Network Fascist USA: Algorithmic Mass Media and the Collapse of the Liberal Subject
To the data-hungry, algorithmically disposed arbiters of social wealth, knowledge, and power in the twenty-first century, the individual collapses into dividual facets, attributes, tendencies, and moods; I as an individual do not matter to the likes of Google, Amazon, Meta, or anyone else harvesting “my” data, no more than the individual homeowners dispossessed after the housing crash mattered to the derivatives traders who tanked the global economy. Likewise population governance becomes a matter of efficient network routing and bifurcation. Together, dividuals and networks unmoor individuals and populations as key anchor points for social control through dispositional adjustment and aggregate behavioral modification; in capitalist societies, these changes primarily serve the corporate persons (as modern legal jargon calls them) or cyborg subjects (as I call them) that dominate the thoroughly financialized, heavily leveraged USAmerican tech sector, which has expanded inversely as the liberal subject, the individual, and the population — long thought to be twin pillars of moral and methodological worth — have collapsed. These trends constitute the rise of Network Fascism, and they coincide closely with the coalescence of actual fascist and fascistic movements not only in the USA but around the world.
Under the rule(s) of Network Fascism, this two-fold collapse, of the individual into dividuals and of the population into networks — in each case a singular breaking into plurals, the one who acts becoming the many that are counted — has come to circumscribe many aspects of daily life under conditions of nearly compulsory digitality, as the Big Data economy requires, engineers, monetizes, and alternately mourns and celebrates these changes while surreptitiously devouring the remain(der)s. I argue that, in the fifteen years between the financial crisis of 2007–08 and the onslaught of so-called artificial intelligence in 2022, the United States began the largest uncontrolled experiment in the history of industrialized human sensorium. Algorithmic audiovision — the feed, the filter, the recommendation, the autoplay queue — pries open the neoliberal subject for heavily financialized, data-driven corporate extraction.
I put my interdisciplinary training to work assembling an array of case studies in my analysis of the algorithmic mass media subject and the political and libidinal economies and infrastructures that simultaneously sustain and drain it, ranging from tech marketing and social media influence networks to video conference setups, NFTs, AI discourse, and algorithmic art. In the corporate form, especially on the contemporary model that infuses Silicon Valley spoliation with old Wall Street money at the tempo of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, we find a novel, albeit monstrous, rejoinder to Spinoza (who was born in the same country, hardly three decades later, as the modern corporation): taken all together, from the mines to the chips to the interface design and the affects it seeks to conduct, here is what a body — the body/bodies of the corporate person — can do…
ricky d'andrea crano 