An exit out of the 'hive': post-apocalyptic fictions of data capitalism and technological acceleration

Abstract

Digital technologies have come to frame the everyday interactions of our world, meshing together public and private spaces into seamless singular platforms for work, socialisation and leisure. At the centre of these transformations are the market imperatives of companies who trade in predictions based upon behavioural data, utilising a range of surveillance strategies to capture information that shapes the most effective corporate interventions into our lives. Shoshana Zuboff's 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power provides a thorough overview of these issues, constructing a new vocabulary with which to identify the forces that shape political, financial, and social processes on a global scale. However, the book maintains a liberal political alignment which reaffirms the powers of the right, advocating for a partial technological deceleration which preserves the violent political-economic foundations underpinning surveillance and digital control. This article examines Margaret Atwood's The Testaments and Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, two contemporary novels which test out the predictions of technodeterminist logic in unequivocal ways, in order to interrogate the imaginative limitations prevalent in responses to data capitalism.