Timothy Erik Ström is the editor of Arena Online. He is the author of Globalization and Surveillance, and the forthcoming book for Verso, Cybernetic Capitalism. His collected writings can be found at his website: The Sorcerer’s Apparatus.
There seems to be a growing consensus among AI experts that if a ‘superintelligent’ machine were made, it would initiate a feedback loop by reprogramming itself in ways beyond human comprehension. If this proves possible, what happens when the means of abstraction are automated into posthuman territory?
Far away and scrambling to try and achieve some relevance to the increasingly unstable and unreliable US, the Australian government has issued a wormy gasping sound, reaffirming ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’.
Albert Einstein issued a dire warning: that we were living under threat not only from the atomic bomb and the spectre of extermination in nuclear war, but also from a second weapon, one he considered just at dangerous for humanity and the planet—‘the Information Bomb’.
The long-term, systematically planned nature of the siege needs re-emphasising as a fundamental aspect of the causation of the massacres that have taken place on either side of Israel’s militarised border.
Seismic exploration has the central contradiction that has been with us since the first nuclear explosions opened the new epoch: the combination of the highly rational and the entirely mad.
In the tech world profit acts as a great ‘enshittifier’, but we also need to think critically about the materiality of the technologies themselves: their embedded alienation and their resource-intensive and polluting nature.
This apparently old-fashioned land war seems to be exposing the extreme fragility of global capitalism, a system we have been told is the only possible future. This is a further rip to the fabric of these illusions, which have recently been cast asunder by an apparently old-fashioned plague, and some very cutting-edge climate catastrophes.
Zuckerberg describes the metaverse as ‘an embodied internet’. In this, he could not be more wrong: the metaverse is precisely about deepening the forces of disembodiment.
China’s Social Credit System is a compelling manifestation of cybernetic capitalism—of how financial mechanisms interlock with other systems of social control, by combining mass surveillance, gamified corporate loyalty programs, and debt peonage.
