The dangerous intensifications of surplus alienation, or why platform capitalism challenges the (more-than-)human

Abstract

This response gratefully acknowledges and engages with the commentaries on my article ‘The nonhuman turn: Critical reflections on alienation, entanglement and nature under capitalism’. It highlights the importance of further defining key concepts like anthropocentrism, ‘the human’, more-than-life and others in discussions of the more-than-human. It challenges desires for ‘returning’ to idealised forms of relationality or animism or the idea that historical, ‘basic alienation’ between humans and the rest of nature rests on some notion of ‘The Fall’. Overall, it aims to reemphasize one of the core arguments in the original article, namely the dangerous intensifications of historical capitalism, how this is critical for both non-human turn scholars and their critics and how this may provide common ground for opening up space for postcapitalism. Central to this argument is a further elaboration of the dangers of intensified surplus alienation due to contemporary platform capitalism for the (more-than)human but also, more specifically, for academic exchange.