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In The World Computer Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression-language, image, music, communication-into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle.
List of contents
Acknowledgments xi
I. Computational Racial Capitalism
Introduction: The Social Difference Engine and the World Computer 3
1. The Computational Unconscious: Technology as a Racial Formation 63
II. The Computational Mode of Production
2. M-I-C-I'-M': The Programmable Image of Photo-Capital 101
3. M-I-M': Informatic Labor and Data-Visual Interruptions in Capital's "Concise Style" 139
III. Derivative Conditions
4. Advertisarial Relations and Aesthetics of Survival 175
5. An Engine
and a Camera 206
6. Derivative Living and Subaltern Futures: Film as Derivative, Cryptocurrency as Film 222
Appendix 1. The Derivative Machine: Life Cut, Bundled and Sold—Notes on the Cinema 255
Appendix 2. The Derivative Image: Interview by Susana Nascimento Duarte 267
Notes 285
References 301
Index 315
About the author
Jonathan Beller is a revered film theorist, culture critic and mediologist. He is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the Pratt Institute and Director of the Graduate Program in Media Studies. He is the author of The Cinematic Mode of Production (UPNE, 2006), Acquiring Eyes (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2006) and The Message is Murder (Pluto, 2017).
Summary
Jonathan Beller traces the history of the commodification of information and the financialization of everyday life, showing how contemporary capitalism is based in algorithms and the quantification of value that intensify social inequality.
