Notes on bio-capitalism and digital labour — Reparations

Now I reread Life put to work with the most charitable perspective possible. I cannot admit that the foundation of this theory is at all sensible, but within this paper is a massive expansion of what counts as work, meaning that if we remain within capitalism, this is work that ought to be receive compensation. Biocapitalism would like to think that the following examples are fringe cases, as the majority of people work in ordinary industries like healthcare, education, transportation, and property maitinance.

For the fringe cases of harm occuring within biocapitalism, a calculation could be made for the cost of relational labour, linguistic and cognitive labour, symbolic labour, corporeal and sensorial labour, and affective labour. (240) For example, reparations for the Anishinaabe who were forced or instructed to attend boarding school, where they forgot Ojibwe and learned English, justifyable based ultimately on the total cost to the “general intellect”. This was lingustic and cognitive labour.

This has allowed for the creation of new hyper-specific caretaker jobs like the death doula (relational and affective), an industry for body modification, with tattoo artists doing double duty as therapists and plastic surgeons ensuring that with the right lighting, movie stars and political cantidates look like sexual gods (corporeal, sensorial, affective). In the shadow of the media tower are the unpaid emotional writers like myself doing all of the above, and even the borderline-schizophrenic who zeroes in on the Flock camera as the source of all suffering in the west (symbolic and affective.. relational if they tear it down). Biocapitalism does not deny; one does not exist without the other. The theory states both parties should be paid, based not on the usefulness or moral imperative, but on the time spent toiling away. Trauma is incentivised, as oppression = wealth in this framework.

Of course if reparations are provided and the resistance stops, this would be the nail in the coffin for any anticapitalist knowledge. What a loss it would be, if we collectively forgot that money is fiat currency: an abstract concept that only functions when both parties believe that it functions. This is getting closer to reality with how the internalization of ideas like autism and borderline personality disorder cause the individual to doubt their own intuition, which then is compensated for as disability pay. Should an individual lose faith in the value of money, the compensation loses the ability to function as a pacifier. The anticapitalist would be forever unsatisfied with a life as a consumer of media, a completer of captchas, a trainer of LLMs and reccomendation algorithms, a writer on wikipedia, or a body at a concert. If capitalism can provide a decent enough living situation, to some, it would be worth the cost of true freedom. Still, there will always be those who perfer poverty with freedom-anguish and death to complacency and the mantling of neuro-divergence. The solution is there in the scope of the general intellect, as if one opts out, the suffering they may or may not be experiencing cannot possibly be known to the biocapitalists during the calculation of who deserves how much. To the biocapitalist, there is actually no such thing as rivalling ideas on the outside, they believe anarchist thought to be monetizable, documentable opinions or trends in human behaviour- anthropology.

The cost of opting out of biocapitalism cannot simply be paid.

The biocapitalist is also “supremely interested in differences. Difference, even under the apperance of knowledge of indigenous or local systems, has become a highly valued commodity to be spent on the market” (239).

Diversity is our strength, yes. Simultaneously, ethnic or cognative differences as points of commodification is dangerous. There is potential to create books, educational courses, ticketed events, etc. that bridge these differences to share knowledge. There is potential also to turn the off-the-grid anarchists into celebrities, artists, content creators, or globalist speakers. Only, to do any of that risks the erasure of knowledge that exists in pre-language minds or extrasocial environments. Both of these examples have the effect of further legitimizing the stage or the written word. The only knowledge inside is how to manipulate perception. When the rest of knowledge exists beyond these spaces, the overstated importance of private event venues, the massive network of intermediary people, and the legal copyright organizations who are already positioned to collect the capital generated by escoteric knowledge function as a deterrance, not a bridge that should be crossed. To cross it in good faith would also require the creation of an industry by the biocapitalists that rewards ideas that threaten biocapitalism. Academia is supposed to be the place for this, and digital spaces are capable too. Academia though has its biases for what kind of research is important, and the allocation of funds does not always happen altruistically. On the internet, users who spread threatening ideas are routinely banned, shadow-banned, or demonitized by the police bot. If the police bot does not exist, we have the early days of 4chan- facilitating the exploitation of minors and criminal organizations, which if we adhere faithfully to the biocapistalist theory, the work that goes into these practices is also of interest. The strict biocapitalist would pay money for the answers to questions such as “how does one shut off their moral sense so as to engage in human trafficing?”, “Are Steve Bannon and Jeffery Epstein biocapitalists?”, “What about Daniel Ek and Mark Zuckerberg?”, “Are we the bad guys?”

Unless we are able to follow the money right to the source and shut it down for good (though we will revisit it from another angle), there is no reason to continue down this biocapitalist thread. Their system admits that a balance is to be weighed: the cost of personal guilt and the labour of reconciliation against the knowledge that biocapitalism is not in and of itself a complete framework for reality. The acceptance that we were wrong, and we may have to give up more than we expected in the pursuit of knowledge. For this reason, biocapitalism is a momentary idea in the developing intelligence of life that will either be abandoned for a better ideology, or walled off into a less-encompacing form like fordism, marxism, authoritarianism, nationalism, et cetera, for which history has plenty of examples against.

The most suitable end for the biocapitalism is suicide. The harm it causes to life on this planet begins to outweigh its benefits. Publications stating a high quality of life do not match up to reality, mental illness runs rampant among hospital staff and goes undiagnosed so as to protect the institutions. Living paycheck to paycheck causes an existential fear, which then is exploited by life assurance companies in an endless loop that keeps money flowing up and out of the average person’s bank account. “In the name of the market”, governments and the companies that protect them speak ad nauseam about health and wellness. The problem is projected out of the institution and into the mind of the citizens, making collective organization impossible as fear keeps people indoors years after the stay-at-home order had been lifted. To pay everyone off would destroy the economy, and so to avoid a movement of mass suicide among the lower class, the system must die instead. The pain of existing within the system pushes us out into anarchy, and we find an international network of people who have already adapted to the post-capitalist environment– their existance and power completely unknown to the uninitiated. This time, it is a nonviolent intellectual revolution.

Written by Aiden Waasaezi and ZV

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