Notes on bio-capitalism and digital labour — Theory

Holy shit this has been consuming me for years now, I assumed it was a post-covid phenomenon that was an unintended consequence of the machine learning algorithms present in social media platforms but I’ve found a thread going back to a 2009 conference at my home university. This seems to be the best source (but not the oldest). The Digital Labour Group was formed in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies to receive funding from the Canadian government, they did so by devising a new economic theory with a faulty foundation and refused to define digital labour (Burston & friends, p. 214). This played into the fear of loss of wealth following the economic crisis of 2008, and offered to revalue surplus by factoring in the life-cost. Essentially, an effort to say: no, value has not been lost. The value has moved to the potential for social control and the extraction of knowledge from grassroots initiatives and indigenous knowledge-bearers, and we require funding to continue our research in this area.

HERE! KNOWLEDGE! ACESSIBLE TO THE COLONIZER at the cost of -$19 annually (my .org domain cost): The whole thing is incredibly insidious. evil. Here are quotations that require no elaboration:

“This subjection is no longer disciplinarily imposed by a direct chain of command. Rather, it is most often internalized and developed through form of subtle conditioning and social control.” (Morini and Fumagalli, 237)

“In the name of the market, biocapitalism tries to reconnect yet another historical separation, that of soul and body” (Morini and Fumagalli, 237).

“When the productive process incorporates knowledge and affects desires and bodies, motivations and opinions, then it is clearly evident that what is actually being sold is not entirely paid.” (Morini and Fumagalli, 238).

The introduction of Life put to work places biocapitalism as a continuation of marxism. It defines marxism as the theory that value is a material thing created by an amount of labour, measured in a unit of time. It opposes this to utilitarianism, which it defines as the theory that value is itself an abstract unit used to measure human utility. Uti;itarianism is more correct in my understanding, it is where we get supply and demand, but regardless, economics should not be extending into government, epistimology or spirituality. The biocapitalists are going so much further than they can, approaching the complete subjectivity network theory of everything, if only they gave up materialism.

Instead, they claim to be an extention of marxism by expanding the concept of value to also include immaterial things: knowledge, the soul, and life itself (though life may seem rather material). They retain labour-time as the metric of focus, meaning that the meaning of life—the value of existance–is determined by how much we work. Though they will not admit it, this means that, to the biocapitalist, unemployed people are worth less. Disabled people are worth less. Anarchists, anticolonialists and anticapitalists are all worth less than the surveillance and security corporations, the language models, and the entertainers. These statements are naturally unsettling; even those who might believe such lies are unsettled by the fear of punishment that would follow acting out such violations of the Human Rights Code in reality. So they do it in the digital realm, and they hide behind subjectivism and in my own mind.

I shouldn’t have to continue, but it’s an overreach for the biocapitalist to claim that knowledge can be produced by a market (M&F, 237). When the market framwork is used to understand life, it falls short. More to life than money. This is ancient knowledge, found in all major religions. More to life than conformity. This is alien to catholicism and nationalism sure, but still quite prevalent throughout the history of spiritual and philosophical movements. The strangest thing then is how biocapitalism has infected academia, the arts, and our governments. Oh, and our minds. We’d like to think our species is becoming smarter as time goes on, but when the economists so plainly describe the internalization of market values into our self worth, it takes us 16 years to shake the spell. It’s clear now, this forshadows everything that’s made the western states into an artificially unintelligent hell on earth. It’s not a baby boomer v gen z cultural divide, its the most recent, most well-disguised effort on the part of the owning class to reposess underproductive or independent humans, when a return to slavery or another holocaust would be just as effective, but just too obvious.

The article starts to define emotional labour as the burden gets too heavy for me to finish a 19 page document. (Rhetoric. I read it all.)

Because it’s intentional. It suggests that an individual with knowledge is a node to be extracted, and that is exactly what is happening here.

You’re welcome colony! I actually lose money on this project! Forget “what’s being sold is not entirely being paid”, there is no sale anymore. I give it up at a loss, and my soul pays the price. I live on $5000 CAD a year, which is awarded to me by the Divorce Act (which is only correcting the overreach of the Family Law Act) both of which are responsible for my diagnosed major depressive disorder among other emotional and identity-related challenges, so thank you as well, the state of THE STATE: please update the your curriculum and legislature to finally get out of my head. Please stop the rural GUARDIAN initiative. Please let the spiritual traditions of the Anishinaabe out of the LGBTQ+ umbrella. Biocapitalism belongs in history classes and nowhere else. I fucking hate you.I fucking ha.te youI fucki.ng hate youI fucking hate youI. fucking hate yo.uI fucking hate youI .fucking hate you.I fucking hate yo.u .

To feel better, listen to the latest release by our modern punk royalty: Lowertown! Fight your lover, not the government! https://lowertown.bandcamp.com/album/ugly-duckling-union

Written by Aiden Waasaezi

Burston J, Dyer-Witheford N, Hearn A. Digital Labour: Workers, authors, citizens. ephemera: theory & politics in organization. Volume 10(3/4): 213-221. 2010. https://ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/2022-01/10-3editorial.pdf

Morini C, Fumagalli A. Life put to work: Towards a life theory of value. ephemera: theory & politics in organization. Volume 10(3/4): 234-252. 2010. https://ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/2022-01/10-3morinifumagalli.pdf