The Message is Murder The Message is Murder Substrates of Computational Capital Jonathan Beller First published 2018 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Jonathan Beller 2018 The right of Jonathan Beller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 The interview in the appendix is republished with thanks to Kulturpunkt and their aim “to create an online and offline base of documentation available to everyone and free for further use.” British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 7453 3731 ISBN 978 7453 3730 ISBN 978 7868 0178 ISBN 978 7868 0180 ISBN 978 7868 0179 Hardback Paperback PDF eBook Kindle eBook EPUB eBook This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America For my students, who so generously engaged Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death —Ruth Wilson Gilmore Statistics is the science of distribution —Norbert Weiner Contents1 Introduction1 PART I: INFORMATICS OF INSCRIPTION/INSCRIPTION OF INFORMATICS Gramsci’s Press: Why We Game 19 A Message from Borges: The Informatic Labyrinth 32 Alan Turing’s Self-Defense: On Not Castrating the Machines 44 Shannon/Hitchcock: Another Method for the Letters57 The Internet of Value, by Karl Marx: Information as Cosmically Distributed Alienation 76 PART II: PHOTO-GRAPHOLOGY, PSYCHOTIC CALCULUS, INFORMATIC LABOR Camera Obscura After All: The Racist Writing with Light 99 Pathologistics of Attention 115 Prosthetics of Whiteness: Drone Psychosis 137 The Capital of Information: Fractal Fascism, Informatic Labor and M-I-M' 158 Appendix From the Cinematic Mode of Production to Computational Capital: An Interview conducted by Ante Jeric and Diana Meheik for Kulturpunk175 Notes190 Index203 notes 195 form” and “the capacity to give form” well understands the social history, that is, the dialectics of the brain as a structure She writes, “How could we not note a similarity of functioning between this economic organization and the neuronal organization? How could we not interrogate the parallelism between the transformation of the spirit of capitalism between the sixties and the nineties) and the modification, brought about in approximately the same period, of our view of the cerebral structures? I have underlined the effect of the naturalization of the social attached to neuronal functioning Boltanski and Chiapello confirm this: ‘This is how the forms of capitalist production accede to representation in each epoch, by mobilizing concepts and tools that were initially developed largely autonomously in the theoretical sphere or in the domain of basic scientific research This is the case with neurology and computer science today In the past it was true of such notions as system, structure, technostructure, energy entropy, evolution, dynamics and exponential growth’ () Like neuronal cohesion, contemporary corporate economic and social organization is not of a central or centralizing type but rests on a plurality of mobile and atomistic centers, deployed according to a connectionist model In this sense, it appears that neuronal functioning has become the nature of the social even more than its naturalizing tool Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5, 41–2 Karl Marx, Capital Vol.1, cited in (ed) R C Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader (New York and London: Norton, 1978), 201 Sebastian Franklin, Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 24 Italics in original 8 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol 1, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996), 55 9 Franklin, Control, 24 10 Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics, cited in N Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post-Human (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 14 11 Weiner, Cybernetics, 125 12 Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2nd series, vol 42 (1936), pp 230–65 For an amazing text on this text, see Charles Petzold, The Annotated Turing (Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing Inc., 2008) 13 Neferti Tadiar, “City Everywhere,” Theory, Culture and Society, vol 33 (7–8) (2016): 57–83 14 Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 28 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986), 125 15 Marx, V28, 129 16 The distinction between the price of a particular “commodity x” and value inherent in a particular “commodity x” amounts to the distinction between a proprietary contract (as price) and a specific derivative of the social totality at point “commodity x”—an exchange value as a measure of 196 the message is murder abstract universal labor time The market is a space of adequation where in one and the same process value can realize its price and capital can valorize itself The expansion of the market meant the proliferation of both exchange values and prices These quantitative transformations lead to qualitative shifts, as, for example the shift from the commodity as object to the commodity as integrated components distributed across a network In the CMP I argued that price was a proto-image, that the fetish character of the commodity was already a becoming-image of the commodity-form Leaving aside the fascinating discussion of photography as a “civil contract” (Azoulay), let me just say here that with the expansion of prices into images comes the development of exchange value into information This is another way of saying that new orders of pricing were being born that required both the generalization of exchange value as information and the movement of commodification away from objects per se toward sociality itself Returning to Borges we note the requirement for new methods of measurement and accounting necessary for the increasing complexity of social relations materially affecting every spatio-temporal movement The “information age” follows upon the Industrial Revolution as a transformation in the modality of capitalist exploitation, as the first blush of computational capital 17 Marx, V28, 131–2 18 Ibid., 154 19 Ibid., 155 20 Ibid 21 Marx, V28, 157 22 See Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987) 23 I can think of no better example of this practice than Diane Nelson’s book Who Counts Diane M Nelson, Who Counts: The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015 24 Cited in Benjamin Peters, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2016), p 15 25 MIT Physicist Max Tegmark claims that consciousness is a state of matter And “how the particular properties of consciousness might arise from the physical laws that govern our universe Interestingly, the new approach to consciousness has come from outside the physics community, principally from neuroscientists such as Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin in Madison In 2008, Tononi proposed that a system demonstrating consciousness must have two specific traits First, the system must be able to store and process large amounts of information In other words consciousness is essentially a phenomenon of information And second, this information must be integrated in a unified whole so that it is impossible to divide into independent parts That reflects the experience that each instance of consciousness is a unified whole that cannot be decomposed into separate components Both of these traits can be specified, mathematically allowing physicists like Tegmark to reason about them for the first time He begins by outlining the basic properties that a conscious system must have Given notes 197 that it is a phenomenon of information, a conscious system must be able to store in a memory and retrieve it efficiently It must also be able to process this data, like a computer but one that is much more flexible and powerful than the silicon-based devices we are familiar with Tegmark borrows the term computronium to describe matter that can this and cites other work showing that today’s computers underperform the theoretical limits of computing by some 38 orders of magnitude (https://medium.com/ the-physics-arxiv-blog/why-physicists-are-saying-consciousness-is-astate-of-matter-like-a-solid-a-liquid-or-a-gas-5e7ed624986d ) Chapter 1 Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006) Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p 237 Ibid., 238 Stephen Heath, “Questions of Cinema” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” Vision and Visuality, (ed) Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 1988) Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: W W Norton, 1977), 106 See Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 10 10 Ibid., 11 11 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2008), 113 12 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 13 13 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 81 14 Saidiya V Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 15 See Vicente Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke UP, 2000); Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Jane Gaines, Contested Culture: the Image, the Voice and the Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) 16 Franklin, Control, 30 17 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 34 198 the message is murder 18 Richard Avedon, William Casby, Born a Slave, in Barthes, Camera Lucida, 35 19 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 36 20 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 80 Italics in the original 21 Regis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms (London: Verso, 1996), 31 22 Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 249 23 Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Captive Bodies: Postcolonial Subjectivity in Cinema (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics vol.17, no.2 (1987) 24 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans Anthony Matthews (London: Reaktion, 2000) Chapter George Lukacs, “The Ideology of Modernism” in (ed) Arpad Kadarkay, The Lukacs Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962/1995) 2 Regis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms (London: Verso, 1996), 13 Benjamin H Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016) 4 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert Taylor (New York and London: Norton, 1978), 89 Lawrence Rickels, The Psycho Records (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2016) 6 Allen Feldman, Archives of the Insensible: War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) While the shattering of historically and biopolitically established continuities (of the sensory-motor schema, of the temporality of contemplation, of the grammar of sense) through the fragmentation and fractalization of attention by and as media technologies indicate the objective matrix of events that capital-logic has imposed upon the numerous members of our species, the psycho-subjective results of post-Fordist digital labor are aphasia, abjection, autism, dyslexia, fear, panic, exhaustion, and collapse In this context of expropriation distributed over the whole social field and of its resultant physical, psychic, and metaphysical collapses, it is difficult to identify the real source of our problems For an excellent account on the emergence and formation of attentional practices, see Bernard Stiegler, “Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon,” Culture Machine (2012), www.culture machine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/464/501 [Accessed April 14, 2017] 8 Owen Hatherley, The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-garde (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 42 notes 199 Walter Benjamin, “Chaplin,” in Michael W Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 2: Part 1927–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929/2005), 94; cited in Owen Hatherley, The Chaplin Machine: Slaptstick, Fordism, and the Communist Avant-Garde (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 43 10 Nor, I think, does the fact that the scene was created with what was known as a glass shot: “The deep drop-off to the department store’s lower floors was actually painted on a pane of glass, placed in front of the camera and perfectly aligned with the real setting, creating a seamless illusion.” For the full text, see Bill Demain, “6 Dangerous Stunts of the Silent Movie Era,” Mental Floss (August 4, 2011) http://mentalfloss.com/article/28422/6dangerous-stunts-silent-movie-era#ixzz2WDaJv8RG 11 Second version in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writing Volume 3: 1935-38, Howard Eiland and Michael W Jennings (eds) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 118 12 Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema?, Vol 1, translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973) 13 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London: Continuum, 1989), 98ff 14 Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Freud, vol 21, (ed) James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1927/1961), 154 15 Antonio Gramsci, “State and Civil Society,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 206–76 16 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), 218 17 Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, (ed) Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), Italics in original 18 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14 19 Ibid 20 Franỗois Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967) Accessed in excerpted form at http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/ some_came_running/2012/11/literary-interlude.html [Accessed April 17, 2017] 21 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 19 22 Sylvi Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012) 23 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 20–21 Chapter The numbers vary, of course See, for example, John Thomas Didymus, “Pornography, ‘Everybody’ Is Watching It, Statistics Say,” Digital Journal 200 the message is murder (April 9, 2012) http://digitaljournal.com/article/322668 [Accessed April 16, 2017] 2 Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, translated by Daniel Ross, 45–56 (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010) See also Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (New York: Beacon, 1964) Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967) Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) Ibid., 11 Ibid., 14 7 bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, (ed) Amelia Jones (London: Routledge, 2003), 94–105 Frank B Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S Antagonisms (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010), 304 Wilderson, 265 10 Wilderson, 263 11 Wilderson, 281 12 Raoul Peck, I Am Not Your Negro: A Major Motion Picture By Raoul Peck (New York: Vintage Books, 2017), 87 13 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 14 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 334 15 Robert Silva, “Flashback Five—The Best Dirty Harry Movies,” AMC Blog (September 10, 2010), http://blogs.amctv.com/movie-blog/2010/09/the-bestdirtyharry-movies.php 16 Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) 17 Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone (New York: New Press, 2015) 18 See Allen Feldman, “The Structuring Enemy and Archival War,” PMLA 124, no (2009), pp 1704–13, and “Securocratic Wars of Public Safety: Globalized Policing as Scopic Regime,” Interventions 6, no (2004), pp. 330–50 See also Allen Feldman, Archives of the Insensible: War, Photo politics and Dead Memory, University of Chicago Press, 2016 19 Medea Benjamin in Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control (New York & London: Verso Books, 2013), 158 20 Benjamin, Drone Warfare, 157 21 Franklin, Control, 166 22 Ibid 23 Benjamin H Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016) 24 Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012), 21 25 Ibid., 22, emphasis in original 26 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2007) 27 W J T Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media,” Journal of Visual Culture 4, no (2005), pp 257–66 notes 201 28 Tadiar, “City Everywhere.” 29 Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear (New York: Semiotext(e), 2012), 30 30 Ibid., 30, 31 31 Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press/ University Press of New England, 2006) 32 Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, “Pussy Riot Closing Statements,” n+1 (August 13, 2012), http://nplusonemag com/pussy-riot-closing-statements [Accessed April 17, 2017] 33 Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” in The New Media Reader (ed) Waldrip Fuin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 277–88 34 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” in Ficciones, translated by Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove, 1962), 89–104 35 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 12 36 Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 133 Flusser makes a similar argument in Towards a Philosophy of Photography Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, translated by Anthony Matthews (London: Reaktion, 2000) Chapter Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, translated by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 241 Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text, 22.2 (2004), pp 117–39 3 See anarchiveofourown.org, “a fan-created, fan-run, non-profit, noncommercial archive for transformative fanworks, like fanfiction, fanart, fan videos, and podfic.” See also, Allen Feldman, Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics and Dead Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) 4 Romano Alquati, see Matteo Pasquinelli, “Italian Operaismo and the Information Machine,” Theory, Culture & Society, 32(3) (February 2, 2014) Jonathan Beller, “The Programmable Image of Capital: M-I-C-I'-M' and the World Computer,” Postmodern Culture, vol 26, no (January 2016) 6 Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production As we saw earlier, Cubitt brilliantly argues that “the environment” as an idea is itself the result of the economic “externalities” of the accounting systems of capitalism and colonialism—it is the supposedly extrinsic space of capital (the colonies, “nature”) where it can freely dump its waste, including the energetic and toxic waste of computational processes See Sean Cubitt, “Decolononizing Ecomedia,” Cultural Politics, vol.10, no.3 (2014), pp. 275–86; and “Integral Waste,” Theory, Culture and Society (July 27, 2014) Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future (Edinburgh, Oakland, Baltimore: AK Press, 2011), 35 202 the message is murder The working conditions at Foxconn factories are fairly well known, but mining conditions for tin and coltan in Congo are less well documented, as is the emergence of this brutal rare-earth industry in the footprint of rubber plantations For more see Kevin Bales, “Your Phone Was Made By Slaves: A Primer on the Secret Economy” from Bales, Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2016) excerpted at blog.longreads.com 10 In the article sighted above, Pasquinelli outlines three determinations of metadata Metadata as the measure of the value of social relations Metadata as implementation of machinic intelligence Metadata as new form of biopolitical control (dataveillance), Pasquinelli, “The Labor of Abstraction,” 64 11 Tadiar, “City Everywhere,” 57–83 12 The Information Nexus: Global Capitalism from the Renaissance to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) 13 For an excellent analysis see, Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) 14 See ethereum.org for the details Index Adorno, Theodor, 26, 27, 31, 37, 53, 124 Agamben, Giorgio, 181 Alloula, Malek, 105 Alquati, Romano, 161 Althusser, Louis, 54, 55, 88, 108 Alt Right, 159 Anderson, Laurie, 12 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 124, 150, 156–7 Blow-Up (film), 150, 156 Zabriske Point (film), 124 apartheid, 48, 112, 142, 180 Apple, 89, 164 attention, 36, 39, 82, 140, 147, 173, 180, 188 attention economy, 9, 14, 22, 40–41, 89, 96, 146, 158–68 expropriation of, 153, 154 pathologistics of attention, 115–36 Avaaz, 187 Avedon, Richard, 107, 113 Azoulay, Ariella, 104, 185 Babbage, Charles, 7, 82, 83 Baldwin, James, 115, 119, 140, 141 banks, 128, 129, 147, 157, 168–73, 181 Barthes, Roland, 14, 53, 149 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 99–114 Bateson, Gregory, 8–9, 91, 155 Bazin, Andre, 124, 126, 149 Benjamin, Medea, 144 Benjamin, Walter, 90, 121, 123, 129, 158–9, 160, 170 unconscious optics, 124, 125 Benning, Sadie, 119 Berardi, Franco, 34, 39, 164, 188 Bernal, Ishmael, 184 Beyoncé, 74 Bifo See Berardi, Franco biochip, 163–4 biometrics, 14, 20, 112, 165 bios, 4, 11, 20, 112, 165 bitcoin, 86, 87, 93, 168–72, 174 #Blacklivesmatter, 74 blockchain, 86, 168–72 Borges, Jorge Luis, 1, 13, 24, 32–43, 44, 55, 75, 76, 154 Garden of Forking Paths (essay), 31, 32–5, 37, 62, 110, 155 Library of Babel (essay), 59 Bostrom, Nick, 93 Bratton, Benjamin, 10, 147 Brocka, Lino, 184 Browne, Simone, 10, 164 Burnett, Charles, 142 Burr, Aaron, 73 Business Today (magazine), 187 Butler, Judith, 47, 53 Cabinet (magazine), 180 camera, 13, 31, 66, 99, 101–2, 104, 111, 132–4, 142, 148, 150 capital accumulation, 38, 41, 84, 95, 155, 161, 166, 173, 175–7, 180, 181 Capitalism, 1, 10, 13, 20, 22, 38, 41, 52, 65, 82, 136, 158, 163, 167 cognitive capitalism, 41, 86, 118, 120 computational capitalism, 14, 88, 92, 120, 175–89 digital culture, 5, 29, 160 environment, 21, 78 industrial capitalism, 5, 121, 123 informatic capitalism, 31, 77, 81, 91 204 the message is murder racial capitalism, 2, 3, 8, 10, 89, 93, 94, 112, 119, 145, 147, 150, 151–2 sex/gender capitalism, 112 valorization, 9, 40, 161, 164 celebrity, 89, 156, 159, 165 Chamayou, 115, 143 Chaplin, Charlie, 14, 121–4, 136, 138, 142 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 34, 139, 141, 142 China, 5, 32, 35, 159 Christianity, Chun, Wendy, 39 Cixous, Hélène, 52 Clover, Carol, 67 CMP (The Cinematic Mode of Production) (Beller), 87, 163, 178, 182, 188, 196n16 colonialism, 2, 5, 38, 101, 155, 172, 184 Britain, 35 computational colonialism, 6, 10, 165 environment, 78, 201n7 racial capitalism, 20, 77, 104, 109, 111, 143, 164–5, 180 settler colonialism, 23, 186 colonization, 3, 6, 8, 38, 72, 78, 105, 173, 183 of communication, 10, 12, 23, 53, 112, 113 decolonization, 20, 74, 75, 79, 81, 92, 101, 119, 173 commodities, 21, 29, 40, 164, 168, 169, 178, 180 Marx, 80, 82, 85, 163 Crary, Jonathan, 99, 100 cryptocurrency, 168, 172 Cuba, 43 Cubitt, Sean, 21, 78, 80, 163, 201n7 Curtis, Tony, 141 DAO (Distributed Autonomous Organization), 171 Darwin, Charles, 45, 149 data visualization, 13, 38, 56, 105, 112, 172 Debord, Guy, 38, 39, 88, 156, 159, 180 Debray, Regis, 22, 54, 99, 108 decolonization, 20, 74, 75, 79, 81, 92, 101, 119, 173 de Leon, Mike, 184 Deleuze, Gilles, 53, 101, 124, 125, 177 Department of Defense See U.S Department of Defense Deren, Maya, 119 Derrida, Jacques, 52, 185 Descartes, 27, 91 Digital Culture, 1–2, 20, 29, 38, 118, 188 DC1 (Digital Culture 1.0), 5–6, 29, 68, 82, 160, 187 DC2 (Digital Culture 2.0), 5, 9, 68, 82, 160, 187, 188 Dinerstein, Joel, 92 discrete state machine, 13, 35, 48, 147, 150, 188 Disney, 164 Driscoll, Mark, 76 drones, 15, 115, 119, 137, 143–5, 186 Duke University, 175, 182 Durham, North Carolina, 182 Dyer-Witheford, Nick, 29, 187 East India Company, 165 Eastwood, Clint, 141, 142 Economist (magazine), 186 Einstein, Albert, 32–3 Eisenstein, Sergei, 126, 150, 153, 176, 177, 178, 182 Battleship Potemkin (film), 126 Ethereum, 86, 171, 172, 174 existentialism, 34, 36, 103, 140, 142, 143, 154, 185 Facebook, 9, 87, 89, 93, 135, 188 Fanon, Frantz, 103, 138, 141 fascism, 25, 37, 120, 125, 127, 129, 139, 184 fractal fascism, 5, 120, 137, 146, 147, 158–74 index 205 Federici, Sylvia, 135 Feldman, Allen, 53, 54, 144, 152, 160 fetishism, 2, 3, 109, 113, 124, 127, 128, 129, 131, 134, 178 Fleetwood, Nicole, 103–4, 143 Flusser, Vilém, 27, 31, 93, 104–5, 109, 110, 112, 113, 148–9 Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey, 113 France, 103, 159 Franklin, Sebastian, 10, 81, 82, 105, 145, 146 Fregoso, Rosalinda, 80 Freud, Sigmund, 67, 128–9, 131, 139, 148 Gaines, Jane, 105 Galileo Galilei, 51 Galloway, Alex, 148, 149 Gates, Bill, 74, 127 Gates, Henry Louis, 104 Germany, 35, 119 Global North, 180, 181 Global South, 2, 94, 101, 180, 181 Goldsby, Jacqueline, 99, 100, 104, 105, 110 Google, 87, 89, 151, 164, 188 Gordon-Reed, Annette, 73 Goss, Emma, 47 Gramsci, Antonio, 13, 19–31, 68, 127, 174 Greece, 159, 187 Guatemala, 43 Guattari, Félix, 53 Guevara, Che, 42–3 Gutenberg, 28, 29, 59, 118 homogenous segmentation, 22, 24, 28–9, 59, 118 Hamilton, Alexander, 73 Hands, Joss, 187 Haraway, Donna, 15, 76, 79 Hardt, Michael, 39 Hartman, Saidiya, 141 Hart, Liddell, 33, 34 Hartman, Saidiya, 70, 104 Hatherly, Owen, 121 Hayek, Friedrich, 86, 187 Hayles, Kathryn, 45, 46 Heath, Stephen, 100, 101, 140, 141 Hegel, 110 hegemony, 14, 19, 35, 39, 48, 52, 74, 85, 125, 136, 138, 159, 160 Britain, 35 racism, 138 Hemings, Madison, 73 Hemings, Sally, 73 Higgs-Bozon, 95 Hitchcock, Alfred, 1, 13, 14, 57–75, 124, 130–33, 136 Psycho (film), 59–75, 130, 133 Hobbes, Thomas, 57, 87 Hollerith, Herman, 105 Holocaust, 35, 105 hooks, bell, 105, 119, 139 Horkheimer, 26, 27, 31, 37, 53, 124 humanism, 6, 12, 46, 48, 92, 107, 143, 150 IBM, 105 Ilouz, Eva, 117 imperialism, 2, 55, 75, 94, 143, 155, 180, 184 imprisonment, 25–6, 32, 101, 109, 154, 183 Inception (film), 109, 124 Industrial Revolution, 28, 118, 163, 176 information, 1, 3, 7–15, 19, 20, 23, 34–9, 62, 69–70, 75, 109, 150–5, 188 bios, 115 dead labor, 146 exchange, 47 history, 56, 57 management, 7, 25 Marx, 76–96, 158–74, 196n16, 196n25 operationalized information, 31 photography, 112 statistics, 73 inscription, 24, 27, 34, 70, 72, 92, 102, 109, 110, 111, 120, 155 206 the message is murder Instagram, 36, 96, 159, 166 Ireland, 35 ISIS, 24, 159 Israel, 159 Jacobs, Harriet, 101–2, 111 Jafa, Arthur, 138 Jameson, Fredric, 55, 152, 175, 188 Japan, 183 Jay, Martin, 101 Jefferson, Thomas, 72–3 Jeric, Ante, 175–89 Jim Crow, 142 Joyce, James, 115 Judy, Ronald, 141 Kafka, Franz, 115 Kelley, Robin, 10 Kickstarter, 187 Kittler, Friedrich, 49, 53, 58, 145, 146 Kulturpunk (magazine), 175–89 labor, 4, 35, 39, 69, 81, 151, 181 alienated labor, 77, 81, 88 dead labor, 68, 84, 94, 146 division of, 27 expropriation of, 1, 7, 120 farm labor, 29 immaterial labor, 82, 179 informatic labor, 13, 15, 97–114, 158–74 labor power, 80, 95, 179 labor time, 23, 26, 82, 179, 180, 195n16 sensual labor, 7, 22, 28, 40, 85, 118, 137, 146, 176, 180 transformation of, unpaid labor, 12, 40, 79, 80 wage labor, 7, 12, 41, 77, 79, 82, 86, 168, 173 Lacan, Jacques, 55, 62, 67, 102, 129, 133, 140 Freud, 131, 148 language, 61, 70 Marxism, 58 Latin America, 42 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 39 Lee, Benjamin, 40 Leigh, Janet, 131 Lem, Stanislaw, 76 Liu, Lydia, 67 Lola (film), 185 Lovecraft, H.P., 79 Lovelace, Lady, 7, 83 Lukacs, György, 115, 116 Malabou, Catherine, 194n5 Malone, Dumas, 72, 73 Mambety, Djibril, 119 Mann, Thomas, 115, 141 Marcos, Ferdinand, 184 Marcuse, Herbert, 137–8 Marks, Steven G., 167 Marriot, David, 141 Marshall, John, 73 Martin, Randy, 11, 40 Marx, Karl, 1, 4, 13, 25, 39, 76–96, 156, 163, 166 Capital (Marx), 179 commodity-form, 41 dead labor, 26 machine, 7, 68, 118 materialism, 55, 68, 83 Marxism, 20, 40, 116, 122, 135 Lacanian Marxism, 58 masturbation, 65, 66, 136, 137 Mbembe, Achille, 85, 141 Mckittrick, Katherine, 10 McLuhan, Marshall, 2, 13, 21, 22, 25, 46, 53, 72, 149 chicken and egg question, 28–30, 96, 157 homogenous segmentation, 22, 24, 28–9, 118 medium, 2, 8, 14, 19–31, 33, 34, 67, 72, 84, 95 assembly line, 123 bitcoin, 168 capital, 128 cinema, 67, 149 death, 85 digital media, 117, 148 index 207 justice, 133 language, 49, 52–3 newsreel, 125 photography, 104, 107, 109 war, 53, 158, 160 Meheik, Diana, 175–89 Meister, Bob, 40 Mendoza, Brillante, 185 metaphysics, 40, 41, 46, 48, 50, 52, 53–6, 160, 175, 185 Metz, Christian, 38 Microsoft, 172 Miéville, China, Mind (journal), 46, 84 Minh-ha, Trin T., 119, 150 Mirowski, Philip, 95 Mitchell, W J T., 149 money, 11, 20, 41, 82, 90, 118, 138, 184 bitcoin, 168 capital, 29, 72, 163 circulation, 86, 88 Citizen Kane, 125, 127, 128, 129 commodities, 86 containerization, 30 informationalization of, 93 programmable, 170–2 Psycho, 66, 131, 134, 135 Monster’s Ball (film), 140 montage, 118, 121, 122, 123, 125–6, 129, 149, 150, 153 Moten, Fred, 102 Mulvey, Laura, 63, 131–2, 133, 135 necropolitics, 85, 137 Negri, Antonio, 39 Nelson, Diane, 43 von Neuman, John, 95 Newton, Isaac, 4, 83 New York Times (newspaper), 25, 55 Nietzsche, 52, 53, 185 NRA (National Rifle Association), 159 Obama, Barack, 144, 186 objectification, 64, 65, 66, 102, 104, 109–12, 138, 143 Ocampo, H.R., 183 Oedipus complex, 66 Olivetti, 161 OOO (object-oriented ontology), 94 optics, 14, 15, 99, 124–5, 136, 148 Orwell, George, 158 Parnet, Claire, 101 Pasquinelli, Matteo, 10, 166 patriarchy, 55, 63, 64, 65, 132, 133 capitalist patriarchy, 134, 135, 136, 138, 155 heteropatriarchy, 8, 47, 52, 66, 67, 77 Patterson, Orlando, 141 Peck, Raoul, 140 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 14 Philip, M NourbeSe, 70 Philippines, 105, 182, 184 philosophy, 26, 46, 110, 116, 140, 141, 151–2, 161 language, 12, 49 photography, 1, 4, 14, 15, 99–113, 136, 149, 150, 185 Pietz, William, 53 Poitier, Sidney, 141 Polyani, Karl, 28 Portillo, Lourdes, 109 post-Fordism, 1, 39, 41, 82, 93, 118, 173 Pound, Ezra, 56 proletarianization, 120, 137, 143, 154 psychosis, 2, 6, 13, 15, 89, 115, 123–4, 131, 137–57 Hitchcock, 14, 57–75, 77, 132 punctum, 103, 106, 107, 109, 111 racism, 9, 10, 14, 35, 55, 73, 137, 138, 140, 141–3, 157, 159 anti-racism, 119 capitalist production, 38 computational racism, 148 historical racism, 15, 155 photography, 100–114 Rafeal, Vicente, 105 repudiation, 131–6 Retamar, Roberto Fernández, 42, 43 revolution, 4, 12, 22, 23, 86, 119, 126, 138, 157, 172, 174, 176–8, 186 208 the message is murder derivative revolution, 40 Latin America, 42–3 Russian Revolution, 36 Rickels, Laurence, 67, 115, 137 Rotman, Brian, 91 Russian Revolution, 36 Tsun, Yu, 32–6, 42, 155 Turing, Alan, 1, 13, 27, 37, 42, 44–56, 83, 84, 91, 171 Universal Turing Machine, 83–4, 187–8 Twitter, 89 Sandoval, Chela, 102 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 133 screen, 37, 117, 160, 161, 164, 179, 188 image, 69, 161, 172 semiotics, 13, 23, 74, 103, 107, 108, 111, 113, 120, 172 sexism, 137, 143, 155, 159 Shannon, Claude, 1, 4, 13, 22, 37, 57–75 slavery, 5, 14, 20, 77, 101, 104, 140, 142, 143 abolition of, 49 Barthes, 106–13 Jefferson, 73 photography, 102, 108–13 Smith, Adam, 56, 87 Solanas and Gettino, 119 Solaris (film), 76, 95 Spillers, Hortense, 20, 54, 57, 72, 73, 112, 141, 152 Spivak, Gayatri, 185 Stalin, Joseph 178 Steigler, Bernard, 118, 137 subaltern, 14, 101, 173, 180 subjectivity, 27, 54, 55, 62, 68, 109, 133, 143–8, 153, 178 alienated subjectivity, 26, 173 expropriation of, 7, 153, 154 female subjectivity, 66 language, 22 of the melancholic object, 139, 142 post-colonial subjectivity, 150 racism and, 111, 137, 138 slavery, 110 U.S Department of Defense, 145 Tadiar, Neferti, 84, 166 Tarkovsky, Andre, 76, 95 Taylorism, 7, 123 Tegmark, Max, 56, 196n25 Third World, 180 valorization, 9, 40–41, 161, 164, 165 Vertov, Dziga, 82, 176, 177, 178 violence, 1, 6, 20, 91, 94, 115, 146, 150, 172, 174, 184 colonial violence, 76, 139 Global South, historical violence, 13, 73 information, 12–13 nationalism, 2, photography, racial violence, 10, 12, 100, 104, 105, 136, 143, 148, 165 sex/gender violence, 12, 192n9 of whiteness, 137–48 Virilio, Paul, 99, 153 Virno, Paolo, 39, 88, 181 visuality, 13, 14, 103, 104, 111, 112, 113, 143, 144, 149, 172, 182 Wal-Mart, 188 Watts, 142 Weaver, Warren, 37 Welles, Orson, 125 Citizen Kane (film), 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 137, 153 whiteness, 3, 66, 100, 111, 112, 136, 137–57, 139 white supremacy, 15, 73, 76, 101, 111, 119, 138, 142, 143, 154, 155 Weiss, Peter, 140 Wiener, Norbert, 23, 136 Wilderson III, Frank B., 140, 141, 142 Wosnitzer, Robert, 40 Wright, Melissa, 80 WWII, 183 Wynter, Sylvia, 53 YouTube, 159 ... dispossessed of much of the product of their attention The loss of the power of thought and decision automate historical racism and psychosis in and as the drone The drone-subject is at once prosthetic... extension of the violence of abstraction under capitalism into the cosmos The second part of Message is a re-viewing of the seeming mess of visuality and visual technologies pre- and post-discrete... and the leveraged value-expropriation of labor by capitalized industry The decline of the Fordist factory and the rise of post-Fordism make ambient computation the mise en scène of new types of