Neoliberalism has created the conditions for a renewed convergence, and at times fusion, between the living human being and objects, artifacts, or the technologies that supplement or augment us and are in the process transfigured and transformed by us. This event, which we can equate to a return to animism, is nevertheless not without danger for the idea of emancipation in this age of crypto-fascism. What does it portend for the future of democracy — democracy understood not in national terms but as a kind of planetary and shared responsibility and agency in relation to the future of all inhabitants of the Earth, humans and other-than-humans?
A first reason has to do with science’s having turned into fiction and fiction into the real — all of which has led to a profound destabilization of what, not so long ago, counted as the ground for knowledge and, by extension, power and accountability. After all, the fact is that today there is hardly any consensus concerning what constitutes reality and how to access it. In the absence of such a consensus, all that we are left with is ontological difference. Every form of difference — minor differences included — is imparted ontological attributes in a context in which we cannot refer to one and the same external deity who would have the last word when it comes to grant- ing a singular truth or adjudicating between right and wrong.
A major consequence of this apparent collapse of the basic foundations of knowledge and cognition is the impossibility of accountability, the radical impossibility we increasingly find ourselves in, specifying what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong — and in fact the obsolescence of those very categories. No wonder pure violence is back on the agenda and is being willfully embraced by all sides as the final arbiter of any and every single differend.
This condition of epistemic obsolescence and indeterminacy is itself a consequence of — or has been exacerbated by — the overreliance, under late capitalism, on modes of production of knowledge that take for facts only that which can be measured and experimented with. The trend toward a relentless impoverishment of the real has only escalated during the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. It has reached a point where today, knowledge is increasingly defined as knowledge for the market. The market in turn is increasingly reimagined as the primary mechanism for the validation of truth. Since markets themselves are increasingly turning into algorithmic structures and technologies, the only useful knowledge today is supposed to be algorithmic. Instead of actual human beings with a body, history, and flesh, big data and statistical inferences are all that count, and both are mostly derived from computation.
As Matteo Pasquinelli explains, algorithmic reason is a form of rationality whose finality is about the understanding of vast amounts of data according to a specific vector, the recording of emerging properties, and the forecasting of tendencies. To some extent, Pasquinelli’s metadata society is characterized by the “accumulation of information about information.” Algorithms mostly mine metadata for the purpose of measurement and forecasting, of establishing patterns of behavior, detecting anomalies, and recognizing an enemy. The enemy is constructed as a reality via statistics, modeling, and mathematics.
Power, thus, is increasingly about identifying patterns or connections in random data, in a context in which the opposition between information and knowledge, knowledge and data, data and image, thinking and seeing, appears to collapse. Computational and algorithmic logic is now found at the very source of general perception. As a result of the conflation of knowledge, computation, and markets, contempt has been extended to anyone who has nothing to sell and nothing to buy or anything that cannot be bought and sold. The Enlightenment notion of the rational subject capable of deliberation and choice is gradually being replaced by the consciously deliberating and choosing consumer. The more the real is deprived of enchantment, the more people yearn for enchantment. At the same time, we are witnessing the loss of authority of established forms of evidence-making, a growing disregard for scientific expertise, and the reduction of that expertise to numbers and codes, all of which throws into confusion the related forms of accountability. How do we know in the face of uncertainty?
The reason is that the very concept of evidence has been discredited, throwing into confusion the related forms of accountability, since there is no accountability without some form or other of evidence. How we are to get to the reality of reality is now the question at the center of public debate, as recently illustrated by the notion of a postfact. The main casualty of a “postfact world” is arguably democracy itself. Democracy has no future in a factless world or in a world without evidence, that is, accountability. Such a world is, by definition, hostile to the very idea of reason and freedom.
– Necropolitics (2019), pp. 108-10