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And so I find myself coming to a very dark hinge moment in this essay. Would I like more Waynes? Sure. But I wouldn’t wish this profession on anyone now, not even the bottom-dwelling jingoists of the fashy cyber-right. We are not fucked because we don’t have enough Waynes. We are fucked because we have a country full of Waynes who don’t have any real, stop-the-capital-M-madness power.
The point is that there are no editorial decisions that aren’t economic decisions. I’m not going to pretend that the old, newspaper-age “church-state separation” between editorial and advertising was magically exempt from a stultifying capitalist logic; it was mostly just a structure that worked to convince enough consumers of a news outlet’s credibility to make it consumable and profitable. That’s not how you establish your journalistic credibility anymore, and it’s certainly not how you make money. You make money, for now, by connecting, via Facebook, to people’s passions and prejudices. You don’t use carrots and sticks on these potential readers: You use sugar, cocaine, molly, Infowars dietary supplements, and a Gorilla Mindset.
as Teresa Hayter points out in Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls, migration, whether political or economic, is not only a human right, but a necessary response to cruelties inflicted by war, inequality, and climate change. So let the nomads, migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, detainees, and the ethnically cleansed, go wherever they’ve got to go. Essential travel’s okay [...]
It’s the leisure travels of the leisured classes that deserve scrutiny. The automatic rush to the computer to book cheap flights—we barely even notice we’re doing it anymore. A long weekend in Guadalajara, a short one in Zagreb, Zimbabwe, or Zeebrugge. The requisite bucket-list prance through a lavender field, a pyramid, a rainforest. A ride on a donkey, dromedary, dolphin, double-decker. . . . We’re such saps! We’ve been fed a bunch of fake reasons to travel by evil geniuses determined to use up all the fossil fuels as fast as possible, so as to coerce us all into accepting nuclear power as soon as possible. We galumph across the earth at their bidding, getting ourselves into all kinds of scrapes. We get lost, we starve, we hang off cliffs, we struggle with unfamiliar plumbing arrangements and foreign currency. But do they care?
People are rewarded with large financial bonuses and promotions for academic and business trips, and therefore learn to crave them, and to crow about how many they’ve been on. The assumption is that travel is automatically fun, worthwhile, and enviable: a status symbol. But really all that’s happened is that these questionably important people (more lemmings than locusts, and therefore to be pitied) spent twenty-eight hours in airplanes and airports, twelve hours drinking, an hour or two at a dull meeting or under-attended talk, and a few hours playing golf or fucking a drunk business colleague, assistant professor, or total stranger.
And thanks to this same networked mutually reinforcing matrix of digital age capital, the traditional lessons of punctured asset bubbles also failed to take hold in the wake of the mortgage sector’s implosion. Capital demanded austerity, even as every sane measure of a sustainable mass recovery called for deficit spending on an enormous scale. Even after the desperate bailout of the global financial sector, the degree of leverage that capital exercises today is so great—and so unprecedented in history—that capital is no longer simply a leading sector of economic activity, but the only sector that matters. Hedge fund assets have gone from $39 billion in 1990 to around $1.5 trillion in 2008 to $3 trillion in 2016. Nonfinancial institutions have become financialized—a process well under way throughout the globalized neoliberal regime—to the point that in the United States, institutional investors have gone from owning 47 percent of the top thousand companies in 1973 to owning 73 percent in 2014. The five biggest U.S. banks owned 45 percent of assets in 2015 (a total of $7 trillion), compared to 25 percent in 2008, even as 1,400 small banks disappeared.
Governments all over the world are indulging in the same form of statistical imagination, as surpluses are directed away from public goods into handling debt—creating debt and paying it off—a never-ending cycle that has nothing to do with public policy as we have understood it. Time, space, and life—the future of the earth itself—are encoded as statistical probabilities where former conceptions of alienation and belonging have no meaning. All communication becomes encoded within the parameters of this abstract information-gathering which presents itself as the only available form of rationality.
Capital as AI is the paramount myth of our time. We are no longer in possession of any competing myths of space and time. Financial expertise has become a primary linguistic domain, the speed of circulation of virtual money makes all previous spheres of value irrelevant, and we succumb to the languages of data and explanation from within the fully functioning AI system that we know as capital. [...]
Can we imagine civilization functioning in any recognizable form if we pull the plug on capital? We have reached a point where, far from conceptualizing a mode of life not dependent on capital as AI, we cannot even imagine a situation where capital’s power can be regulated; no country on earth is currently succeeding in this venture, though some, particularly in Latin America, have recently tried.
Capital has become so autonomous (the mind-boggling numbers reflect the power that stems from this autonomy) that the state as we knew it has ceased to exist as a competing power. The state, to the extent that finance dominates every decision the state makes, has become absorbed in capital. The state is merely part of the external architecture capital has learned, very intelligently, to maneuver around, with the eventual aim of extinguishing it.
[...] Alienated labour had four aspects to it. First, the workers were related to the product of their labour as to an alien object; it stood over and above them, opposed to them with a power independent of the producers. Second, the workers became alienated from themselves in the very act of production; for workers did not view their work as part of their real life and did not feel at home in it. Third, peoples’ ‘species-life’, their social essence, was taken away from them in their work which did not represent the harmonious efforts of people as ‘species-beings’. Fourth, individuals found themselves alienated from other individuals. [...]
in the first part of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. [...]
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. [...] Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. [...]
[...] This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others. Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity.