Critique of the Necropolitical Economy of The Internet of Things: Brains, Biohacking, and Social Apartheid

Abstract

Science and technology are converging with centralized political and economic interests in research fields and industries such as neurology, weapons manufacturing, AI, biosurveillance, and human augmentation. This convergence is international in scope and entails a technoscientific intensification of anti-democratic governing procedures. It therefore poses an international challenge to democracy. In this paper, I critically survey diverse applications of a key governing procedure according to which this convergence is being engineered. I also highlight apposite features of the political/libidinal economy through which it operates. To do so, I merge Achille Mbembe’s analyses of necropolitics/necropower with Deleuze and Guattari’s diagrammatic analyses of paranoic-fascisizing procedures of unconscious social production, linking both to the IoT. With the latter established as a universal infrastructure, necropower deploys global and specific (in contrast to partial and nonspecific), anti-democratic integrative procedures in both scientific R&D and geopolitics to decode the human brain, hack biosystems, and engineer social apartheid.