The connection between race and production hardly appears in Gilroy. I’m skeptical about his claim that “cars fudge any residual distinctions between material and semiotic, base and superstructure” (30). It might make more sense to think of cars à la Lazzarato as connected to an infrastructure that is both material and semiotic, which is deeply embedded in a global geography of production and distribution, shaping cities to its affordances. As Pasolini had noted in the ’60s, the production lines of neo-capitalism stamp out subjects as well as objects. What I find most promising in this part of Gilroy’s work is the opportunity to think about how race and infrastructure interact, and always on a global scale.

What I find missing in Dean is the sense of a struggle over how tech and flesh were to coadapt to each other. Let’s not forget the damage done to the conversation about the politics of technology by the Cold War purge, in which not only artists and writers were blacklisted, but scientists and engineers as well. Iris Chang’s account of the fate of Tsien Hsue-Shen in Thread of the Silkworm is only the most absurdist of such stories.10 This pioneering rocket scientist lost his security clearances for having social ties to people who, unbeknownst to him, were communists. And so he was deported—to communist China! There he actually became what he never was in America—a highly skilled scientist working for the “communist cause.” This is just the craziest of thousands of such stories. Those who find the tech world “apolitical” might inquire as to how it was made so thoroughly so.

Hence the Californian Ideology is a product of particular histories, one piece of which is documented so well in Turner—but there are other histories. The belief that tech will save the world, that institutions are to be tolerated but not engaged, that rough consensus and running code are all that matter—this is not the only ideology of the tech world. That it became an unusually predominant one is not some naturally occurring phenomena—even though both Californian ideologists and Dean both tend to think it is. Rather, it is the product of particular struggles in which such an ideology got a powerful assist, firstly from state repression of certain alternatives, and then by corporate patronage of the more business-friendly versions of it.

The developed world became the overdeveloped world. Commodification ran up against the limits of what it could claim to organize efficiently or effectively. Whole chunks of social life had to be hacked off and fed into the flames to keep the steam up. Commodification moved on from land to things to information. A whole infrastructure grew, of information vectors, backed up by the growth of “intellectual property” into a comprehensive set of full private property rights. This for me would be a sketch that makes sense of neoliberalism as effect rather than cause.

Brown shows that there’s a slippage in neoliberal thought about the subject, between the individual and the family. Homo economicus is still imaged as a male head of a household, or at least one with the benefits of such a household. He may no longer have slaves, but someone tends the kids and does the dishes. The family remains a nonmarket sphere that cannot be economized. It’s a space of needs, interdependence, love, loyalty, community and care—where it is women who take care of all that “stuff.” I might venture that for all its patriarchal faults, the family is the minimal unit of communism, not as a utopia of course, but strictly understood as a domain of shared or pooled resources outside of both exchange and even gift, as Karatani might see it.

The disinvestment in higher education may be more explicable in terms of labor-market requirements. Today’s vectoral class has no need of the mass worker. Labor is bifurcated between a small core of a highly skilled hacker class using or designing information technology and a vast precarious population whose jobs have been deskilled by the same information technology.19

The bulk of the book is not about such things. It is rather about what one can think by extension from such experience. It is about mapping the commodity economy centered on the management of bodies, sexes, identities, or what Preciado calls the “somatico-political,” of how it finds itself both making and made over by “the sex-gender industrial complex” (28). It is an exercise in what Bogdanov calls substitution, building a metaphoric account of how the whole world is made out of one’s own experience of labor. The most interesting kind of labor is now that of the “production of the species as species.”

“I look for keys to survival in books,” Préciado writes (135). Scattered in Testo Junkie are useful lists of writers and artists for anyone who feels they need similar keys to survival: Jean Genet, Walter Benjamin, Monique Wittig, Susan Stryker, Edmund White, Faith Ringgold, Faith Wilding, Jill Johnson, Valerie Solanas, Silvia Federici, Ellen Willis, Kathy Acker, Sandy Stone, Shu Lea Chang, Diane Torr, Del LaGrace Volcano, Pedro Lemebel, Michelle Tea. As in any low-theory book, the reading list is determined by a need to live rather than disciplinary boundary keeping. What is of interest is how Préciado pulls it off.

My argument would be that while the timing is different, programming might not be all the different from other professions in its claims to exclusive mastery based on knowledge of protocols shorn of certain material and practical dimensions. In this regard, is it all that different from architecture? What might need explaining is rather how software intervened in, and transforms, all the professions. Most of them have been redefined as kinds of information-work. In many cases this can lead to deskilling and casualization, on the one hand; and to the circling of the wagons around certain higher-order, but information-based, functions on the other. It is not that programming is an example of “neoliberalism,” so much as that neoliberalism has become a catch-all term for a collection of symptoms of the role of computing in its current form in the production of information as a control layer.

Hence my problem with the ambiguity in formulations such as this: “Software becomes axiomatic. As a first principle, it fastens in place a certain neoliberal logic of cause and effect, based on the erasure of execution and the privileging of programming” (49). What if it is not that software enables neoliberalism, but rather that neoliberalism is just a rather inaccurate way of describing a software-centric mode of production? The invisible machine joins the list of other invisible operators: slaves, women, workers. They don’t need to be all that visible so long as they do what they’re told. They need only to be seen to do what they are supposed to do. Invisibility is the other side of power.13 To the extent that software has power or is power, it isn’t an imaginary fetish.

To what extent is information the missing “complement” to the commodity? There is only one kind of (proto-) information in Marx, and that is the general equivalent—money. The materiality of a thing—let’s say “coats”—its use value, is doubled by its informational quantity, its exchange value, and it is exchanged against the general equivalent, or information as quantity. But notice the missing step. Before one can exchange the thing “coats” for money, one needs the information “coats.” What the general equivalent meets in the market is not the thing but another kind of information—let’s call it the general nonequivalent—a general, shared, agreed-upon kind of information about the qualities of things.24

Putting these sketches together, one might then ask what role computing plays in the rise of a political economy (or a post-political one) in which not only is exchange value dominant over use value, but where use value further recedes behind the general nonequivalent, or information about use value. In such a world, fetishism would be mistaking the body for the information, not the other way around, for it is the information that controls the body.

Thus we want to think bodies matter, lives matter, things matter—when actually they are just props for the accumulation of information and information as accumulation. “Neo”liberal is perhaps too retro a term for a world which does not just set bodies “free” to accumulate property, but sets information “free” from bodies, and makes information property in itself. Perhaps bodies are shaped now by more than one kind of code. Perhaps it is no longer a time in which to use Foucault and Derrida to explain computing, but rather to see them as side effects of the era of computing itself.25

I have always dissented from part of this narrative. I think the category of the “immaterial” is meaningless, and modifiers such as “cognitive” and “semio-” don’t really capture what is distinctive about the forces of production and reproduction in our times. I also think it best not to assume in advance some sort of collective or class unity when really one is talking about quite different experiences and implications within the production process. Thus, in A Hacker Manifesto I was careful to see the hacker and worker as different figures that need to find ways of combining their interests through cultural, political and organizational means.

Nevertheless, I think Italian and French writers such as Virno, Boutang, Lazzarato and Berardi are at least asking the right questions and trying to capture in a conceptual net some of the features of this stage of commodification. It would appear that Stengers also accepts part of the shared terrain here. She draws attention to those working in computation who invented a form of resistance to the appropriation of what was common to them, of which Richard Stallman and the Free Software movement might be the most conscious element.14 “It was as ‘commoners’ that they defined what made them programmers, not as nomads of the immaterial” (85).

Is this still capitalism, or something worse? Haraway was already grappling with a new language for it in her “Cyborg” text. Whatever it is, it produces a new worldwide proletariat, new distributions of ethnicity and sexuality, and new forms of the family. Haraway was writing about an earlier moment in Silicon Valley, when it was still a major center for chip fabrication, using mostly women of color as an industrial workforce. Much of that production has moved on, leaving toxic Superfund sites behind, but the global, distributed labor of making these digital means of production still exists, on an expanded and globalized scale.18

The word precarity had not yet been coined, but Haraway was already describing it. Work has in a paradoxical way been feminized.19 On the one hand, women get to work; on the other, the work is precarious, powerless and toxic. The vector has the ability to route around any stoppage or strike that workers might deploy as leverage.20 “The success of the attack on relatively privileged, mostly white, men’s unionized jobs is tied to the power of the new communication technologies to integrate and control labor despite extensive dispersion and decentralization” (39).