, money banked), then data flow disruption or redistribution—though tremendously varied and relatively unexplored through the lens of a critique of political economy—presents key tactics and perhaps strategies in an anti-fascist praxis.

 

 

---

In a forthcoming essay entitled “The Programmable Image of Capital: M-I-C-I’-M’ and the World Computer,” I argue that in order to correct the multiple misunderstandings in various “post-Marxist” analyses of capital that assume that value has become “immeasurable,” it is necessary to bring the labor theory of value up to date.5 In “The Programmable Image” I extend my earlier hypothesis of the attention theory of value in The Cinematic Mode of Production (in which “labor” was understood as a subset of the emergent yet more capacious category of “attention” and, conversely, attention reduces to what used to be called labor at the sub-light speeds of non-screen-mediated production), and rewrite the general formula for capital, M-C-M’ (where M is money, C is the commodity, and M’ is a greater quantity of money realized in the sale of the commodity C), as M-I-C-I’-M’.

 

In this new equation, we replace commodity C with I-C-I’, where I is image, C is Code and I’ is a modified image). Where paradigmatically, labor had once been sedimented in the commodity-object, I had argued in The Cinematic Mode of Production that attention was sedimented in the image, and furthermore that commodities and images converged as image-commodity.6 In the cases of both labor and attention, sensuous activity produced surplus value for capital through dissymetrical exchange. With the wage, as Marx clearly showed, workers put more value into the creation of commodities than they receive in their wages, with spectatorship, spectators do more to valorize and legitimate images, media platforms and the status quo than they receive in pleasure or social currency. In bringing the industrial revolution to the eye, the cinema opened up the mediational spaces of what would become known in autonomist Marxism as the social factory—albeit in a manner that was more or less incognizant to the technical and indeed techno-logical aspects of this very mediation. In my most recent work I have endeavored to show that forms of attention result in the modification of code on the pathway to monetization. This relationship between image and code, I argue, is the paradigmatic form of leveraged mediation in the distributed production and consumption of post-Fordist capital. Value extraction, instead of taking place only during wage labor as it was purported to do under industrial capital, can take place anywhere in a network in which oscillations between image and code occur. The embodied entity, formally know as the “laborer” or the “human” is still the source of all value for capitalism, but has, to use a cutting term from Sean Cubitt, been structurally reduced to a “biochip” in an increasingly ubiquitous computational armature.7 The absorption of value is thus no longer paradigmatically organized around a factory worker producing an object for a wage. In our era there has been an exponential intensification of the number, form, and distribution of sites of production as well as in the metrics of evaluation and remuneration. As “Bifo” aka Franco Berardi puts it, production and valorization have become, “cellularized.”8

 

 

 

Jonathan Beller, "Informatic Labor in the Age of Computational Capital" - Lateral