How do we relate to the imperceptible changes that disrupt the way we live, the way we relate to each other, the way we inhabit a city? Time-delayed changes, never punctual or particularly evident and recognisable, but which are the symptoms of an anthropo-cybernetic mutation, to use the words of writer and researcher Renato Curcio.
We refer in particular to the upheavals brought about by what is called cybernetic capitalism, i.e. capitalism’s ability to extract value from every moment of our lives through the use of technological devices and cybernetics. An ability to extract value that was born years ago but is only recently developing its full potential. A potential so strong and incisive that it is possible to use the term anthropo-cybernetic mutation, meaning the extent to which the interference of cybernetics in everyday life affects our being as humanity.
To try to be clearer, we have focused our attention on particular aspects of this mutation, starting from the local context in which we find ourselves.
We live and study in Venice, where for some years now has been operating the Smart Control Room, a physical room that aggregates in one place all the data collected by the ‚capture devices‘ spread throughout the city. People counting sensors, telephone cells and cameras create a network of devices whose purpose is to constantly extract data and information from the people in Venice. This data is then sent to the Smart Control Room, which stores, processes and reuses it for commercial purposes (selling data packages to private companies), social control (with sentiment analysis to understand the city’s ‚moods‘) and predictive purposes (such as predictive policing). The data thus extrapolated are the new gold of cybernetic capitalism, which functions thanks to the symbiotic relationship between data and devices, where the latter have the role of extracting the former to put them to value. Just owning a phone and walking through the city of Venice gets you into this productive and generative flow of data. The Smart Control Room was designed years ago for the introduction of the access ticket for the city of Venice, a measure that should curb the mass tourism that historically affects Venice, but instead has totally different purposes. As of this 25 April, the experimentation of the access ticket has begun, which is expected to become definitively operational in 2025. The purpose of the access ticket is far from what is being peddled by the promoting institutions, since rather than limiting mass tourism, it is a new tool for extracting and immediately putting a value on the data of the people who not only come to visit Venice, but who live, study and work in the city. In fact, even those who do not have to pay for access to the city must still register on the platform, giving data proving exemption from payment of the ticket. The access fee is simply one of the symptoms of the current mode of extraction and generation of value, that of cybernetic capitalism, which functions precisely thanks to the omnipresence of devices in our lives. The driving force is obviously economic: capitalism finds in the use of cybernetics a new capacity to create fields of accumulation and profit, and consequently re-organises society in such a way that this extraction of value from life can be constant. This is the reason which, for us, Smart Control Room and access fee are more related to the concept of organization of life around devices and data, more than the control and surveillance of life by the use of devices and data (to be precise, this two concepts are of course very much related to each other: to organize life is to control it, and control is a form of organization; we try to understand the “engine” that moves this kind of “innovation”). The specific aim of this devices (both Smart Control Room and access ticket) is to be able to manage the flows of life, which in the cybernetic extractivist paradigm are the same of the flows of production and generation of profit. The access ticket is a QR code that proves payment or exemption, and thus forces those who move around Venice to be always equipped with their device, so as not to incur fines if stopped for a control we must organize our life with the omnipresence of the devices that brings our digital persona. But the implication of this measure is not limited to total dependence on the device to avoid fines, as in this case, but in a distortion of our relationship with the city. Indeed, we must get used to always being ready to justify our presence in the city, to prove that we can be in the city thanks to our digital synthesis, the qr code. The parallels with the COVID-19 period are obvious.
Of course, the implication of a measure like the access ticket are not only this one we talked about. It is also an attack to the sociality of people who must relate with this measure, changing the relationship with the city and between the people, but mainly it is a new measure to attack the excluded from the capitalist society. In fact, it can used to target people with out papers, without home, to gentrify even more some neighbourhoods.
Cybernetic interference are multiples. Another example is the spread of predictive algorithms applied to police and justice. For some years now algorithms have been built to use the artificial intelligence for predictive purpose. An example is the attempt to analyse the past to ‚predict‘ the future by the police and the bourgeois justice system. Predictive police does not aim to ‚prevent certain crimes‘, but to know in advance, hence predict, who will commit what, when and where. This prediction, precisely because of the cybernetic paradigm that constitutes it, i.e. the ability of machines to understand the past to predict the future, must be self-fulfilling, and consequently influential to achieve the predicted results. Knowing a little about the role of the police, it is self-evident how much the implementation of their work with predictive algorithms is but a material danger to anyone.
The same applies to bourgeois justice. The use of predictive algorithms in the field of justice should serve to make the work of judges and lawyers lighter and faster, according to the promoting institutions. But even here, the algorithm studies the past to predict the future, polluting the present. Predictive justice algorithms are supposed to give back the probability of victory or defeat of a given legal case, prompting or not a lawyer to follow the legal case in question based on this algorithmic prediction, and influencing the judge’s decision on the final verdict, which will increasingly resemble past ones, since it is ‚advised‘ by the machine on the outcomes of similar cases. Justice is a machine of expression of domination and oppression and implementing it with artificial intelligence and algorithms will only increase the divisions along class, gender, and race lines that already characterise our lives.
The development of predictive police and justice are two more small examples that demonstrate the implications and omnipresence of cybernetic capitalism in different aspects of life. The use of artificial intelligence and predictive algorithms in different aspects of our life, from the manage and organization of a smart city, to the administration of justice and to the fulfilment of police work, is justified thanks to the ideology of security, sustainability and efficiency, an ideology which brings with itself the new forms of domination and oppressions.
To conclude, it is necessary to focus on the founding paradigm of current cybernetics, namely the removal of the possible from life, replaced by the probability of calculation. Human life under the omnipresence of devices is no longer that set of coincidences, causal encounters, path errors, unpredictability and variability that characterise our way of being together and inhabiting life and the world. Human life under the cybernetic paradigm thus becomes a succession of probabilistic calculations based on past behaviours that allow the prediction of future behaviours, to put them to value and extract profit from their fulfilment. Life organised around the cybernetic paradigm is nothing more than yet another extension of capital among us, now capable of extracting value even from moments when we are not exploited, when we are together but apart, generating a constant extraction of value from singular and collective lives.
The cybernetic paradigm has existed for decades, but it is perhaps the last few recent years that demonstrate its interference in various aspects of our lives. As fast as it is establishing itself, so simply can it be eradicated. The technological incarceration that surrounds us is as intrusive as it is evasive, as subtle. The more it extends, the more it weakens. The human capacity for self-determination is still and remains the central factor in life. The Palestinian people are perhaps the most striking example of this human irreducibility.
[Translation from Italian]