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Accepted Paper:
New Subjects: Digital Governance, Freedom, Expropriation
Donald Nonini
(University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
This paper sets out the cultural and social processes by which Western subjects captured by a new mode of digital governance and a new mode of expropriation are being constructed and organized by post-neoliberal corporate states. Examples of these processes are given.
Paper long abstract:
This paper sets out the cultural and social processes by which subjects captured by a new mode of digital governance and a new mode of expropriation are being constructed by the conditions of post-neoliberal corporate state society. The paper first sets out the process by which humans in the West are being increasingly brought into a new subjectivity through the digital technologies they employ, which in turn are employed upon them as digital subjects. The paper sets out the stages through which digital technologies first seduce their subjects, then re-order their behaviors and affects into new conditions of enslavement. Through this process digital technologies come to expropriate the living qualities of the persons that use these technologies at two levels. First, they transform vital human attributes (e.g., gender, race, movement through space, sexual behavior) into data artifacts; second, they transform these artifacts into commodities of data assemblies that are employed by corporations and states to predict and govern the collectives of persons from whom these data have been extracted. Finally, for specific collectivities marked by their racial and class specificities, these technologies allow states and corporations to engage in the violent expropriation of the attributes (e.g. labor, property) of the persons who make up these collectivities.