How to define the normativity of techniques in the era of the Capitalocene and surveillance?

Abstract

The article examines how to define the normativity of technologies in the era of the Capitalocene and surveillance capitalism, starting from the observation that the capitalist economy is responsible for a systematic destruction of living spaces—economic, mental, social, and political. To name this process, the author mobilizes the concept of ecofragmentation, inspired by Baptiste Morizot, and proposes rethinking technology on the basis of what Gilbert Simondon calls alimentation, understood as the articulation between means, ends, energy, materials, and human motives. The text analyzes surveillance capitalism as a sociotechnical system that structurally depends on invisibilized human labor, particularly commercial content moderation. Drawing on the case of women and men workers in the Global South, the author argues that this labor consists in assuming psychological trauma “for others,” thereby displacing norms of life and instituting a division of affective and perceptual labor. Added to this is the materiality of the digital, marked by extractivist mining practices and the exploitation of human and nonhuman populations. Building on the Simondonian concept of the transindividual, the article argues that thinking about “technologies of the future” requires forming collectives with those who materially and symbolically produce the technical world.