Mapping the Contemporary Articulation of the Society of Control: Big-Data, 'Post-truth'-Disinformation and Network-Imperialism

Download or read book Mapping the Contemporary Articulation of the Society of Control: Big-Data, 'Post-truth'-Disinformation and Network-Imperialism written by Nils Makauskas and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the contemporary articulation of the Society of Control, online-platforms such as Facebook have vastly extended the breadth of surveillance and depth of control exerted by capital, used to guide our subjectivation within circuits amenable to the accumulation of surplus-value. As digital-networks facilitate the proliferation of information, the symbolic order becomes increasingly fractured and the capacity for previously authoritative sources such as news media to secure common meaning declines (Andrejevic, 2013). Through examining the development of control societies into Platform Capitalism, as well as the Cambridge Analytica and "Fake News" scandals emerging within the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, this thesis seeks to examine two converging strategies through which capitalism attempts to maintain its domination. The first is the control exerted over our subjectivation as statistical technologies facilitate the production of fine-grained inferences from unstructured data, such as our seemingly arbitrary Facebook likes being used to infer sexual orientation, ethnicity and political views (Kosinski, Stillwell, & Graepel, 2013). The second is the exploitation of a decline in symbolic efficiency, which the emergence of a 'post-truth' politics is symptomatic of. A problem which results in the subject turning towards affect as a means to resolve meaning (with affect measurable and exploited through data-analytics), and a culture of conspiratorial-cynicism which makes disinformation such as "fake news" effective. This thesis further examines the centralization of the internet through monopoly platforms as an expansion of imperialism, seeking to examine their role in contesting the sovereignty of the nation-state and shaping the terrain of political struggle.