A Spectre Haunts the Planet
"If we do not hate the internet, what we detest is its capture, enclosure and transformation by Big Tech’s nexus of billionaire oligarchs and finance capitalists." - Nick Dyer-Witheford and Alessandra Mularoni
The following is taken from the Preface to Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Alessandra Mularoni.
As we were completing this book, Marc Andreessen, billionaire co-founder of a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, did us the inestimable favour of proclaiming in the clearest terms a viewpoint we oppose.
Technology, he argues in ‘The Techno-Optimist Manifesto’, is the foundation of civilization.[1] Growth is progress (‘societies, like sharks, grow or die’). All social problems are solvable through technology. Technology entrepreneurs are providers of the general good. Markets and technology combine in a ‘techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance’. Unlimited zeroemissions energy will come from nuclear power. The global human population can expand to 50 billion, then settle on other planets. Artificial intelligence is ‘our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone’. Humans are ‘technological supermen’ overcoming nature. Free markets are optimal. Socialism – aka central planning – is a ‘doom loop’. ‘Advancing technology’ is intrinsically virtuous, creating conditions necessary for finding the ‘meaning of life’. Techno-optimism is a duty.
Although the ‘Manifesto’ is framed as a celebration of ‘technocapital’ in general, Andreessen is in fact a spokesperson for a very specific sector of its operations: Big Tech, the nexus made up of five gigantic digital corporations – Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, a list to which Tesla and Nvidia are sometimes added – alongside a layer of second-tier companies focused on networks and software, a mayfly swarm of startups, and, of course, venture capital enterprises such as Andreessen Horowitz, that, along with other financial institutions, keep the whole machine running. In an earlier essay, Andreessen wrote enthusiastically of how ‘software is eating the world’, with digital capital taking over and transforming activities ranging from phone calls to bookselling and healthcare; Andreessen is both a protagonist in and propagandist for this process.[2]
Optimistic as Andreessen’s ‘Manifesto’ may be, it is also defensive. The assertions of techno-capitalist triumph are bracketed by angry opening and closing denunciations of techno-critics as liars, deceived and deceiving, who may impede and delay the victory march. Andreessen is clearly concerned that the owners, directors and investors of Big Tech are not receiving the respect they deserve. There are good reasons for his anxiety.
In 2016, Turkish-American author Jarett Kobek published I Hate the Internet, a novel set in gentrifying San Francisco that revolves around the damage inflicted within its artistic communities by the screeds of online misogyny and racism unleashed by social media, particularly Twitter.[3] The book became an unexpected international bestseller, probably because its title bluntly challenged years of celebratory endorsements of Silicon Valley tycoons and their ‘disruptive’ innovations.
A decade later, Kobek’s sentiment is widespread. Whatever the flaws of Twitter once were, they are dwarfed by the chaos that followed its $44 billion purchase in 2022 by Elon Musk, and its transformation into ‘X’. Content moderators were fired, vicious charlatans such as Alex Jones reinstated, ‘blue badge’ authenticity verification went up for sale, and advertisers and users alike fled the free-fire zone of calumny and disinformation. More broadly, the digital sphere is seen as increasingly suspect for its rampant commercialization, omnipresent surveillance, gig-work exploitation, erratic censorship and toxic social media. In the United States, polls show that between 2018 and 2023 public confidence in tech companies dropped ‘precipitously’, undergoing a fall ‘greater and more widespread than for any other type of institution’.[4] Elsewhere, a rush of belated attempts to regulate digital capitalism by neoliberal governments who had previously been happy to give Big Tech free rein reflect a growing, if politically confused and inchoate, ‘techlash’. Now, apparently everyone hates the internet.
In fact, we do not hate the internet per se, though we certainly do not love it as it is. We use it all the time: after decades in which every aspect of social life has been digitized, the dubious convenience of networks is now all but compulsory in affluent zones of capitalism. But beyond that necessity, and despite bouts of intense screen aversion and digital loathing, we continue to find sources of fascination, pleasure and solace in the virtual world’s vast streams, flows and fluxes of text, image and sound, even as they mix with abundant digital toxicities, outrages and hazards. Whatever its misuses, the network of networks continues to offer astounding affordances for cooperation and association, new methods of scientific research and artistic creation, fresh forms of collective subject-formation and vital means of sensing and comprehending the vast ecological changes now overtaking the planet.
Moreover, like every artificial wonder of the world, the network of networks is an incredible achievement not just of technology, but above all of the human labour that constructs that machinery. It is an apparatus built initially by the work of university scientists and independent hackers whose inventions were soon appropriated and privatized by the commercial sector, and then extended by the differentially rewarded and often outrageously exploited work of programmers, coders, software engineers and system architects, infrastructure constructors and maintainers, moderators, data cleaners, and miners of copper and coltan – and beyond that to the various gradations of users’ free labour that has been the basic propellant of the whole system. Every login deserves a sharp in-breath saluting the digital workers of the world.
But if we do not hate the internet, what we detest is its capture, enclosure and transformation by Big Tech’s nexus of billionaire oligarchs and finance capitalists. This has made the digital sphere an apparatus of accumulation, implanted with spyware, advertising and cyberweaponry, expanding regardless of human and planetary consequences. Big Tech’s ascent has occurred amid climate chaos and capitalism’s failing attempts to curb it, a global pandemic, proliferating war, imbalanced economic growth, aggravated inequalities and rolling social unrest. Digital technologies are involved in all these compounding crises, in ways that are always complex and contradictory, but often predatory and destructive. Techno-capital’s social steering seems increasingly erratic; if software is indeed ‘eating the world’, then humans, and possibly humanity itself, are on the menu.
On this point, ‘The Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ makes a revealing error. One of the sources for his work on ‘techno-capital’, Andreessen claims, is the writing of Nick Land, the dark eminence of ‘accelerationism’. But, in contrast with Andreessen’s near-utopianism, Land, a reactionary and anti-human philosopher, sees and celebrates the outcome of capitalist acceleration as a species-liquidating ‘meltdown’ in which Homo sapiens will fall victim to an ‘invasion from the future’ by artificial intelligences.[5] What will triumph, in Land’s view, is nothing but the impersonal process of techno-capital itself as a ‘positive feedback circuit’, in which
commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process . . . As the circuit is incrementally closed, or intensified, it exhibits ever greater autonomy, or automation. It becomes more tightly auto-productive . . . Because it appeals to nothing beyond itself, it is inherently nihilistic. It has no conceivable meaning beside self-amplification. It grows in order to grow. Mankind is its temporary host, not its master. Its only purpose is itself.[6]
Perhaps Andreessen did not understand the destination of Land’s ‘accelerationism’, or perhaps he liked the word while ignoring the direction. Perhaps, as the shepherd of billions of dollars of venture capital, he fully understood and secretly approved of Land’s vision of human annihilation by cybernetic accumulation. In either case, what this shows is the nightmare lurking within his ‘techno-optimism’: that of a digital capitalism making itself increasingly ‘autonomous’ from humans and ultimately threatening their existence.
Of course, Land’s image of an AI-dominated Skynet remains fantastical, though the elements from which such a system might be assembled are already evident in Musk’s SpaceX satellites and Neuralink brain implants, Israel’s AI-selected weapons-targeting systems, and US and Russian drone-warfare systems. But there are other ways in which Big Tech is generating what Geert Lovink has called an ‘extinction Internet’, most notably by speeding and intensifying capital’s biosphereattacking spiral of production and consumption while weakening humans’ capacity to think and act according to alternative logics.[7] Indeed, behind Land’s image of capitalism as a cybernetic circuit lies a far older critical model of capital: Karl Marx’s account of it as a circulatory process whose out-of-control logic leads to massive social and economic crisis. Today’s ‘poly-crisis’ is significantly different from what Marx envisaged – ecological factors play a larger role than he could have conceived; but in many ways the basic dynamics of crisis are the same.[8]
Marx’s circulatory model of capitalism guides our thinking in this book. Alongside the work of recent digital theorists, it has led us to coin a new name for Big Tech. In 2016, Nick Srnicek popularized the phrase ‘platform capitalism’ to describe the business model typified by companies such as Google, Facebook and Uber.[9] In 2022, Tiziana Terranova, riffing on this idea, wrote of a ‘Corporate Platform Complex’.[10] We extend this further still to discuss a ‘cybernetic circulation complex’ (CCC): the cluster of companies whose platforms, structured around cybernetic feedback loops between digital users and capital owners, function to accelerate the larger cybernetic loop of capitalist growth by automating the processes of sales, advertising, logistics and finance. We explain not only the inner workings of this cybernetic circulation of capital – a cybernetic loop of cybernetic loops – but the potentials it contains for the undoing of its current iteration of network practice, and the possibilities for radically different uses.
As critics of the CCC, we are enemies of Andreessen. ‘The TechnoOptimist Manifesto’ contains a long list of foes, including such lamentable creatures as ‘ivory tower’ academics and proponents of ideas as vile as ‘credentialed expertise’, ‘sustainability’, ‘social responsibility’, ‘existential risk’, ‘collectivism’ and ‘degrowth’. But across this motley crew of opponents, the author believes he detects a common denominator: many of these ‘zombie ideas’, he writes, derive from ‘communism’. In what might seem an amazingly retro-McCarthyite, Cold War, Red Scare tactic (situated alongside an ostentatious salute to US nationalism), Andreessen identifies the opponents of techno-capitalism as a bunch of commies.
To this we reply: ‘guilty as charged’. We are communists, albeit communists for whom, as Jonathan Beller puts it, recognition of ‘antiracist, decolonial, feminist, queer and anarchic struggles’ is fundamental for that name ‘to have any relevance or meaningful future’.[11] Indeed, to make things worse for Andreessen, we are degrowth communists, or at least communists who do not believe in economic growth as an overriding social imperative. We have a different idea of what constitutes a good life.[12] Just as we do not share Andreessen’s optimism about techno-capitalism, we likewise repudiate Land’s reactionary nihilism. We do not bet on the inevitability of extinction, but rather on the possibility of averting that outcome. This depends on disconnecting the digital networks from endless growth, and their radical repurposing for a new mode of social reproduction based on human equality and ecological sustainability – a revolutionary bet that we call biocommunism, making us, we suppose, ‘biocommies’.
The question of emancipation is one of both equality and ecology. The internet today is one of many sites of social contestation between not just ‘socialism or barbarism’ but, as McKenzie Wark puts it, ‘communism or extinction’; we would add that the remaking of networks will also entail a reinvention of the theory and practice of communism itself.[13] In that remaking we continue to draw upon, and radically reimagine, Marx’s concept of ‘circulation’. It is this idea that we adopt and adapt in our analysis of the contradictions and conflicts within the cybernetic circulation complex: Big Tech and planetary crisis.
- Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Alessandra Mularoni is out now.
Big Tech firms dominate the global economy. But what value do they actually produce? In this brilliant survey of global tech economy, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Alessandra Mularoni argue that the role of firms like Amazon and Google, Palantir and Uber, is in the automation of circulation. By applying digital technologies to processes of market exchange—everything from advertising and shopping, to logistics and financial services—Big Tech aims to subject these activities to the level of control and predictability that capital has secured in industrial production.
Cybernetic Circulation Complex offers not only a compelling analysis of the power of Big Tech and their role in our current global crises, but a roadmap for a new form of life: biocommunism, a digital degrowth that can help us steer between the double boundaries of ecological sustainability and equitable social development.
Notes -
1 M. Andreessen, ‘The Techno-Optimist Manifesto’, Andreessen Horowitz, 16 October 2023, at a16z.com.
2 M. Andreessen, ‘Why Software Is Eating the World’ Andreesen Horowitz, 20 August 2011, at a16z.com.
3 J. Kobek, I Hate the Internet (Los Angeles: We Heard You Like Books, 2016).
4 S. Kates, J. Ladd and J. A. Tucker, ‘How Americans’ Confidence in Technology Firms Has Dropped’, Brookings, 14 June 2023, at brookings.edu.
5 N. Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007 (Plymouth: Urbanomic, 2011), p. 441.
6 N. Land, ‘A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism’, Obsolete Capitalism, 2017, at obsoletecapitalism.blogspot.com.
7 G. Lovink, ‘Extinction Internet’, Eurozine, 14 December 2022, at eurozine.com.
8 A. Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World Economy (New York: Viking, 2021).
9 N. Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2016).
10 T. Terranova, After the Internet: Digital Networks Between Capital and the Common (New York: Semiotext(e), 2022).
11 J. Beller, The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), p. 70.
12 ‘Degrowth communism’ is now strongly associated with Kohei Saito and his Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). But there are a number of antecedent and concurrent versions: see N. Dyer-Witheford, B. R. Hansen and E. Leonardi, ‘Degrowth Communism: Part I’, 2023, at projectpppr.org.
13 M. Wark, ‘It’s Not So Much “Socialism or Barbarism”. More Like “Communism or Extinction” ’, Twitter, 21 March 2019, at twitter.com.