52N. Srnicek & A. Williams (2014) On Cunning Automata: Financial Acceleration at the Limits of the Dromological, in R. Mackay (ed.) Collapse, vol. VIII, Casino Real: 463–506. Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, pp. 470–1.
53Ibid., 473.
54MacKenzie, Is Economics Performative?, p. 76.
55E. Esposito (2011) The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, p. 150. Or, as Davies puts it, ‘[t]echniques of risk management can…become too successful in representing the future, and end up altering the future to the point where they no longer represent it adequately’. Davies, Moral Economies of the Future, p. 12.
56Esposito, The Future of Futures, p. 151.
57E. Esposito (2016) The Construction of Unpredictability, in A. Avanessian & S. Malik (eds.) The Time Complex: Post-Contemporary: 133–42. Miami: [NAME] Publications, pp. 137–9.
58Ibid., p. 143. See also B. Willems (2016) Hospitality and Risk Society in Tao Lin’s Taipei, in J. Clapp and E. Ridge (eds.) Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture: Modern and Contemporary Perspectives: 227–40. New York: Routledge; and B. Willems (2016) The Potential of the Past: First on the Moon, Science Fiction Film and Television, 9(2): 159–79.
59W. Mougayar (2015) Understanding the Blockchain, O’Reilly.com, 16 January, www.oreilly.com/ideas/understanding-the-blockchain. Here I am discussing the blockchain technology rather than the Bitcoin currency, which has many problems, including being ecologically disruptive: Digiconomist (2017) Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index (Beta), http://digiconomist.net/beci. Perhaps, as Peter Frase argues, the joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin is a better option: P. Frase (2016) Four Futures: Life after Capitalism. London: Verso, pp. 63–8.
60Melanie Swan, (2015) Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, p. vii.
61Ibid., p. x.
62Ibid., p. xi.
63Ibid., p. xii.
64Ibid., p. 27.
65Ibid.
66Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, p. 67.
67Ibid. In a very basic sense, Mike’s position is anarchic because it objects to private property and emphasises self-sufficiency: K. Ross (2016) Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. London: Verso, p. 141.
II
Capitalist Dystopias
Unlike earlier or rival economic systems, capitalism is a form of political economy that involves constant expansion, disruption and innovation. Some would call this ‘progress’. Others see it as a form of collective suicide, seeing as the system respects no limits in terms of the exploitation of social and environmental resources. Capitalism lends itself to dystopian extrapolations, providing the ingredients that science fiction writers and artists can use to map distant futures, in which currently existing limits have been transgressed.
Carina Brand’s chapter explores the dystopian, expansionary drive of capitalism via a concept that (as she discusses) is central to Marx’s work, namely extraction. As an artist working with film, Brand refers to her own work, alongside a reading of various science fiction films, to consider the often horrifying cultural representations of extraction (including Marx’s favoured metaphor of the vampire) as expressions of terror in the face of rampant capital. The following piece, written by the artists’ collective AUDINT, is the first entirely fictional contribution to this volume. This is a dystopia set in 2056, in which corporations and nations have merged and new global conflicts have emerged around scarce resources. The key resource in this global war is human pain, seeming to imply the final frontier (but who knows?) of what corporations might turn into a commodity. Khairani Barokka’s is another dystopian fiction, which could be read as a dark satire of the United Kingdom’s punitive welfare reforms brought in under austerity. Barokka imagines a global government running a ‘Biodiversity Credit’ scheme to manage disability benefits in an inhuman fashion.
Nora O Murchú’s dystopia points to an extreme form of post-Fordist work, in which there are no boundaries, and everything flows in a stream of tasks and consciousness. The human experience of time itself seems to have become seized, presumably by capitalist management, but it’s not entirely clear. The final chapter in this section is presented in the form of a consultancy report from the future, entitled ‘Fatberg and the Sinkholes’. Written by designers at Wolff Olins, this report offers a glimmer of hope. It envisages a future for the United Kingdom (or United Regions of England) in which London has seceded as a city state, but soon finds something new, confusing and possibly superior in the regions it has left behind: a mentality known as ‘absorbism’.
5
‘Feeding Like a Parasite’: Extraction and Science Fiction in Capitalist Dystopia
Carina Brand
Introduction
The challenge in creating a work of science fiction is being faced with the potentiality of creating a new world,1 the blank sheet of paper so full of possibilities. This desire to ‘dream of’ is what Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson identify as the utopian impulse that drives the science fiction imagination.2 But successfully engaging this imagination in creating new worlds is no easy task. This is why SF writers often use a critique of their own political economic circumstances as the basis for their fictional worlds; alternatively, they use the status quo as a foundation to project a society to its utopian pinnacle or catastrophic ruination. When I created a science fictional world in film3 it was the dilemma of reality, and how much this influenced the new world I was to create, that inhibited my imagination. In order to overcome this I made the critique of our capitalist reality central to the project. As a result of the critique I identified the concept of extraction as central to both culture and the economy. I began to see examples of extraction everywhere, in the digital apparatuses we used, depicted in the films and television we watch, and in the ongoing transformations to labour under global capitalism. This chapter uses Karl Marx’s Capital, volume I (1976), subsequent readings of extraction4 and ideas around ‘cognitive estrangement’5 to interrogate the role that extraction plays in the capitalist economy and in science fiction. I define the extractive impulse in relation to both the economic reality of capitalism and the cultural dimensions of science fiction. Extraction, it will be argued, not only forms the basis of capitalist exploitation and accumulation but, understood as a wider term, is an important metaphor for understanding the utopian imagination. In short: how do we imagine a new world without extracting parts of the old? This dialectical relationship between capital, extraction, the utopian impulse and science fiction not only illuminates new critiques of capital but it can also illuminate the conceptual limitations of the utopian impulse.
To begin I outline the concept of extraction, in its expanded sense, and explain why this is relevant for thinking about economic science fictions. Subsequently I focus on three current spheres of economic extraction, which can be read as embodying a kind of capitalist dystopia and their cultural counterparts in popular TV, film and SF literature. First, the relationship between extraction and digital technology, or what Marx identified as relative surplus value, considering the ways that technology is facilitating extraction, from data mining to the micro-extraction of actions in the development of apps. Second, I consider the sphere of social reproduction, and what I define as bodily or corporeal extraction. This can be read through Marx’s idea of absolute surplus value and formal subsumption, whereby the autonomous actions of the worker are appropriated by capital; the autonomous or private body is transformed or harvested by work; and, more importantly, the lines that demark private life and work life are blurred. The final sphere looks at extraction from ‘nature’ or the environment, and what Marx illuminates in his writing on the ‘so called’ primitive accumulation. I consider this in light of the Anthropocene and the relationship between images of environmental destruction and science fiction. What is important to acknowledge is that each of the aforementioned spheres also provides rich material for imagining utopian/dystopian vision
s. The sphere of technology has always been crucial for imagining not just the future but our way out of capitalism. The sphere of reproduction itself has often been the subject of science fiction, in terms of different forms of life and how they might function, but, more specifically, let us consider The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Brave New World (1932), and the role of reproduction proper. Finally, there is the penultimate image of utopia, or ‘the Garden of Eden’, presented in the harmonious image of pristine nature. Therefore, there is a latent potentiality in the act of extraction that is utopian because, at the moment of extraction, we are faced with the opposite.
Defining Extraction
Extraction is physical and entirely abstract at the same time; extraction is medical, political, geological, chemical and literary; it is both violent and delicate; and it speaks equally about wholeness and duality, exploitation and transformation. Extraction is analogous to appropriation and accumulation, but requires the removal of something from another thing. It means that through this process what is left is never the same again. Extraction can be a violent action causing pain, which is why Capital is full of bloodsucking analogies – leeches and vampires – as capital draws out living labour. Extraction is the point at which the abstract concept of exchange value meets the visceral and material world. Ironically, to extract can also mean to ‘free’ something – in its removal – or to select a specific element, a passage, as the artist does in the act of montage or collage6 or in terms of the medical idea of extracting a tumour or rotten tooth. Through this rationale we can fictionally eliminate current political economic systems to make way for new ones. In science fiction, extraction as event and image functions by illuminating the limits of the body, mind and environment, and the limitlessness of capitalism’s hunger; examples are bodily extraction in Prometheus (2012), when Elizabeth uses a mechanical surgeon to remove the alien from her womb; the use of a macro shot in The Matrix (1999) to reveal the embryonic human bodies feeding the machine; and Jonathan Glazer’s film Under the Skin (2013), in which young men’s bodies are extracted of all their substance, leaving paper-thin skin. Temporal extraction, when time is stolen, is depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by the constant surveillance of life, and in Inception (2010) time is both sped up and slowed down to extract information while subjects sleep. Environmental degradation and extraction are shown in nuclear Akira (1988) and post-apocalyptic Mad Max (1979/2015). Both extraction and science fiction are framed by the concept of time: how much time the labourer spends working over what is socially necessary; how much time is saved by accelerating technologies. Capital and science fiction deal in the currency of the future, or the future/past.7
To begin to understand extraction within the economy, however, we can start with Marx, even though the extractive impulse is evident in thinking before and after him. What Marx does that is relevant in this chapter is theoretically qualify how and why extraction is the dominant drive in capitalism. Marx identifies that the capitalist ‘will strive as hard as possible to raise his [the worker’s] output above his [/her] minimum and to extract as much work from him [/her] as is possible’.8 Therefore, part of the process of capitalist production is the creation of value ‘as value alien’9 to the worker. Living labour is sucked up and transformed into dead labour in the form of capital, and consequently
[t]he self-valorization of capital – the creation of surplus value – is therefore the determining, dominating and overriding purpose of the capitalist: it is the absolute motive and content of his activity…10
Therefore, the extraction of surplus value from the worker underpins the capitalist system. This extraction is more a trick than a straight-out theft, however, and this is what differentiates it from prior extraction, and current extraction of natural resources. But how can we understand extraction in its expanded sense – outside production, outside the wage – and what of its literary or cultural form? Subsequent and contemporary analyses of extraction in political economic theory have pointed to the continued relevance of Marx’s analysis of surplus value extraction. Nevertheless, many theorists in the Marxist tradition have also tried to understand the way changes in the technological,11 ideological,12 geographical13 and productive composition of labour have affected Marx’s thesis and, subsequently, the mechanisms of extraction. This is why much of what I explore throughout the chapter is not strictly wage labour, but all the activities around wage labour that are now being transformed into value-producing actions and extracted in different ways by capital,14 constituting a capitalist dystopia only science fiction writers could have imagined.
Extraction and Digital Technology
In Capital, volume I, Marx explained that there are two types of surplus value, relative and absolute.15 Relative surplus value refers specifically to the use and/or deliberate construction of machines that will accelerate labour power, thus enabling the capitalist to extract even more surplus from the worker. The concept of relative surplus value was timely when Marx was writing in the midst of a very mechanic industrial revolution, but these critiques are still crucial as we near Web 3.0.16 Therefore, what I explore here is the relationship between digital technology and extraction. Algorithms are everywhere today; they run services, machines and interfaces – and people. The appearance of touchscreens, video calling and smart electronics has actualised the 1950s image of the ‘future’; but what is the cultural response to this digital outsourcing, and in what ways is digital technology exploiting and extracting value from us?
Critiques of what has been called ‘communicative capitalism’17 emphasise the role that capitalism or corporations have in making the devices and technology that now underpin most forms of communication. Technology has on the whole been harnessed for profit, not comprising the techno-utopia many early visionaries (including Marx) hoped for. Relative surplus value is ultimately tied to what Marx called real subsumption, which translates to the subsumption of all of work (and, as many have argued, life outside work)18 to capitalism. The machines that increasingly extract relative surplus value from us today are on the whole digital;19 even great machines that extract minerals or assist in building cars are operated by algorithms,20 and there is nothing more science fiction than the robot, cyborg or artificial intelligence (AI). The concept of relative surplus value is crucial in recognising the role that machines play in augmenting, accelerating and extending our labour; from workplace surveillance to bit tasking, working from home and global outsourcing, all are enhanced by digital technology. This technology has made it easier for capital to extract value from us during the full 24-hour day, and into the future. Media theorist Siva Vaidhyanathan points out not only that leading companies in digital technology are interested in controlling all the future ‘data streams’ but that things such as Google Glass, the iWatch and iTouch are modelled directly on our bodies.21 It is when these bodies are both at work and at home that privately owned companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon extract data from us; the extraction of data, or data mining, is the primary interest of digital corporations, not only as they can sell such data to other companies or governments, but they can then control your future consumptive choices.22 The extractive impulse is written into the algorithms that control all digital platforms and the software we use, from Spotify to Uber; the apps, devices and software that ‘make life easier’ are designed to extract value from our everyday actions, making us increasingly cyborg or constant capital.23
Marx explicated that machinery in industry soaks up ‘the special skill of each machine-operator’ and transforms it, turning the ‘mass of social labour’ into the ‘system of machinery’,24 or dead labour. Devices for communication, such as the mobile phone, are machines built around the individuated subject,25 and exemplify a hybrid or cyborg of human–machine. Donna Harraway imagines this cyborg as the mutant future, which is ‘monstrous’ and ‘potent’ and in which the ‘utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender’ could emerge.26 As Harraway rightly argues, ho
wever, digital technology relies upon the international division of labour, ‘feminisation’ of work and class exploitation in order to function. As all life, from the workplace to the bathroom, becomes commodified through the capture of our life experiences as ‘big data’, future and past are both written as code, which is regulated or traded like finance capital.27 Ali Dur and McKenzie Wark explain:
The digital is the means by which all the capacities of the body become proletarianized. To become proletarian is to be excluded from the process of production as anything but its object. This exclusion has more recently extended beyond material labour…and so beyond production, to the realm not only of consumption but into the pores of everyday life.28
Tiziana Terranova explains that ‘the Internet is deeply connected to the development of late post-industrial societies as a whole,’29 and if we consider the internet a factory we are all proletarians. The internet may be the illegitimate child of post-industrial capitalism but on the whole this child now works for its parents.30
Cultural representations in media and mainstream science fiction often artificially separate AIs, robots and artificial humans with the algorithms we use every day. What is clear, however, in current representations of AIs is that they are replacing our roles as lovers, as workers and as parents.31 The replacement of humans with robots is a long-standing anxiety within science fiction, as the robot or cyborg often symbolises either a society come unstuck and without boundaries or one that is rigidly controlled. Consider Forbidden Planet (1956), in which the robot and, indeed, invisible monster are the workings of the mad possessive father; Blade Runner (1982), whose ‘replicants’ are the work of an ‘evil corporation’ who run riot on a sick Earth; and, finally, the calculating AIs of Alien (1979) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), who know better than the humans. Ironically, technology in real life, or at least what is released for public consumption, is never actually this good: AIs are just not that smart yet. What we experience when we experience technology is more often than not glitches, freezes, shutdowns or disconnects, and not the fluid mobility promised by science fiction or Apple. This is why perceptive film and media understand that part of our relationship with technology is its non-functioning; perhaps this is why the popular character of the ‘hacktivist’, or hacker, as we see in the television series Mr. Robot (2015), has taken on a messianic role in contemporary culture: not only can hackers make better technology, but they make it work for themselves.
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