Algorithmic capital

0,00 €

TopicSocial Sciences

AuthorJonathan Durand Folco

AuthorJonathan Martineau

PublisherÉditions Écosociété

Accumulation, power and resistance in the age of artificial intelligence

At a time when everything seems to be speeding up in our hyper-connected lives, the separation between the ‘real’ world and the virtual is becoming increasingly blurred. For Jonathan Durand Folco and Jonathan Martineau, the technical changes underway are such that we have entered a new stage of capitalism: algorithmic capital. In twenty critical theses, they show how the exploitation of massive data and the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence are accompanied by major socio-economic and political changes. At once a dynamic of accumulation, a social relationship and a new form of power based on algorithms, it is a multidimensional reality that is already profoundly disrupting our lives.

Algorithmic capital links phenomena as varied as the rise of GAFAM, the extraction of rare metals, the fragmentation of our hyper-connected schedules, the fortunes of Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg, and US-Chinese tensions over Huawei and TikTok, the proliferation of screens, teleworking, Alexa, cryptocurrencies, military conflicts in the Congo, targeted political assassinations using drones, the climate crisis, the shortage of semi-conductors, the influencer industry, the ideology of ‘existential risks’, 24-hour delivery, etc. Forging a critical theory of algorithms and artificial intelligence is becoming urgent and necessary if we are to understand the many ramifications of algorithmic logic, it is also a way of uncovering the power relations associated with the new technologies and understanding the political economy that produces them.

The industrial revolution propelled the empire of capital in the nineteenth century: algorithms and artificial intelligence could have the same impact in the twenty-first. This is an ambitious thesis that helps us to grasp the scale of the transformations and changes underway.