There is no shortage of epithets aimed at grasping the transformations taking place within global capitalism under the impact of the ongoing technological revolution. Algorithmic capitalism, cognitive capitalism, communicative capitalism, data capitalism, digital capitalism, frictionless capitalism, informational capitalism, platform capitalism, semiocapitalism, surveillance capitalism and virtual capitalism have all been proposed, to name but a few. Of late, this categorization project has posited a rupture that leaves capitalism itself behind, not in the spirit of an advance, but as a regression to a world of data barons and user-serfs: digital feudalism, techno-feudalism, information feudalism, neo-feudalism have become new watchwords on both left and right, attracting the bracing attention of Evgeny Morozov, whose ‘Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’ appeared in the last number of nlr.footnote¹

Morozov concedes that uses of the term may be largely rhetorical, capitalizing on feudalism’s ‘shock value’ and meme-friendly affect. But he also sees it as the symptom of an intellectual failure to conceptualize the most advanced sectors of the digital economy, where ‘the left’s brightest minds still find themselves very much in the dark’.footnote² If giant info-tech platforms like Google, Amazon and Facebook don’t earn their profits through old-fashioned capitalist exploitation of their workers, should they be seen as new-model landowners—non-productive rentiers, leveraging their network dominance and monopoly hold over data-sets and algorithms to extract advertising revenues generated elsewhere in the capitalist economy? Or, as Shoshana Zuboff argues in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, are they getting rich by extracting and expropriating our user data through means of algorithmic surveillance, a form of ‘digital dispossession’ that feeds a new logic of accumulation, akin to the model of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ hypothesized by David Harvey in The New Imperialism? Or again, as Cédric Durand puts it in Techno-féodalisme, have the tech giants effectively subordinated us to their rule through their control over information and knowledge (‘intellectual monopolization’), on the basis of which they develop ever-more sophisticated means of predation, à la Veblen, for appropriating surplus value without being involved in the productive process?

Morozov himself wants to have it both ways. Google’s monopoly over the data it is gathering may have a rentier logic, but the corporation’s business model largely rests on producing a commodity, the search result—‘real-time access to vast amounts of human knowledge’—even if it then gives this away for ‘free’, so as to sell advertisers targeted access to its users. But this is not classical intellectual monopolization, since the web pages Google indexes remain the abstracted property of their owners—who, admittedly, are made to forgo extracting any licensing fee from Google itself. In addition, quite unlike Veblen’s Belle Époque predators, or unproductive feudal lords, Google and its peers invest vast sums in research and development. Grounding his argument in the landmark debates about capitalism’s distinguishing features, Morozov sides (more or less) with the world-systems theorists and Harvey’s later work in proposing a more expansive concept of accumulation, encompassing both dispossession and exploitation, against Robert Brenner’s ‘elegant and consistent’ model of a core competitive logic. Capitalism has undergone no rupture; it is ‘moving in the same direction it always has been’, leveraging whatever resources it can mobilize. If Google produces search-result commodities, ‘there is no great difficulty in treating it as a regular capitalist firm, engaged in normal capitalist production’—along with other time-honoured tactics like buying influence on Capitol Hill and swallowing the competition.footnote³

Yet neither Morozov’s same-as-ever capitalism nor Durand’s techno-feudalism succeed in grasping the novel dynamics of a capitalist sector founded on networked computing-machines, tracing its conception to the us military-industrial complex. Nor does Zuboff’s idea of ‘digital dispossession’—or for that matter Harvey’s original ‘accumulation by dispossession’—fully fathom the qualitative transformations these new practices entail. To be dispossessed suggests there must have been an earlier form of possession that has been violated. This becomes more complex when the possession in question takes the form of data. In what way does one ‘own’, say, a search term entered into Google? Or the string of digits that represent one’s locational coordinates, as calculated by interactions between a mobile phone and orbiting satellites? My physical location may be abstracted to something like -30.177092,153.185340 digital degrees; but these—and the many other data traces that the tech-titans use—do not exist before the web of devices and sensors abstract them into the digital realm. They only make sense through the powerful abstractions of the Global Positioning System, the planet-enmeshing apparatus of networked computing-machines and gps satellites, travelling at nearly 9,000 mph, 12,000 miles above the earth’s surface, which require the application of Einstein’s theories of relativity to function. This techno-scientific process renders the planet’s surface as a general equivalent, within which the digital degrees drawn from my embodied location are produced on a more abstract level, with this process in turn producing a new organizational capacity. We need theories that can critically analyse these new levels of abstraction and map the qualitative transformations taking place.

In what follows, I outline an alternative approach. I argue that the concept of cybernetic capitalism supplies a framework that can encompass both the deep historical processes and the radical discontinuities of our current conjuncture, conjugating the analytically distinct levels of speculative finance and techno-scientific enquiry, concentrations of wealth and social power and disembodied forms of communication.footnote⁴ The term ‘cybernetic’ derives of course from the Greek kubernētikós, or ‘steersman’, etymologically related to ‘govern’. Plato’s ship of state famously required a true pilot, combining knowledge of the stars and winds with commanding authority. But the coinage of ‘cybernetics’ in the 1940s, emerging from the work of an elite group of scientists, engineers and technicians at the heart of the us military-industrial complex, emphasized instead the unity of communications and control.footnote⁵

Any theorization of communications will need to foreground the concept of abstraction—in the sense, not of a concrete-abstract dichotomy, but as a material social practice with deep historical roots. Writing itself is an abstraction of speech, translating it into symbols that can be embedded in an external technology, such as a clay tablet. The means and forces of abstraction appear to have undergone an uneven process of intensification across human history but reached new heights with the emergence of early modernity in Europe in the ‘long sixteenth century’ (c.1450–1640), manifested in the rise of print technology in communications, the scientific method for inquiry, double-entry bookkeeping in accountancy, perspective in painting and rationalized cartography in interpreting space, to name but a few. The ensemble of these practices facilitated expansion and extraction, centralization and concentration, acceleration and accumulation, underpinning the early history of capitalist modernity.

A key figure in this early ‘scientific revolution’ was the English statesman and philosopher, Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Bacon is credited with many things, being the ‘father of modern science’ for one, as well as being the first to conceive of a research institute, the first to imagine industrial sciences as a source of economic and political power, and the first technocrat. He was also a pioneer of science fiction. His incomplete utopian novel, New Atlantis, written in 1624 and published posthumously, imagined the workings of a state-sponsored scientific research institute on a fictitious Pacific Island. There the inhabitants practised Bacon’s experimental method of isolating natural phenomena in controlled settings where they could be subject to instrumental analysis and rational inquiry. Running with Bacon’s aphorism, scientia potesta est—knowledge is power—his successors studied nature in order to extract secrets that could lead to prediction and control, to establish the ‘Empire of Man’ over creation. This drive to dominate was central to what the American urbanist Lewis Mumford called capitalism’s ‘quest for power by means of abstractions’—a quest that would create enduring connections ‘with more vulgar forms of conquest, those of the trader, the inventor, the ruthless conquistador, the driving industrialist seeking to displace natural abundance and natural satisfactions with those he could profitably sell.’ Abstraction became problematic, as it facilitated dominion over nature, including human nature, and over other peoples.footnote⁶