The domain of objects and machines, as much as capital itself, is increasingly presented in the guise of an animistic religion. Everything is put into question up to and including the status of truth. Certainties and convictions are held to be the truth. Reason needs not to be employed. Simply believing and surrendering oneself is enough. As a result, public deliberation, which is one of democracy’s essential features, no longer consists in discussing and seeking collectively, before the eyes of all citizens, the truth and, ultimately, justice. The great opposition no longer being that between truth and falsity, the worst thing is henceforth doubt. For, in the concrete struggle opposing us to our enemies, doubt hinders the total freeing of the voluntarist, emotional, and vital energies necessary for the use of violence and, if necessary, for shedding blood.
The reserves of credulity have similarly accrued. Paradoxically, this accrual has gone hand in hand with an exponential acceleration of technological development and industrial innovation, the unremitting digitalization of facts and things, and the relative generalizing of what might be called electronic life and its double or robotically adjusted life. A new and unprecedented phase in the history of humanity has effectively begun, in which it will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish human organisms from electronic flows, the life of humans from that of processors. This phase is made possible by accumulated know-how concerning the storage of enormous data flows, by the extreme power and speed of their processing, and by advances in algorithmic computation. The terminal point of this digital-cognitive turn could well be a widespread infiltration of microchips into biological tissues. Already under way, this humanomachinic coupling has not only led to the genesis of new mythologies of the technical object. It has also had the immediate consequence of calling into question the very status of the modern subject stemming from the humanist tradition.
– Necropolitics (2019), pp. 55-6