Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capita… (2024)

The internet is a trap, and we have fallen into it. Powerful forces ensure we sink deeper. In Scorched Earth, Jonathan Crary pulls back the curtain to reveal the true wizard, giant corporations, employing the internet to both pacify and divide everyone. This is not division into likes and dislikes, political parties or socioeconomic class. This is division right down to the individual, isolated and powerless.

Crary says "If there is to be a livable and shared future on our planet, it will be a future offline, uncoupled from the world-destroying systems and operations of 24/7 capitalism." He points to not just selling, which allows people to skip visiting stores, but doing almost everything online, to the point where it has become mandatory. Companies routinely send customers somewhere online if they have complaints, warranty issues, want loyalty cards, discount coupons, and of course, direct purchases. Banking is all but totally online; customers literally never have to visit their branch. Voter registration is moving online. So are business meetings, family reunions, education, tax filing, postage, and applications for everything from COVID-19 test kits to class action claims. He says corporates "require digital compliance everywhere." The keyword here is "require". More and more, there is no other way.

A shutdown of the internet would not merely cause angst amongst gamers, it would cause an almost complete halt to western society. It is no longer even capable of handling business in-person. Crary claims "The internet complex is now the comprehensive global apparatus for the dissolution of society."

This is because the internet has substituted for almost all social functions as well as commercial functions. Endless scrolling fills hours a day. Americans consult their smartphones over 200 times daily. Contributing a comment online is essentially anonymous (and pointless), and interaction is generalized, rarely personal. Even when it is personal, it does not lead to closeness between people.

This sociopathic behavior is rewarded and reinforced with likes, retweets, followers and points, sucking individuals into less and less personal contact. He cites philosopher Bernard Stiegler: "'The hegemonic rule of the market' makes it impossible for an individual to love oneself or love others or to have any desire for the future."

For several years, headlines have been raging over younger generations feelings of a grim future, with less prosperity and success than their parents knew. There is less marriage, more single households, and a clear satisfaction deficit. Crary calls it presentism, as opposed to futurism, which held the light for countless generations. Today people only see a downhill slide looking forward, so they focus on what's available today; infinite scrolling. Presentism is a response to things like artificial intelligence, the next big thing on the corporate agenda: "One awaits this future as one would await death," Crary says.

It has also made idealism more shallow. He says the Green New Deal is "absurd" because it does nothing to dampen demand. It just satisfies users' need to acknowledge the problem today. Lip service at best, but it shuts people up and out. Signing an online petition is not canvassing door to door or participating in a sit-in.

All of this fits in Crary's bucket he calls scorched earth: "Scorched earth capitalism destroys whatever allows groups and communities to pursue modes of self-sufficient subsistence, of self-governance or of mutual support." It means the end of community to him: "The internet complex continues to mass produce these solitary subjectivities, to deter cooperative forms of association and to dissolve possibilities for reciprocity and collective responsibility."

An interesting example is the town hall meeting, totally anathema to corporate interests because it is beyond their reach. Democracy remains a thorn.

He puts the lie to the seeming ethereal nature of the internet, with its "wireless setups, the placelessness of data, and terms like 'virtual' and 'cloud'." The reality is massive server farms, each consuming millions of gallons of water daily to dissipate the wasted heat generated by all the equipment. The needs of exponential data growth show that in 65 years, server farms will take up more space than the entire land surface of the continental United States, he says. We are headed towards nothing but internet.

But it's also physically impossible. Which means dislocations of varying sorts. Again, not something to look forward to.

Until then, the beat goes on. For the corporations, it means even finer tuning of their online efforts. Crary devotes the mot space on any subject to eyeballs and how to measure their operation. The science of tracking and attracting eyeballs has advanced remarkably, and not for medical reasons. Getting users to look where the company wants and click what the company wants is the focus of armies of people. Users are directed and restricted. Creativity, he says, cannot come from a Google search.

For the elites, the priority remains: "keep people enclosed within the augmented unrealities of the internet complex, where experience is fragmented into a kaleidoscope of fleeting claims of importance, of neverending admonitions on how to conduct our lives, on what to buy and who to envy." This is the daily grind for far too many.

I can directly relate to a lot of what Crary says when he writes about the antisocial framework America is living. I read and write all day, tasks requiring no one else's input, let alone direction. I definitely meet with fewer people, and it's not simply because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I do take pride in ever-increasing numbers of followers - for book reviews of all things. Communicating with them has never led to anything real. And I have no hesitancy about doing my shopping anywhere in the world - online. The book made me feel a conformist, which is highly ironic if you knew me.

It's a short, powerful book, written as an essay in three parts. It can go on for a page without a paragraph break. It's a polemic and a rant. A number of Crary's assumptions are arguable when not simply wrong, but it doesn't change the overall truth of his message: we need to get back to communicating and working together. We need to learn from the ever-shrinking societies of the world that have not yet succumbed to the internet life. Because the path we're on leads to disaster.

David Wineberg

A polemical essay in want of more rigor. Crary essentializes the colloquial understanding of "the internet" (taken as the net aggregate of social media, apps and the World Wide Web) to make grandiose claims about an intrinsic nature enmeshed with the forces of big capital. But by failing to acknowledge a more precise definition of the internet in terms of network protocols, Crary commits a category error. The discontents he locates as necessary products of the internet actually bear no essential relation to it; rather, they are outcomes of a contingent history. The centralizing tendencies of the internet over the last two decades have nothing to do with the internet itself, strictly speaking, and everything to do with dynamics of capitalism.

There is an alternative, perhaps counterfactual history of the internet that this essay is unable to articulate due to its assumption of historical necessity. This is one whose users are empowered rather than exploited, where the majority of compute power is dedicated to the sharing of information and not the training of ad-tech models. Such a situation would not be altogether incompatible with the 'eco-socialist' vision offered here as one possible escape route of the present.

This book is good but you have to accept the author's perspective as true and follow along with them about it. It's polemical and well written, but it doesn't necessarily argue for the perspective than the internet is not going to exist in a few decades. I found it interesting and compelling in this sense, but you have to be a little less than critical to read the work through. If one rejects the premise that the internet is inherently capitalist or that it is going to break down in the climate collapse, then it is harder to read this. I think it's well written, and the author has a lot of good citations to other authors to investigate as well.
Ultimately, 4/5. It's a quick read and it's worth engaging with polemically. It's definitely technology critical.

Scorched Earth is a polemical indictment against corporate technology, the internet, and social media. Jonathan Crary presents us with a three part essay, breaking down the relationship between the internet complex and capitalism, we are shown that many of the technological commodities we enjoy today, especially social media, rob us of the essential elements of what makes us human. Emotions, interpersonal interactions, and communication are reduced to nothing more than 1s and 0s on a silver screen in our hands, powered by a large server room in a different state, consuming vital environmental energies. Crary starts with the history and the naive sentiments of the internet, to bringing in examples of biometrics such as eye tracking to further cement his point that most of these technological advances we’re seeing, are at the expense of human lives and the environment, leading to what he coins as “Scorched Earth” Capitalism. Scorched Earth Capitalism is what we’re seeing today, where our world’s resources are being depleted at such an alarming rate, that only the richest of the rich capitalists and their corporations survive while the world and everyone else perishes. One can accuse Crary of being nihilistic, but there is realism and honesty here, because in the end, he offers what can be seen as potential solutions to the condition we are all subject to. He writes “unless there is an active prefiguration of new communities and formations capable of egalitarian self-governance, shared ownership, and caring for their weaker members, post-capitalism will be the new field of barbarism.”

I took my time both intentionally and unintentionally with this book. The unintentional part stems from the exact problems I have that Crary points out. Endlessly scrolling through social media sites after a long day of work, having this desire to just numb my brain and short attention span with bite sized serotonin bursts, leading to an addictive relationship with these sites (another symptom of the internet complex he addresses). Did this book question my habits of how much I allow certain websites consume my life and time? Yes. Will I still be posting my review on some of these sites for vapid internet points? Also yes. The duality of man.

I feel I must begin my review of this essay to state that I think several reviewers have not fully grasped the point and form of this work: Within the opening pages, Crary points out that this is supposed to be in the tradition of pamphleteering. It is very much a polemic and an exercise in critical argument, and as such, I find it to be very accomplished and successful. It is not a polite 'smart thinking' book about the climate crisis.

Crary's essay is meant to lay bare the extent to which technology under capitalism is unsustainable and how we as a society, and even as a living planet, are suffering the consequences. Crary makes some pertinent points about what he calls the 'internet complex' and the way that we are very much in the thralls of a capitalist system intent on burning everything to the ground in the pursuit of profits and aggrandisem*nt. I think the most central point to Crary's argument is the passage on the life-extending technologies and how the billionaire class cannot fathom that their existence is finite despite their funds being nearly unlimited.

It is a depressing piece of convincing academia and an intriguing thought-experiment. I don't believe Crary is actually the technophobe he could be interpreted as being from this book, I think he is just trying to make his readers aware of the imminent danger we find ourselves in.

"We may abstractly deplore the millions of lives and species rendered disposable by capitalism or the devastation of ecosystems on which we depend, but we cling to our disembodied online routines and to the illusion that the internet complex is somehow not a primary agent of the catastrophe."

I am not smart enough to understand a lot of this book but I can't remember the last book that made me think so much about things that I just accepted. I feel like the author would hate that I read this as an e-book.

This book was extremely dry and for someone who talks at length about the awfulness of cold and unaffectionate machines and people, the author does a pretty good job of mimicking them. It is clear Crary does not care for modernism or technological advancement, and whilst I share some of his worries for the future, his outlook on how technology will effect the world is very dire and leaves little room for positivism or hope. I’m unsure I’d even label his approach as realist, as his argument fails to weigh the good with the bad and instead focuses completely on all the ways society and technology is failing us and will continue to fail us until our inevitable doom. When reading this you have to follow the author’s opinion as fact, rather than as a levelled argument - others have called the essay a polemic and I am inclined to agree. There were some real gems of information and I particularly found the section on eye and facial tracking of people intriguing. However, Crary’s need to label individuals as problems, pointing to those who are Netflix addicts as figures of capitalist corruption was, in my opinion, an over simplified construction of modern issues and interests. Instead, I feel this essay would have benefited from a more levelled argument style, rather than being a rant which throws every possible bad thing that has happened/could happen at the reader and labels this as the whole truth.

A scathing and welcome criticism of the internet, Crary shows how it’s inextricably linked with the systems that are destroying our planet, and as he convincingly argues, our very human essence. His final chapter is the most “eye opening” in that it shows how our eyes are being disciplined to act in certain ways in digital environments, impacting how we relate to the world outside of our devices. Data on our eyes, faces, and voices is harvested and redirected back at us in ways that degrade experiences that are essential to being human - warping our ability to properly empathize with others and experience life “offline.”
Crary’s book feels important, one that should be borderline required reading, since we all live in some way online. While discussing the work of Martin Buber, Crary says “the value of Buber’s work lies not in the degree of its originality but in the clarity with which it articulates what is intuitively known or apprehended by many; it has the familiarity and epiphanic force of the commonplace,” - which is exactly what Crary does here. We all know that the internet is damaging us, Crary gives full force to the argument that is absolutely is.

An incredible downer, but the longer you read it the more you realize the guy might not be wrong.

The argument is that the internet can't be part of an "equitable" post-capitalist world, not just for sustainability reasons, but because it is part of the marketization process that has eliminated public spaces and made us all perfect little working, competing, and consuming subjects with no off-time. This process has has hollowed out the emotional core of our lives, taken away the community, togetherness, spontaneous face to face interactions that we need to be happy. A lot of the other stuff that comes up in this argument (the extent of open pit mining, capture of science by industry, future of biometrics, on and on) is also almost too overwhelmingly depressing to think about, but we shouldn't ignore it. It's a very uncomfortable line of reasoning though because it makes you start to question if there's anything at all worth saving from the way we live now. And if not, what will the next world look like? It will be totally unrecognizable and that's terrifying.

I've spent a lot of time reading and thinking about 60s counterculture recently, and one of the most obnoxious and off-putting aspects to me has been the undercurrent of "back to nature" thought - just get out of the city and live primitively on a commune and everything will be fine. There's a line in Diane di Prima (Revolutionary Letter #32) where she says “not western civilization, but civilization itself / is the disease which is eating us." That's the horrifying subtext of this book.

At times, this book can be pedantic and meandering. But at others, it grabs you by the throat, urging you to put down your phone and reimagine the current human condition.

one of the foremost achievements of the so-called knowledge economy is the mass production of ignorance, stupidity, and hatefulness.

in our present moment, all the new forms of digital uprootedness support the illusion of autonomy, while any vague longings for enduring emotional connections are thwarted by the transience and hom*ogeneity of online interactions. inevitably, this reinforces our uncomprehending indifference to the unraveling of the lifeworld around us. we become blind to the mounting uprootings of a different kind, merciless and terrifying, which are on course to shatter our techno-complacency. famine, drought, and warfare continue to force millions from their homes and once-functioning communities, leaving behind lands and whole regions that can no longer support life. by casting our lot in with the "becoming digital" of everything, we drift in the hallucination that it will all somehow persist.

Jonathan Crary’s Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World is perhaps best understood through the neologism we encounter within the title. The act of “scorching” is distinct from that of “burning” or “singing” as in its uncompromising intensity. Controlled burning can often actually rejuvenate a forest, returning nutrients to the soil through the ashes of vegetation and making sunlight available for new growth. A scorched earth, however, is resolutely barren, with no capacity for regeneration. “Scorched earth capitalism destroys whatever allows groups and communities to pursue modes of self-sufficient subsistence, of self-governance or of mutual support,” argues Crary in the first chapter. “A scorched earth is a stifling of hope, the canceling of the possibility that the world could be restored or healed.”

Crary’s suggestion of a scorched earth capitalism denies neoliberal suggestions of “reform,” that capitalism might be healed or remedied rather than fully abolished. The etymology of “scorch” goes back to Old French escorchier, which means (as Crary himself notes) to “flay or strip skin off a body, rendering it fatally exposed.” While Crary positions scorching primarily in ecological terms (the stripping of the Amazon, coral reefs, and temperate grasslands by the demands of capital), I would argue that “scorching” also operates as a mode of critique and is itself indicative of Crary’s rhetorical methodology. We often use “scorching” as a generic adjective to describe a particular mode of criticism, an indicator burning severity encountered within an argument. Crary’s text is a “scorching” criticism of biometrics, techno-optimism, the internet, and the general notion of “science” itself, one that Crary aligns with a tradition of social pamphleteering and is self-admittedly uninterested in “nuanced theoretical analysis” of most monographs. A scorching argument is an argument that demands urgency. It recognizes the immediate emergency of 24/7 capitalism and, in Crary’s words, the need to overcome “the overpowering barrage of messages that insist on the unalterability of our administered lives.” In the same manner that “scorching” fatally exposes the body, Crary is invested in a form of criticism that might expose the underlying mechanisms of late-stage capitalism.

Crary’s first chapter reckons with what he terms the “internet complex,” which he suggests could never exist outside of the reaches of global capitalism (despite many arguments made by both modern technocrats and more digitally minded theorists within the far left). Crary methodically predicts the objections that his flat-out rejection of the digital would raise: that in a future variant of capitalism, the internet might “change hands” in the same manner as a mid-twentieth century telecommunications utility; that a prior, more democratic and horizontal internet existed in the late-nineties; and that the internet is an important tool for political organizing. Crary’s rejection of the internet is, as the rest of his text, blunt and uncompromising. “Indeed, the internet complex has never been deployed with even minor success in furthering an anti-capitalist or anti-war agenda,” he writes. “The truth is irrefutable: there are no revolutionary subjects on social media.” While certain observations made by Crary make me want to self-consciously scrawl “yes, boomer!” with my Apple Pencil in the margins of my iPad, there is something both admirable and distinctly useful in Crary��s Luddite-isms. Misplaced nineties-internet nostalgia, in which leftists suggest the existence of a pre-gentrified, pre-corporate internet, often glazes over the internet’s origination within the scope of military technology. Audre Lorde, perhaps, said it better: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

Crary’s second chapter offers an investigation of science as an epistemological category, one which he argues is “now essentialized as an a priori source of truth, existing above economic interests or social determinations and exempt from historical or ideological evaluation.” (He scaffolds his argument with the writing of Jacques Camatte from the 1970s, which directly suggests the mobilization of “science” by global capitalism.) It is his third chapter, however, that I find most compelling. Here, Crary carries over some of the basic thematic observations in his 1990’s Techniques of the Observer, reading across visual culture, the internet, and eye tracking biometric technologies. He begins with a basic suggestion that modern culture is outsourcing face-to-face interactions into digital space, which lack many of the non-verbal (and more basically non-linguistic) communicative features that are especially relatable with the rise of Zoom (which remains unnamed): “There is no joy or sorrow, no beauty or exuberance on the internet. One can find poems, but no poetry.”

Most generative in Crary’s chapter is his reading of biometrics and eye tracking technology. He begins with a rearticulation of Émile Javal’s “saccadic” characterization of basic eye movement. Rather than generating a visual image through a single, fixed gaze, our eyes constantly jerk and shift around, creating a coherent picture through an accumulation of ten to twenty vague impressions. We insistently “skim the surfaces of the world around us,” which, as an aside, I could not help but connect to the various modes of ambient (or, perhaps, “skim”) reading that seem to dominate textual culture today, with fits and bursts of attention replacing any sustained concentration.

Eye tracking, therefore, is one that Crary argues becomes part of an “ongoing project of colonization,” one in which the interface trains an “observer-user into probable patterns of performativity.” Eye tracking, in fact, shapes the basic design of the internet: web-designers are discouraged from formats that enable either long attention or aimlessness, instead contently pre-determining the way we work through a page. While Crary focuses exclusively on digital media, I wonder the extent to which “eye tracking” is, in fact, exclusive to this domain. A Classical painting will often offer subconscious cues for how we should move our eyes across it, with color or size signaling various focal points in which we are meant to focus our attention.

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A polemical summary of much of Crary's work. It was good. Of particular interest to me was his integration of Buber/Levinas on the face/gaze as an ethical (revolutionary?) position and how this is being 'disappeared' by biometrics.

"Yet the stifling of our propensity for encounters and their responsibilities unfolds on many levels. One of the forces exacerbating this debilitation is the pervasive use of biometric procedures and related techniques to reconfigure human behavior and responses into quantifiable information. There is little in the body and brain that is not now subjected to extraordinary forms of monitoring and analysis, and an important goal of this data acquisition is to maximize and habitualize our use of network technology. During the last decade, biometrics have been debated and critiqued extensively but mostly around questions of surveillance, consumer profiling, and digital policing. My concern in this chapter, however, is the fate of what makes possible and sustains an intersubjective lifeworld: the voice, the face, and the gaze. Capitalism requires their appropriation and utilization as part of the weakening of an individual’s capacity for caring, empathy, or community. Biometrics furthers the comprehensive habituation of human beings to interfacing with machine systems. The reductiveness of its operations, especially when these target vision and speech, leads to a splintering of the interhuman basis of a shared social reality."

This read was a very mixed bag for me. While I think there are many insightful lines in this book about the deleterious effects scorched Earth capitalism can have on our communities via technology's rapid commodification of human interaction, I cannot help but notice that the author too makes some critically short-sighted and anti-social statements himself. Describing theoretically social spaces in the public that are harmfully egotistical in nature through the lonely crowd being atomized as "profoundly autistic" shows a (charitably phrased) myopic view of neurodiverse peoples and conflates differences in how individuals experience sympathy and empathy with the ruthless and cutthroat behavior engendered by capitalist notions of rabid individualism. This description was especially ironic because it comes after an incisive series of observations about technological measurements of emotion and facial expression pigeonholing the nuance of human expressivity into easily assessible boxes for the purpose of capturing one's attention in advertisem*nt. Considering neurodiverse people are one notable counterexample of how emotion and the nuance of human words cannot be distilled simply into market-ready products, I would have thought that rather than being used as a pejorative, the author would have turned to us as a prime example of the necessity of human-to-human interaction and the wonderful diversity of expression. So, this book is a very mixed bag for me, spot-on in some instances and skidding past the mark in others.

Kitabın kapağı bile çok şey söylüyor. Küresel Isınma konusunda en ideal uyarıları yapan kitap.

Not without its flaws, particularly when Crary becomes a bit too polemic, or stays too vague in terms of what he specifically directs his critique at. At the same time, the central accusation, and the rich scope of his thesis, are perhaps the most relevant analysis of what's wrong with the world, today, making this text essential for understanding the problems we face, as well as for identifying the direction we need to move towards as society to have any hope of meaningful survival.

Crary makes the claim that the ‘internet complex’, by design, is destructive. Even proposals like the Green New Deal are pointless, because they do not address the escalating need for energy and resource extraction.
We need to radically refuse, not adapt or resign. An equitable society requires abandonment of the dominance of the market and money. And, the internet can not function independently of the catalytic operations of global capitalism.

As Marx realized that a global market would result in a dissolution of community, we are led to believe that we do not depend on each other, and can manage our friends like we manage our social media presence, letting go of the cohesion of community.

Since the 1980s, capital has invaded the entirety of social space, standardizing them into online simulations, leading to the dissolution of society.
The corporate control of digital networks is a monopoly of knowledge, serving the ambitions of empire; breaking up small communities and moving them into larger spheres under tight control.
Meanwhile, the potentially powerful majority can’t recognize itself, split into separate and competing factions, from which a handful of representatives are allowed into the meritocracy. This, while social media favours easily packaged concepts, precluding radical ideas reporting long term engagement.

Moving politics online is inherently counter productive, as this makes ‘politics’ integral to the platform designed for consumerism and self administration.
We need to establish different kinds of relationships to counter this, prioritising responsibility to others, nor with a focus self interested subjectivities.

By extension, war is represented by mass media as an unexceptional part of the state's external political life, facilitating plunder, securing markets, and exploiting labor, with dispersed, compliant, consumers at the core.

Western modernity is enforced on the entire world, and can only function when the whole world is under its control. The, now, American model of technological consumption results in liquidation of local culture, and decomposes the social.
So, closing the digital divide only produces more addictive behavior, and destroys diversity, enforcing a western-centric societal construct through a neocolonial mindset.

Permanent immersion in technology precludes the perception of the possibility of escape, as we denounce independent selfhood.
Power relations and hierarchies are entrenched, and the former promise, through technology, of collaborative exchanges and shared inventiveness have been overpowered by harsh time management, isolation, and productivity surveillance. All private time is forced to be productive through online mediation.

When the availability of information is infinite, common resources are trivialized and society dissolves. The result is belittlement, where the gap between personal desires and their recognition by society remains unfulfilled. We streamline our needs with what is provided by mass media, enslaving ourselves under the pretence of empowerment.

Because the global economy no longer has long term prospects, one last mad spree of plunder is ongoing all over the planet, right now.
This, while already in 1970, Debord noted that capitalism's destruction of the environment was the most pressing issue for the survival of life, and, now, capitalism has proven more than capable of mitigation and extinction of everything that sustains life.
This scorched earth policy extinguishes hope, also by capturing and disempowering youth at an ever earlier age, denying them the space and time for even limited autonomy and collective self recognition, instead assigning blanket consumerist tropes as identifiers (in the North), or austerity and state terror (in the South), and dispossessing them of their youth. This, to the extent that society now disallows youth from having the circ*mstances in which to imagine and build a future that belongs to them, defending their potential.

In chapter two, the author starts by highlighting the contradiction in politics' duality of envisioning an unchanged ever-present, while pretending to want to combat climate disaster, without concepts of degrowth, post-capitalism, or eco-socialism.

The end of capitalism is identified by human productivity not being augmented by technology, but by being replaced by it. Meanwhile, we are also approaching the physical limits of continuous expansion.

A recently identified concept is ‘presentism’, replacing futurism, and envisioning all services and products being available on demand, with risk analysis neutralizing undesirable futures.
As a consequence, this focus on ‘now’ precludes the possibility of change, entrenching capitalism’s control and delinking the future from any imagination of transformed social relations.

On a planet disfigured by neoliberal austerity and environmental collapse, there is no longer even the pretense that scientific and technical development is aligned with human purpose or needs.
Instead, we get the dispossession of thought through the promise that technology will provide us with what we need before we’ve thought of it.

Meanwhile, science, while venerated as the source of ultimate truth, not in the least in terms of solving the climate crisis, has become servant and divinity of capitalism. Specifically, scientific advancement, and innovation, primarily serve their commercial utility. Science and technology will not provide a solution to problems created by science and technology.

Besides its role in climate destruction, the rich' focus on eradicating aging extinguishes values that transcend the veraciousness of capitalism; an ever present ‘now’, for the rich, points to the irrelevance of religion, faith, and even morals.
More so, ‘aging’ then becomes a problem for the poor, absolving society from responsibility in the same way it absolves itself from providing, say, social services.
In addition, the desire to transcend death imbues a focus on infusing the inanimate with meaning, emphasizing interactions with constructed systems, disconnected from the tangible, fluid, world.

An interesting implicit observation is that the current focus on the digital, connected, home is an extension of the futurist mindset of the early 20th century which disconnected the land and the living from the technologically advanced metropolis. That, of course, existed, if in the mind, through reliance on societal disconnected labor and land, in the colonies, in a similar way to how, today, advanced tech and its resources are dependent on third world labor and exploitative resource extraction, either at home, for example through intense animal farming, or remote.

Crary sums up surveillance capitalism as such: “The reality of the internet is its effectiveness in the channeling of the minuscule assets of the many into the portfolios of an elite few.”
As a consequence, the vassal class serving the elite has learned to ally themselves with capital as the conduit of success. It then becomes their duty to silence, exclude, or marginalize anyone questioning the social necessity and purported benefits of digital media products, becoming vessels for control, manipulation, consumption, and value extraction.

The abstraction, even annihilation, of the intangible, online, is continuous with how capitalism has long demanded channeling human energy into patterns molded by economic requirements.
As observed earlier, we perhaps feel more free, but are conditioned, and constrained, by an enforced and limited variety, against which we are expected to perform for gratification and exploitation. Workers and consumers are dispossessed, of knowledge, of communicative abilities, of desire.

The author emphasizes the need of small scale, local, councils, for establishing a democracy closer to the ground, in line with Debord’s thinking on the importance of these physical encounters.
Crary makes the interesting point that physical encounters are literal conspiracies, 'breathing together'. Not only can physical encounters not be quantified in the same way that digital versions can be, they provide a spontaneity and uncontrollability which provides a venue for breaking out of the straight jacket of capital and control.
In addition, the recent focus on deploying biometrics in human-computer interaction works towards a breaking down of experiencing a shared social reality, working towards a splintering, a break up, of society to the aid of the elite.

Crary's foray into user interface design points out that “experience is what I agree to attend to”, while UXD is “experience what we tell you to attend to”.
The author makes the point that the resulting control enacted on the public, if effective, is not the crux of the problem, but that our cutting off from experience results in our losing the ability, understanding, and tools, to express the negative result these forms of consumption have on our lives.

If we aren’t attentive to how neoliberal imperatives are harming the intimate fabric which upholds human connections, we become less and less capable of sustaining or even initiating the larger-scale struggles against imperial war, economic terror, racism, etc. With a weakened ability to respond to others, we lack motivation to abandon the meagre compensation of our digital insularity.

This insularity is without the restorative benefits of actual solitude, and builds on the pseudo privatization of public space, without providing privacy. The individual’s subjugation to the market is thus marked by delusions of autonomy while grounded in powerlessness. And, pathways to a different world will not be found through internet searches.

At the end, Crary draws hope from Sartre’s observation that scarcity is the basis for human history; scorched earth capitalism, with its extreme disequilibrium, and extensive deprivations, can lead to common action, breaking through the chains of the individuals holding together the breadth of separateness and individualism.
However, without preparation for this post capitalist world, the result still will only be a new field of barbarism.

Interesting tidbit: John von Neumann advocated for a massive pre-emptive nuclear strike on all major soviet power centers.

banger

review soon at Jacobin

The irony of posting this review on the internet will not be lost on anyone who reads this book -- which everyone should!

The internet is an integral function of late-stage capitalism, polluting minds and social relationships as rapidly as it damages the biosphere. But take heart, Jonathan Crary exhorts – it’s not like the internet will last forever.

Full review at:
https://anoutsidechance.com/2022/03/3...

A jeremiad against everything digital that makes a lot of good points.

“The internet complex has become inseparable for the immense, incalculable scope of 24/7 capitalism and its frenzy of accumulation, extraction, circulation, production, transport, and construction on a global scale. Behaviors that are inimical to the possibility of a livable and just world are incited in almost every feature of online operations. Fueled by artificially manufactured appetites, the speed and ubiquity of digital networks maximize the incontestable priority of getting, having, coveting, resenting, envying; all of which favours the deterioration of the world.”

The cynical response is to say that they made similar charges against the invention of the printing press and the advent of mass literacy, which opened up vistas of getting and having to folks who’d previously got through the days at the tempos of sunrises and sunsets. Henceforth we were on a slippery slope which suggested that the world of ideas that were circulated through the medium of print were more real than those prompted by engagement with the sensual world. The wormy apple of knowledge condemning us to purgatory again!

But Crary goes on to make more specific charges against the digital nemesis. He sees it as deleting “class-based language” and “advocacy of class struggle at a historical moment when class antagonisms are as acute as ever.” Instead of solidarity the “disempowered” are dispersed “into a cafeteria of separate identities, sects, and interests and is especially effective at solidifying reactionary group formations.” Yes, but doesn’t parliamentary democracy do exactly the same thing? Maybe the grim fact is that just about everything in the world tends of favour conservatism over progressive change, which is, after all, what we normally mean by hegemonic power.

The important point about the challenge of the digital world comes in a discussion about the role it plays in facilitating the imposition of Western modernity across the planet, so “no peoples or places should escape its demands.” Echoing a previous writer, Bernard Stiegler, argues:
“… the internet complex incarnates a specifically American model of technological consumption to which there has been little or no resistance in Europe and elsewhere, resulting in the liquidation of regional or national cultures.” …. “…calculation and computation are extended into every area of life, [which] makes it impossible for an individual to love oneself or love others or to have any desire for the future.”

Maybe, but people less pessimistic on this point will say that there has been no decline in public awareness of the social injustices which best life and the statistics that point to inequality and growing divides across society have scarcely vanished from public view. Crary’s response is that even when this is the case it merely provides more opportunities for stakeholders in the digital system to advance demands for access to the minds of children and others with deficits in skills so that the great evil of ‘tech illiteracy’ can be overcome. Something called MOOCs (massive open online courses) are supposedly telling fishers in Labrador to use GPS software and textile artists in Zimbabwe to better market their goods.

Crary is not impressed. “The pathology of the internet is not what is transacted […] but rather in the naturalization of how our needs, desires and affections are diverted from a commitment to care for a world lived in common with others. The temporalities and values of an on-demand world are unlivable and the appetites incited are terminally insatiable.”

All this is producing a capitalism which is now operating in a “terminal, scorched earth phase.” Regions of the planet are being rendered barren as the army of perverse wants are desires mobilised by the internet marches into territory which once thrived and had infinite capacity for regeneration. Extraction, deforestation, toxic dumping merge into uninhabitable wastelands. But even if your neighbourhood isn’t hit by the worst of this physical damage it will still see what were once familiar social environments transformed into the ‘abstract space’ which Henri Lefebvre wrote about. All the forms of exchange and circulation which once made areas of the world distinct are gutted of their differences in order to create a hom*ogeneity in which the goods and services produced in global markets can circulate without hindrance.

But Crary contests the idea that all the supposed innovations of tech – AI, 5G networks, the Internet of Things – will “coalesce into a smoothly functioning panoptic arrangement of social control.” It is more probable that we will see a reality made up of “…a patchwork of competing and incompatible systems and components, resulting in defectiveness, breakdowns, and inefficiencies.” We have waited until, halfway through this manifesto, we get a glimpse of hope that the digital world monster can be defeated. The goal is to get to the point where we can realise just how free we really are, and filled with the power to “refuse the mandates of empire and adopt alternative ways of living.”

The text takes us through the strategies of the billionaire class to get a better understand of what their goals are. But at this point he makes a comment that seems to contradict his vitriolic instance that digital tech has got nothing that would help fight our way to freedom. Apparently, the Musks and Zuckerbergs have, as one of their priorities, the prevention of an understanding “… of how existing technical capabilities could be creatively redeployed by local and regional communities to meet human and environmental needs….”. They seek to present the opponents of their plans as being solitary technophobes who are resentful of the changes wrought by digital tech. But what is bubbling away beneath the surface (and this is remarkable given everything Crary has argued thus far) is “… the mass insurgent potential of millions of low-paid workers in Amazon warehouses, Walmarts, meat packing plants, call centers, and many other sites who are subjected to increasingly harsh regulation of their time and labour, and who also risk immanent replacement by robots.”

So we can look forward to digital capital calling forth its own gravediggers after all? That’s an encouraging thought and looking at the world through their eyes might tell us more about the nature of the resistance to the inhumanity of digital capitalism as it is being assembled. But Crary hasn’t much more to say on the subject that these few, rather hopeful, sentences. He has already dismissed the claim that social media has played a useful role in bringing democracy and peace movements onto the streets, presumably because there isn’t much evidence at the present time that any of these social actions have resulted in victory. In a final section he plunges back into a discussion about the threats that initiatives aimed at close analysis of user experience (‘UXD’ or ‘user experience design’) is going to have on the next generation of digital technology. Our computers will be referring information about eye movement and facial expression back to the tech corporations so that they can develop evermore nuanced software that will capture our thought processes and render us insensible to what is really going on around us. Back to the pits of pessimism then…

Crary has got a great style of writing and his references to the philosophers, cultural workers and activists who have trod the anti-digital ground before him is ultra-helpful in appreciating the considerable force of his argument. But his conclusion, that there is now very little left of the lifeworld that would have once allowed humanity to rally against capitalism domination, clashes with the glimpses he occasional he gives of contradiction within the digital world and the space for resistance. Should the modern wretched of the earth, stuck in low-paid, precarious jobs ditch their mobile phones with the scores of apps they need to navigate gigs they need to do to earn a living wage, or is there a possibility that they might have some use for them in mounting a fightback?

The book convincingly makes the case that the hegemony of the artificial world contributes to the degradation of the real one - human society included. None of this is new ground and Crary overstates the case at times (completely forgetting the existence of people with sight and mobility impairments, for example) but it's hard to argue with his well-supported thesis. The internet is built for the ruling class and not for us.

There’s probably something to examine in my logging this book on goodreads to inch closer to my reading goal.

The author of this text really does not like modernity. And in this book he explains why. I think the only real problem with it is that he talks about the inevitable post-capitalist future but he doesn't really align with any sort of positive post-capitalist future. With path dependency it's hard to see how we go from here to anything good. Perhaps it will be in his next text.

This is a truly horrible book. I get that neoliberalism is all around us and that we should reject it, but this book does it way too simplistically. It says we should reject all modern technology, which is beyond ridiculous. I get that a lot of modern technology is terrible for the environment, but you can't just throw the baby out with the bathwater. What, should we go back to living in the woods and sh*tting in buckets? This is ultra-left anarchist nonsense. Also, the book doesn't give any specifics on HOW to reject these things and what kind of society we should build. The only positive is that it's mercifully short.

it is endearing to talk about and describe the internet as a tool, however after peeling back the layers, it is hard to argue against it being nothing but a tool for the exchange of capital. i appreciate the author providing new perspectives, however the book is nothing but a doom read, despite the author having a quote "say no to doom" on the first page.

I couldn't finish this book as it all it really gave me was despair. the first page of chapter 3 a line says "There is no joy or sorrow, no beauty or exuberance on the internet." There is no other explanation that a person can only say this if they find no joy in an aspect of life and because of that, no one should have that thing. Watching the Lakers is currently my #1 special interest and actually brings me a lot of joy. However if Jonathan had his way no one can do any of the things that they enjoy on the internet. I don't need to be explained all of the technological components and transactions required for me to watch the Lakers, however people in fact do enjoy things on the internet. Society would have been fine without TikTok and all social media but capitalism is the problem that allows imperialist countries hoard all the resources and expropriate the countries who produce all the trinkets that we need to have delivered via overnight delivery. a tv would be better if it was meant to last and not break or be technologically incapable in a few short years, so on, mass overproduction, climate change, so on, etc.

I don't think abolishing the internet is a productive solution to the control it has over everyone's lives. capitalism, an evil system, ruined the internet. there are few corners of the internet that aren't commodified. but I think of things such as library reservations, prescription delivery, other things that are actual resources that are beneficial as opposed to the 99% of the internet be used to purchase and have useless things delivered, or endless scrolling to see things to be sold to us consumers. a car is a great innovation and despite our infrastructures addiction to it, objectively abolishing all cars is unproductive. the only thing I can think of off the top of my head that society would benefit from the abolishing of an entire thing is military weapons manufacturing.

- "Identity politics, as Nancy Fraser and others have argued, has been crucial to the strategies of "progressive" neoliberal elites: to ensure that a potentially powerful majority cannot recognize itself, being split into separate and competing factions from which a handful of representatives are allowed conspicuous entry into the meritocracy."

- "Being off social media is an opportunity for us to really understand how it's impacting us, how it's being used to manipulate us by our oppressor."

- "The suggestion has been that people without broadband access are living in a condition of deprivation, cut off from the possibility of upward mobility, career opportunities and cultural enrichment. However, the primary goal of the most powerful stakeholders is the eventual transformation of everyone into captive and obedient consumers of their products and service. The unspoken truth is that as internet access and use expands, economic inequality is heightened, not diminished. "Tech literacy" is a euphemism for shopping, gaming, binge watching and other monetized and addictive behaviors."

O texto mobiliza a sensibilidade para abolir a certeza de que o futuro digital proclamado pelo 'complexo internético' é inevitável. Faz isso apontando para a dimensão política da tecnologia e sua conexão com o neoliberalismo que cria mercados globais enquanto dissolve comunidades. Relações sociais são mercantilizadas, temporalidade e história se desfiguram, respectivamente, em 'tempo real' e um presente onde os futuros possíveis são aqueles produzidos via simulação computacional.

O autor argumenta que, sendo parte fundamental do problema, o 'complexo internético' não se presta à alteração do status quo.
"(...) a ampla aceitação dos arranjos atuais como algo necessário e inevitável decorre tanto da resignação e do cansaço como da impossibilidade de usar o complexo internético de forma não financeirizada e para reafirmar a vida." (pgs. 42-43)
Contrariando esperanças no poder da colaboração, "As assimetrias esmagadoras de escala entre os indivíduos e as redes globais desfiguram todas as noções não quantificáveis de importância ou valor. Cada um de nós é diminuído pela veneração das estatísticas - seguidores, cliques, curtidas, toques visualizações, compartilhamento, dólares - que, fabricadas ou não, são investidas constantes contra a confiança em si mesmo" (pg. 45). Contra os indivíduos, processos de formação de desejo e controle cognitivo, produzem o 'desenraizamento' do indivíduo de suas sociedades enquanto projetam uma ilusão de autonomia. Ainda assim, para o autor, as fantasias distópicas de vigilância totalitária não representam a vocação do capitalismo para renovadas crises e obsolescência programada.

A origem militar da internet parte do pressuposto de um cenário de 'terra arrasada', de guerra nuclear, e da capacidade de continuar operando mesmo quando já não há mais sociedade. As redes sociais são a continuidade dessa lógica: A terra arrasada pelo capitalismo (onde não há mais planeta habitável, ou sociedades, é mantida 'funcionando', quer dizer, seus fluxos informacionais funcionando. Como se, falsamente apartados das consequências materiais, o mundo virtual, a Internet das coisas, os algoritmos e sistemas de inteligência artificial se tornassem 'atores'.
Dados sequestrados e mobilizados em volumes sem precedentes, produzindo 'confiança estatística' de aspectos mínimos da existência humana, máquinas conversam entre si, deixando um gosto de um mundo sem nós.

Na mesma direção, a captura do olhar e da atenção ocorre em um ambiente onde se apagam as outras dimensões sensuais e mesmo a indeterminação na troca direta (olho no olho) é substituída pela quantificação dos movimentos dos olhos pela tela. A cognição corporificada cede lugar (e tempo) à atenção capturada. Corpos que se encontram e dividem um espaço real onde formas de comunidades baseadas no senso de cuidado e empatia, hesitação, contemplação e dúvida são encarados como interrupções indesejáveis dos fluxos do capitalismo contemporâneo.

Faz isso com afirmações fortes, às vezes inspiradas, que nos deixa em estado de alerta. No entanto, nem sempre faz isso com a sustentação apropriada. Muitos argumentos só funcionam se aceitamos as afirmações objetivas que são feitas sem que se questione a relação dessas afirmações com algo mais parecido com fatos. Por exemplo: "A verdade não dita é que, conforme o acesso e o uso da internet se expandem, as desigualdades econômicas se acentuam, e não o contrário". (pg. 37). Mas a provocação não deixa de funcionar por conta desses 'excessos' retóricos.

A short and strongly worded polemic about the ecocidal consequences of a social media network (and technology as a whole) that was created to support the bloodloost of neoliberal capital. Although the mythos of the internet conjures a counter-cultural image of empowering individuals and allowing the challenging of authority, Crary makes many salient point about the hollowness of such images as well as the harm that social media does to our ability to actually organise against the status-quo. Indeed, there are many different and interesting angles from which Crary attacks media habits that I had not previously considered, beyond the clear and vast ecological (and specifically human) devastation of operations such as lithium mines.

The are a few issues I had with this despite the many interesting arguments. For one, Crary fails to really engage with his references, or fully explain some of the terms used, and the result is that he sometimes states a contentious idea with a quick reference as fact then moves on without bothering to explain why he believes it to be so. In aiming for something scathing and conscious-raising, he veers closer to an op-ed than a monograph, and I think this wastes some of the benefit of the format - he should have padded the very short length out by given the time and attention that the topics he often leaps over deserve in order to be much more compelling. As someone who has already been immersed in some of the academic debates he skims, I did not necessarily need a lot of such explanation, but it was very frustrating to think that new-comers to such pressing debates might come away frustrated at prose that smugly refuses to provide certain contexts despite so many engaging ideas.

In conclusion, Crary grapples with a lot of piercing discussions of our reality of vast harm that current models of technological expansion and never ending consumption. It's a shame that more effort isn't spent to fully explain, and thus persuade, but it is still worth reading (perhaps not as an introduction to such criticisms, which is unfortunate given that the very short length would otherwise suggest it for such purposes).

In keeping with the pamphleteering tradition, Crary frequently writes sentences that pack a punch and evoke visceral reactions, forcing the reader to confront the harsh realities of living in a relentless consumer-driven capitalism. There is no easy escape, here, no belief that its flaws can be alleviated by simply becoming "better" consumers of digital media.

Personally, my favorite of such statements appears early on:

"Now, however, with the post-2008 global economy on life support, with the growth of corrupt autocratic regimes and cartel states, and with the looming imponderables of the climate crisis, long - term calculation by powerful interests has given way to short - term forms of enrichment. This is casino capitalism at midnight, when the winning players begin to cash in their chips. Because the global economy no longer has any long - term prospects, one, last, mad spree of plunder is now ongoing all over the planet. Fracking, mountain - top removal mining, rainforest clear - cutting for biofuel farming, offshore drilling, wilderness despoliation proceed alongside the ravaging and looting of social resources, the expropriation of the remaining fragments of a commons, whether drinking water, wilderness or city parks. It’s like a new version of the 1960s TV game show Supermarket Sweep , where contestants were given a shopping cart and a time limit within which they could frantically grab anything of value in the store."

One notable absence in the book was the exploration of how our digital presence impacts gender roles and the gendered division of labor. a critique shared by scholars such as Donna Haraway in her "Cyborg Manifesto." Haraway and others who see potential liberation in digital realms often emphasize their ability to transcend geographical limitations, providing opportunities for a more flexible and inclusive understanding of gender identity. I wonder how Crary would respond to this suggestion.

I read this book to add to my knowledge about semiocapitalism as discussed by Franco Berardi and other scholars. Naturally, it repeats many concepts already outlined by other authors such as Byung-Chul Han despite trying to present a fresh set of ideas. The relationship between capitalism and the internet has been subjected to large amounts of discourse, even before it manifested as it is today. Many thought that the internet could leave us a decentralized realm of freedom, but we have seen it is quite the opposite.
A central topic in this book is the connection between internet usage and ecological destruction. In the simplest possible sentence: our internet usage is increasing our reliance on resource extraction while also fragmenting our political solidarity and aim to stand up and do anything about it. We have constantly trusted in the past decades that the status quo's technology would be here to stay. However, each new era disrupts these expectations to bring more and more technology. That means our reliance on the internet for things like media will only grow into more damaging ways in which our activity can be controlled by the capitalist platforms that mediate our digital interactions.
I just threw around a lot of vague generalities that might not make sense to most people, so I recommend reading a series of other books if you have read this. After the Future by Franco Berardi and Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han are great choices. I recommend this book and the previously mentioned books to people who are tired of ancient orthodox Marxist views of progress and class struggle. Crary adds to a perspective that says we need to recognize how our world has changed our ability to access the ideal of class struggle bringing inevitable progress.