Machinic Capitalism and Network Surplus Value

by Matteo Pasquinelli

Abstract: Gilbert Simondon once noticed that industrial machines were already an information relay, as they were bifurcating for the first time the source of energy (nature) from the source of information (the worker). In 1963, in order to describe the new condition of industrial labour, Romano Alquati introduced the notion of valorising information as a link between the Marxist concept of value and the cybernetic definition of information. In 1972, Deleuze and Guattari initiated their machinic ontology as soon as cybernetics started to exit the factory and expand to the whole society.
In this text I focus again on the Turing machine as the most empirical model available to study the guts of cognitive capitalism. Consistent with the Marxian definition of machinery as a device for the “augmentation of surplus value”, the algorithm of the Turing machine is proposed as engine of the new forms of valorisation, measure of network surplus value and new ‘crystal’ of social conflict. Information machines are not just ‘linguistic machines’ but indeed a relay between information and metadata: in this way they open to a further technological bifurcation and also to new forms of biopolitical control: a society of metadata is outlined as the current evolution of that ‘society of control’ pictured by Deleuze in 1990.

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