[...] Capital can know, right? Capital can know, because capital is like evolution: it selects for things. Capital has agency. Mark Zuckerberg has a kind of idiotic compulsion to like, errghh I wanna make loads of money and, like, impress some girls. (Laughter.) As we see in [David Fincher’s 2010 film] The Social Network, which is a brilliant film, I think. Really… It’s almost unprecedented, The Social Network, don’t you think? And also the meticulousness of the construction of its historical moment, in terms of the forms of technology it’s working with. We’ll come to that later. We’ll come to that later.
So, he has those motives but that doesn’t mean that capital doesn’t have its own ends and designs inside, without there being any conscious agent that’s sitting behind it all. Otherwise it’s just a conspiracy, isn’t it? The thing is, it’s a systemic tendency. It’s a systemic tendency. Now, of course, at a certain point, there are humans who make self-conscious decisions at crucial points, but there are also people like Zuckerberg who are puppets of capital without any kind of reflection.