[...] The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealised. Fed by the market, its rapid growth is offset by bloat, and elegant innovation is surrendered to the buyer, whose stagnant world it decorates.

As the rate of profit continues to faceplant, capital responds to the declining organic composition of capital by seeking further, more elaborate efficiencies. As a result, we are now witnessing a technological development as rapid and runaway as accumulation itself, as packs of capitalists seek desperately to satiate themselves on any remaining puddles of profitability. A key component in the struggle over the conditions of our social relations is the wresting of those technologies to our needs. And what are struggles over healthcare provision, if not struggles over the terms of use for socially reproductive technologies? Successfully struggling on these fronts requires exorcising the pernicious ghost of a ‘natural’ human. Why? Because any evocation of an innate, untouched human invokes the idea that by having changed, we have lost humanity. This is not true: as Haraway says we are effectively cyborgs already [...]

Technology is us, and we change ourselves through changing the world around us, though not necessarily in a revolutionary way. Whilst reading glasses and a chip in the brain might have different effects, they are both ultimately about manipulating our bodies. And gender is contested – a tool, or perhaps machine, that is produced, dynamically, through history by active manipulations. Yet we always move within limits – by both historical accident and design we find ourselves with limited gender-shells in which to make sense of ourselves – even our rebellions are constrained. The Xenofeminists talk about ‘seiz[ing] alienation to create new worlds’: accelerationism perhaps, but on the terms of the oppressed, not despite them. Alienation is a two-faced thing: it hurts, and the freedom it gives is not on our terms, but there is also the germ of liberation – we are offered the chance to relinquish any investment in a self-destructive society. The pain felt from our alienation can’t be alleviated by a return to an ethereal state of nature, but has to be embraced, and retooled.

In an exploration of the role and meaning of digital labour, Jamie Woodcock encourages us to think about re-tooling emergent tech to ‘sketch out the ‘possible construction of a rationality opposed to capital … Instead of looking at the wasted opportunities of digital technology under capitalism.’ [...]