Cyber-physical Systems, or, the Cultural Logic of Techno-Neoliberalism

Abstract

We live in a world characterized by digital networks, blurred boundaries, pluralized workplaces, hybrid identities, and highly contested ideological agendas driving complex interactions between diverse local and global discourses. In contemporary capitalism, faith, trust, loyalty and solidarity are all casualties to the algorithmic diktat of big data, the foundation to a new logic of capitalist accumulation. When knowledge is capital and information is a commodity, wisdom is the capacity to forecast earnings from data. The big data stockpiles that cyber-physical systems generate make up the building blocks of the information economy, combining technology, commercial interests and social operations. Since information is increasingly perceived as a profit-laden entity that produces exchange value, the new commanding heights of power and control are being drawn up by techno oligarchs. I will articulate in my research the totalizing effect capital and technology have on contemporary digital subjectivities by arguing how the fabric of society is being irrevocably changed by the installation of cyber-physical systems. Cyber-physical systems bring together the ‘cyber’ workings of analytics software and automation hardware infrastructure with the ‘physical’ materialities of ubiquitous human interaction. For the purpose of this paper, cyber-physical systems will be classified into audit culture industries and affect-audit culture industries. Audit culture industries are made up of new managerialist operators implementing measurements of progress (e.g. metrics, rubrics, benchmarks, performance indicators etc.) to affect the behavior of consumers, workers and citizens. Affect-audit culture industries function as infrastructures of consent, amassing data, auditing the affective interactions of their user base and generating revenue for the techno-oligarchical corporations through the sale and commerce of data analytics. These industries are always-already engaged in data acquisition processes making them an integral part of the surveillance apparatus of the neoliberal state procuring data for both state and market surveillance. Audit culture industries provide data for the structural surveillance apparatus and the affect-audit culture industries feed data to the phenomenological surveillance apparatus. The processes involved in transforming individual data-points, e.g. geographic coordinates, music playlists, blood sugar levels, pedometer readings, news feeds, dating profiles, video game scores, search histories, smart grid energy meter readings, etc. into aggregated, tradable digitized commodities are shrouded in mystery. The opacity and inaccessibility of these commodities markets highlight the absolute power differential between techno-oligarchical corporations and digital subjects. Cyber-physical systems, I contend will set in motion the expropriation of human agency and restructure work and society in the process through the deployment of disruptive technologies such as process automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence and wearable technologies.