Recent popular depictions of AIs in films such as Her (2013) and Ex Machina (2015) personalise and singularise both the character of the AI and the wider polemics of AIs in society. At times they lower us back into a patriarchal and clichéd view of the robot as female sex slave, or ‘kick-ass chick’, more concerned with the loss of authentic love – or, ironically, hegemonic gender relations – than asking what social affect the mechanisation of love will bring. They fail to situate AIs within digital capitalism, or to create a machine or world that is significantly cognitively strange or new; we do feel a sense of alienation by the male character’s loneliness, but the cause is always personal, not political. Therefore, what happens when we turn a machine into a human, or humanise a robot, in film or literature is that we give it a subject. We no longer focus on the way that capital is exploiting us through very impersonal machines, and focus our attentions on the benign robot, the ‘evil’ cyborg or the helpful AI. When the machine is disconnected from our bodies and from the system that made it – capitalism – it no longer functions as cognitive estrangement, but it becomes an externalisation of our anxieties, and enables us to ‘other’ any critical judgements of the system we inhabit.
The Common Sense (2015), by artist Melanie Gilligan, and Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (2014) provide a more critical assessment of technology and AIs as extractive, both today and in the future. Both target the ensuing loss of control we have in our lives at work and in our personal lives, as technology becomes inserted into our bodies. Gilligan and Brooker present reality as only slightly unfamiliar, in line with Bertolt Brecht’s ‘alienation effect’, and both also include new technologies that enable us to see the familiar in unfamiliar ways.32 In Black Mirror’s ‘White Christmas’ we are presented with three mini-stories that all focus on the role of technology in our personal lives, and its detrimental effects: an augmented reality programme allows a shy man to become a lothario with the help of his online chat group; a control freak career women is able to duplicate her consciousness as her home slave to run her automated home; and, finally, there is an application to block people, not, as one can do on Facebook, but in our consciousness. While Brooker falls into the trap of technology as alienation, not capitalism as alienation, there is a more incisive look at what technology is doing now, how it fits into our lives and the role of the corporation in designing these products. The Common Sense has evolved from an entirely different order, coming from Gilligan’s long engagement with Marx, and the role of what Marx called ‘total social capital’ in current neoliberal capitalism. Gilligan sets the film in the near future, and through numerous plot and screen devices sets up a story in which a new technology called ‘the patch’ is inserted into our mouths to create two-way communication of our emotions between subjects. Money has become obsolete and we trade directly with feeling, wants and desires. But at the same time a corporation runs ‘the patch’, and therefore employers have full access to all of our lives and time. Gilligan explains that the film is ‘a meditation on contemporary technological tools that act on our inter-subjective relations’ modes of communication, often bringing with them profound changes to the ways we live, creating new types of relations and also new ways that market logics can be imposed on life today’.33 In The Common Sense it is a glitch that unravels the system; we see the revolutionary potentiality of the system malfunction through real collectivisation. There are certainly moments of utopian potentiality afforded by the place of AIs in our lives, and most notably the role that a global network of collective emotions seen in The Common Sense could provide. This is quickly replaced by the reality of living under the logic of exchange value and accumulation, however, so the issue at hand is not the technology but who makes, owns, runs and profits from it.
Corporeal Extraction and Social Reproduction
Absolute surplus value is specifically about time, and the length of the working day, with this day now encapsulating the full 24 hours. The techniques of production, or the means of production, are not radically transformed, as in the factory; we still work, eat, play, raise children and love in the same way, but capitalism extracts value in a parasitic way. This dystopia in which we live at work is reflected by the role our PC or smartphone has in almost all our 24-hour lives. Let us consider migrant workers living on site at work in Dubai, unable to return home, or live-in workers or carers who work for little over their board, or freelancers who work at home who are anything but free. This blurring between work and life initiates a mistrust and detachment regarding our bodies, and has proliferated a range of social and cultural responses, some discussed above, and others whereby a particular regressive desire to inhabit, or own, the body results in ‘body horrors’. Here I will consider the idea of extraction from the body, its blood, flesh, bones, thoughts, dreams and ideas, as representative of the changing place of social reproduction in late capitalism. Leopoldina Fortunati explains that technologies in the home now simulate immaterial or affective labour,34 this being part of an ongoing commodification of reproductive labour, whereby the routines and rituals required for social reproduction are turned into products and services to be bought and sold. On top of this, the time and money we now have for attending to the requirements of social reproduction are severely reduced; for example, consider dating sites that emphasise the possibility of meeting up with like-minded professionals between meetings, or the ‘drop in’ hourly nursery for children.
Production ‘proper’ relies on the creation of value and the extraction of surplus; Marx outlines this in relation to industrial and, primarily, factory-style production throughout Capital. Social reproduction is all the activities that take place outside this working time, and, historically, we have seen this sphere be undervalued, with production prioritised. If we have now moved into a phase that Angela Dimitrakaki describes as ‘total production’, in which ‘everything is production’,35 the strict definitions36 between production and reproduction seem fastidious and unhelpful in understanding how extraction functions today. Marxist feminist readings of the relationship between production and reproduction or productive and unproductive labour are helpful in understanding a transformation in production and how capital now extracts value in new ways.37 Because the sphere of reproduction constitutes a meeting point between the biological necessities of life and wider cultural constructions, it is conceptually and physically ‘messy’. Certain components, such as birth and childrearing, cannot be easily reduced to commodities or removed as unnecessary for the capitalist mode of production.38 For this reason they have been controlled,39 shaped by the needs of capital and progressively commodified.40 Education, mental health41 and public services are increasingly being transformed not only with the logic of accumulation but with the logic of transforming social processes into quantifiable norms and outcomes through increasing biopower.42What the concept of total extraction illuminates is the increasing role that the ‘subject’ or subjectivity plays in systems of capitalist extraction,43 both as object and as apparatus.
The extension of the working day is represented in cultural texts that draw on fears about our loss of our bodies: beginning with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1823), the vampire, through Marx to zombie films, and now represented in body/mind theft films such as Inception (2010) and Upstream Color (2013). Cuts to welfare, public childcare, health provision, community services and pensions, changes to schooling and longer hours in work have all meant that we share collective fears about losing touch with our bodies and their demands: the demands to eat, love, create and care for the old and young. The zombies that we have become walk with no agency, but are dead and driven by a desire to eat, vampires without souls, who are the only ones that can keep up with the 24-hour work/play lives we need to live; but even monsters have limits. Jonathan Crary explains in 24/7 that our conception of time is altered by the increasingly short cycles of technology, the need to update our minds and bodies with the latest tech; this embodied accelerationism44 produces anxious minds and bodies tha
t seek to transcend the limiting condition of the mortal body. What we lust for in the vampire story is our bodies and their replacement by ‘super-bodies’; bodily autonomy is gained through the material transference of blood, which is in some ways a resistive stance against the abstraction of capital. At the same time, however, the literal extraction of blood provides a strong analogy to the act of capitalist extraction, and while much of what is extracted is ‘immaterial’ the metaphor of the body, or the ‘lifeblood’, is symptomatic of how much of our personal or private lives is compromised under late capitalism.
In the US TV drama UnReal (2015) we see an interesting multi-layered approach to the extraction of subjectivity. While not science fiction, what is depicted could come directly from the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four or The Hunger Games (2008). The basis of the show is a dating game à la The Bachelor,45 in which contestants in ‘real life’ are exploited for their subjective potential; their own personal history of mental illness, abuse and sexuality becomes specific fodder for the developments of plots. Alongside this the producers own ‘real lives’, and subjectivities are willingly exploited and self-exploited in order to persuade the contestants of the authenticity of the show. The show illuminates the way that ‘reality TV’ directly extracts participants’ subjectivity as sources of entertainment, and, although the highly constructed nature of the show is exposed, it still sanctions and feeds into the normalcy of self-sacrifice in work. The characters always ‘come back’ into the fold, and subsequently the executive producer proclaims that ‘it’s good TV’. What is illuminating about UnReal, and relevant for understanding extraction in late capitalism, is that participants and producers volunteer their own time and lives for extraction. The dystopia that is the show – ironically labelled ‘everlasting’ – can be viewed as a discrete world where First World problems are played out; contestants who try and leave the show are hunted down like escapees in Logan’s Run (1967), and because of its enclosed nature it represents a microcosm as an economic science fiction of post-Fordist labour.
The persistent popularity of the ‘body horror’46 genre also reflects the embeddedness of the extractive impulse, as almost all films in this genre include some aspect of extraction in its wider sense. More importantly, body horror often deals with ongoing contradictions in social reproduction under late capitalism.47 Videodrome (1983), by David Cronenberg, successfully captures the inconsistencies between the virtual and the biological, the material and the abstract. Cronenberg uses the videotape as an appendage to bridge the space between the impact of capitalism’s abstract ‘ultra-violence’, and its more corporeal effects on the real body. Body horror can reveal the changes in capitalist accumulation;48 indeed, many of Cronenberg’s key body horror films were made during the transformation to global neoliberalism and technological developments in global communications. While The Matrix (1999) and Never Let Me Go (2010) are not strictly body horror films, they do depict the dystopic effect of late capitalism on the body or ‘bare life’,49 and what capital does in order to replenish life and value. The ‘real life’ hidden beneath The Matrix is our bodies feeding the machines, a hyped-up version of Stanisław Lem’s Futurological Congress (1971), appropriating directly from William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) as the characters ‘jack in’ to the matrix. The dystopic reality of the matrix is hidden from view because human bodies have become little more than fuel or chattel. Capitalism extracts value directly from us, no longer requiring the trick of free labour to extort our worth. A more contemplative look at the future of our bodies – and, indeed, subjecthood – is Never Let Me Go, in which clones are made to replenish the bourgeoisies’ organs as they fail later in life, or in the event of an accident. This story illuminates a heightened idea of class structure, an underclass of clones’ consciousness, but too often clings to ideas of identity and individuality, without fully realising what a class of surrogate clones could mean for capitalism and for ideas of mortality. What is important to note is that neither scenario is too far-fetched from the extractive practices of capitalism today: organ and egg sales constitute a global market supplying the wealthiest customers,50 and the global division of labour represents a system in which unknown, undervalued labourers’ bodies literally feed the bulk of the technological goods, or matrix, that we live in.
Environmental Extraction and Dystopia
The ‘original’ or ‘primitive’ accumulation described by Marx at the end of Capital volume I is most closely allied to extraction from the environment and ideas around an environmental dystopia, as explored in science fiction. The ‘original’ extraction can be read as what we take from nature, at no cost to us and all cost to nature. Theories of the Anthropocene51 or Capitalocene52 grapple with our role in climate change, some highly critical, others cementing our inevitable, even celebratory, role in transforming the geological/chemical climate of the globe. The image of environmental ruin is one of the common tropes of dystopian science fiction because it functions at two levels: the first is a warning to mankind of what is to come, and the second a much more utopian or revolutionary impulse presented by the end of times (with the chance to begin again). As Marx and Engels claimed, the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie will lay the foundations for a new communist society.53 Here we must also consider the image of utopia in science fiction as a return to a much more ‘primitive’ or natural state of life, as depicted by the image of the island utopia cut adrift from civilisation.54 Or, as Patrick Murphy explains, a new anti-technology society is imagined due to the environmental apocalypse, with civilisation returning to a neo-primitive model.55 This regressive stance prioritises the natural equilibrium before human impact but at the same time has utopian and dystopian possibilities; take Alan Weisman’s non-fiction The World without Us (2007), which chronicles the life of Earth if we vanished: part science fiction, part environmental plea. The author explains how quickly the Earth would return to equilibrium should a human apocalypse occur.
Dystopian depictions of earth in film often explore the vanquishing of the natural world. This post-extraction globe has drawn on the imaginary of nuclear war and weaponry; for example, Akira (1988) portrays a post-apocalypse Tokyo, where nuclear fallout produces a monster that assimilates Japanese folk law and modern high technology (almost prophetic, considering Fukushima). Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) shows us a dark, post-nuclear-fallout Earth, where the last vestiges of nature have to be mechanically produced. Alongside these imaginaries we find films that celebrate or indulge in the destruction of the natural world, the apocalyptic images from the disaster movie genre, with films such as Armageddon (1998) or Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005), cashing in on the allure of the one-second-destruction moment.56 As Immanuel Kant elucidated, we gain a type of pleasure in witnessing this sublime destruction;57 the popularity of Andreas Gursky’s epic photographs and Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s documentary Home (2009) are testament to this, their technological sublimity presenting us with the scale of modern production and its destruction. Children of Men (2006), The Road (2009) and 28 Days Later (2002) are very much post-apocalypse films, depicting a society that has destroyed the natural world and gone through the very limits of the extractive impulse. The redemptive plot returns, however, in the form of a small-scale ecological community. What is clear from these examples is that the cultural imaginary of dystopia and utopia both rely on the construction of an image of the natural world as separate from us, which reinforces the nature/culture binary.58
We can understand the extraction of/from nature by capital in two ways: first, as I explore below, as primitive accumulation, which uniquely transforms both environment and people; and, second, the demands of capitalist accumulation and profit, which necessitate a constant increase in production and have resulted in excessive pollution and the rapid consumption of natural resources. Marx identified the two processes of accumulation and primitive accumulation as distinct in Capital volume I, but subsequent commentators have identified poi
nts where they not only coexist but are reliant on each other.59 Marx explained that this ‘original’ accumulation resulted from the ruling classes’ expulsion of the peasants from common land; this extraction took the form of appropriation of the ‘free’ natural resources and then forced peasants to work for a wage, thus extracting a surplus from their labour.60 This extraction of land and resources has a tremendous ecological effect too, and primitive accumulation can no longer be considered outside of current readings of ecological disaster and change,61 even Marx by way of Liebig’s law62 identified the way intensive capitalist farming leached the ground of all nutrients.63 Primitive accumulation is capitalism’s ‘start up’ fund and during this historical period we see a correlation between colonial forms of exploitation and the acceleration of capitalist accumulation, this exploitation has not abated it has accelerated.64 David Harvey asserts that profit from what he calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’ matches that of profit from the market in today’s economy.65 And Saskia Sassen states that the acquisition of millions of hectares of land by foreign investment in the global South and subsequent ‘expulsions’ mark a specific move whereby land is more precious than people and labour.66 Land is valued due to the continuous demand for mineral and water resources, meaning that even today mining is the physical action analogous to extraction, as mining punctuates the differing logics of accumulation throughout historical time. Therefore, in terms of the global struggle around labour, mining remains fundamental as a site of exploitation and class consciousness; but it also symbolises a meeting point between the natural and the technological. The film Moon (2009) by Duncan Jones explores the future of mining, now taking place on the Moon. A solitary workman, who supervises the machines that work on the Moon, is driven mad when he discovers he is cloned as a disposable worker; man is made analogous with resources, or a machine, as he becomes part of the constant capital of the corporation. Extraterrestrial mining is also explored by Kim Stanley Robinson in the Mars trilogy, in which the vast mineral wealth of Mars is planned to be exported to Earth by a space elevator. Even James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) depicts the desire for minerals and mining having an interstellar component in the future, with the untouched natural world providing the utopian possibility. The development of techniques in filming and production has also facilitated attempts to mine and extract images of ‘nature’ at its most pure, and has spawned multiple series and documentaries that depict the natural world.67 The irony of the popularity of such shows is that they represent an ‘untouched’ world that is actually being extracted in its molecular definiteness by the scopic quality of the very lenses used to film it. This natural sublime, so sharp it can occur only in high-definition digital technology, represents the last moments – or, indeed, the last supper – of nature free from the extractive demands of capitalism, yet it is still turned into profit by capital through its re-representation in the image economy.
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