Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

For our purposes here, objectifying “things”—whether for scientific identification, economic ownership, or social control—decontextualizes them from the systems of which they are a part.

Any solution that involves valuing human labor risks slowing things down.

We are not products of these platforms so much as the labor force. We dutifully read, click, post, and retweet; we become enraged, scandalized, and indignant; and we go on to complain, attack, or cancel. That’s work.

The more value is extracted, the fewer opportunities people have to create and exchange value through any means other than participating in the systems of domination and control that have robbed them in the first place. Locals can resist by adopting the violent tactics of their oppressors, but this risks infecting them with the same sensibilities.

Whether we’re talking about a smart finance grid, biohacking, drone warfare, space colonization, or universal basic income, technosolutions are too commonly informed by the values inherent in technology itself: exponential growth, automation over human intervention, forward momentum, platformization, and a disregard for existing conditions on the g

From my perspective, this wasn’t the beginning of the Internet Revolution, but the end. We were starting to care less about how this technology could augment humanity and more about how it could bolster a flagging stock exchange.

It’s not a matter of banishing linearity and progress altogether, but rather integrating it within the greater cycles that define our existence. Not a line or a circle, but a spiral, with history never quite repeating but almost always rhyming as it moves forward through time.

Under scientism, humans are just robots running programs—either the ones dictated by our genes, or destructive pathogens like spirituality. However, by refusing to understand how meaning-making is a subtle community project related to the ways we live together, this orthodox scientism denies any scheme of things where human agency—hand in hand with

At some point, manufacturing hits the hard limits of human labor and physical matter itself.