At the time of writing, there is a consensus among Western security specialists that the world has entered a period of uncertainty and political instability unprecedented in recent times. One such source is the latest Munich Security Report (MSR 2017) provocatively entitled ‘Post-truth, post-West, post-order?’. Intended for policy and security professionals, the Report is a digest of the latest international trends and events. Like a breathless messenger, it describes the different flags and factions of the illiberal barbarians now massing at the gates. In concert with a clutch of new books,1 it depicts a groundswell of populist and fundamentalist movements, laying claim to local or cultural authenticities, which are now challenging and pushing back cosmopolitan values and libertarian identities. Expected since the mid-1990s, it looks as if the ‘coming anarchy’ may now be arriving (Kaplan 1994). There are several factors, however, that give the present a new and distinct feel. Divisions and contradictions are appearing in the West. Random terrorism is becoming routine, while dissatisfaction is growing among those who feel left behind and abandoned. Apart from increasing security measures and orchestrating public displays of resilience, political elites are challenged for real answers. With Syria as a case in point, compared to the 1990s, Western states have also lost their interventionary nerve.
Citizens of democracies believe less and less that their systems are able to deliver positive outcomes for them, and increasingly favour national solutions and closed borders over globalism and openness. Illiberal regimes, on the other hand, seem to be on solid footing and act with assertiveness, while the willingness and ability of Western democracies to shape international affairs and to defend the rules-based liberal order are declining (MSR 2017: 5).
This book is not concerned with questioning whether this picture of international push-back and Western decline is accurate or not. That it exists and has credence is sufficient. Our point of departure is the stark contrast between this imaginary future–present and a different, earlier one – namely, how the international scene looked a mere five or six decades ago. Driven by frequently violent struggles for national liberation, decolonization and the dismantling of imperialism from below were in full swing. With its excess of youthful radicalism, for many commentators the 1960s were a volatile interregnum of emancipatory forces pushing towards world revolution (Mills 1960). Breaking with Victorian Marxism, the rash of anti-colonial struggles ushered in a New Left convinced that the peasantry was now the true heir of this revolution. As the colonial order eroded, continuing privation and exploitation meant that it was the peasantry, unlike most industrial workers, that now had nothing to gain from compromise: ‘In China and Vietnam, in Cuba, Kenya and Algeria, in Brazil’s North-east and in the back-country of Angola, the peasantry has emerged as the decisive force in revolutionary struggles’ (Buchanan 1963: 11).
Contrary to an earlier Eurocentric left orthodoxy, while a radicalized intelligentsia and worker vanguard could prime the revolutionary fuse in the industrial countries, it was an emergent Third World that would now ignite it (Marcuse 1967). Moreover, without the active alignment and international solidarity between these spatially separated forces and struggles, the chance of world revolution would be lost. Whether such views were realistic or delusional should not detract from the fact that they were real enough to mobilize people on an international scale. The contrast between a revolutionary, anti-racist future–present, where the international appeared as a space of political optimism and fraternity, and today’s more pessimistic vista of rupture and political failure is striking.
This book is a preliminary attempt to try to understand this shift and assess what we may have lost and, for good or ill, what we have gained. Methodologically attentive to history, it addresses this question in relation to the changing understanding of the nature of humanitarian disaster. How disasters are understood and communicated shapes the nature of the global North–South interface (Chouliaraki 2013).2 Indeed, one could go further. Since the 1980s, disasters have become a new ontological force. From the crash of asteroids into a primeval Earth, disasters have been given a pivotal role in the evolution of life, in the development of creativity and, not least, as key punctuation marks in the emergence and spread of human society (Homer-Dixon 2007). This catastrophism has accompanied the rise to dominance of an ecology-based resilience thinking, with its signature view that ‘authentic’ life exists in the jouissance that lies on the edge of extinction. Resilience is a measure of the probability of escaping disaster through socializing the smart moves that drive developmental evolution (Holling 1973). Disasters are thus a potent bridging mechanism that connects humanitarian practice with wider ideological and societal change. These changes, moreover, help illuminate the move from optimism to political pessimism. This shift, it will be argued, is integral to the rise of post-humanitarianism.
However, in making a link from disasters to these broader questions, two additional and accompanying registers or sets of differences are important. Over the period in question, there has been a spatial shift from ‘circulation’ to ‘connectivity’, together with an interrelated ontological, epistemological and methodological transition from deductive ‘knowledge’, framed by history and causation, to an increasing reliance on inductive mathematical ‘data’ and machine-thinking for sense-making. The way we know the world and understand what it means to be human has fundamentally changed (Chandler 2018). Rather than seeing the emergence of a new post-human essence, this book grounds these shifts and registers in the changing nature of capitalism. While corporations, governments and the academy celebrate the age of connectivity, and regard the sort of international foreboding described in the Munich Security Report as a separate issue, we are more open to the possibility of their causal correlation. This Introduction unpacks these registers and gives the reader an indication of the structure of the book.
Between the 1960s and the present, the nature and organization of international space have changed. Of primary importance has been the relative shift from ‘circulation’ to ‘connectivity’ (Reid 2009). As a factor of spatial organization, circulation involves the physical movement or flow of people and things within, across or around terrestrial milieus and topographies. Discussed more fully in chapter 5, Foucault has argued, that the principle of circulation was central to a liberal conception of security arising from the discovery of the early modern town in terms of its spatial and logistical dynamics. The problem of the town ‘was essentially and fundamentally a problem of circulation’ (Foucault 2007: 13). During the nineteenth century, improving the circulation of people, goods, sewage, light and air, together with managing the movement of disease, crime and political unrest, would become a key feature of modernist planning and urban design (Rabinow 1995). From the perspective of modern urban planning, the city was an infrastructure designed to maximize the circulatory potential of autonomous people and things, while controlling the bad and inimical. Through the opening-up achieved by roads, canals, sewers and railways, for example, people and things were enabled to move, change place and transact. While not without risks, and thus needing administrative, health and police oversight, the aim was to maximize circulation along such fixed conduits.
Connectivity is similar but fundamentally different. Google’s notion of a data-based urbanism, for example, sees cities as key sites for the conversion of data extracted from the electronic interactions of individuals into continually adapting forms of artificial urban intelligence. A 12-acre site in Toronto’s waterfront area is currently being developed as a testbed. It envisions: ‘Modular buildings assembled quickly; sensors monitoring air quality; traffic lights prioritising pedestrians and cyclists; parking systems directing cars to available slots; delivery robots; advanced energy grids; automated waste sorting and self-driving cars’ (Morozov 2017).
Here the city appears as a closed interactive milieu involving the continuous recording and exchange of information between people, things and computer interfaces in motion. Connectivity draws together different domains such as consumer needs, waste disposal, transport, parking and delivery requirements into an integrated real-time information network. While people and things still move, change place and transact, it is no longer autonomous circulation in the modernist sense. Without triggering a series of alerts, a person could not, for example, arrive unexpectedly at a railway station, and buy a ticket for destination A but leave instead at station B. Within the smart city, movement and behaviour are constantly recorded, algorithmically analysed, optimized and directed (Halpern 2014b). Unlike the spontaneous circulation allowed by the modern city, movement within the smart city is essentially robotic.
As a science of information, cybernetics requires the recording and storing of data on all past interactions as a precondition for predicting future behaviour and signalling the presence of anomalies (Wiener 1954). Unlike free circulation, which always involves a potential threat to security (Foucault 2007: 19), connectivity uses the command and control functions made possible by data informatics to avoid surprise. To put this another way, while circulation is necessary it is also open to accidents, dangers and unforeseen consequences. Air travel, for example, can be a vector in the spread of disease. As a way of controlling the necessary risks of circulation, security has evolved as an expanding and invasive technology of connectivity (see chapter 5).
There is another aspect of connectivity, however, that is also important for this book, and which further distinguishes it from the territorially grounded nature of circulation. Imagine a dozen computers scattered around the globe, networked together via a central hub and each machine being able to transmit and exchange data with the others instantaneously. Rather than having to flow through or circulate within frictive topographies, connectivity has the power to leap directly across them, bypassing terrestrial insecurity while rendering distance insignificant. Finance capital, for example, is not like physical money. The latter constantly circulates between pockets, cash registers and banks until it is worn out. As an example of connectivity, finance is capital encoded as data that travels at the speed of light between the vast territorially dispersed network of computers that constitute the global banking system (Lewis 2014): ‘[Connectivity] de-spatializes the real globe, replacing the curved earth with an almost extensionless point, or a network of intersection points and lines that amount to nothing other than connections between two computers any given distance apart’ (Sloterdijk 2013 [2005]: 13).
Although different, circulation and connectivity are not mutually exclusive. They exist together, shape each other and, over time, exist in varying combinations. For this book, the relative shift from circulation to connectivity is implicated in the displacement of revolutionary optimism by political pessimism. In the 1960s, at the height of international expectation, the ability for people, their histories, experience and politics, to circulate internationally was greater than it is today. For a while, the circulation and flow of political praxis was possible as never before. During the period of decolonization, Western European countries were moved to accept permanent immigrants from their colonies and former colonies, together with allowing refugee settlement and recruiting significant numbers of migrant workers. Aspirational white settler colonies such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada also temporally lifted the ‘colour line’ that had earlier applied, especially toward Asian labour migrants (Meyers 2002). For Herbert Marcuse, as for other radicals exiled at some point in their lives, the ability for political praxis to circulate was taken for granted. At a time when journalists were not embedded (Page 1989), this ability was an essential condition of the international solidarity necessary for world revolution. By the mid-1970s, however, the near-universal curtailment of immigration was already underway.
Driven by a mix of racial, social and security fears, the relative post-World War II openness to migration has narrowed and closed under successive waves of immigration controls, nationality laws and refugee restrictions (Hammerstad 2014). Since the end of the Cold War, as a visible register of this institutional move to closure and return, the number of physical border fences, demarcation walls or separation zones to contain the risk of autonomous movement has exploded globally (Brown 2010). Of course, the barriers and restrictions that now striate the globe have not prevented the urge to move. Indeed, as the upward track of numbers suggests (UNHCR 2017a), the pressure to escape poverty, disaster and war, even at the risk of an arduous and perilous passage, is as strong as ever. With millions in the queue, it shows few signs of abating. While offering no viable solution, the interdiction and return measures used to insulate the West have done little more than criminalize autonomous human circulation.
As the legal circulation of migrants, refugees and other sans-papiers has narrowed and closed, in terms of the data being stored and exchanged between machines and screen interfaces, connectivity has expanded exponentially (Cortada 2012). At the same time, computational technologies including remote satellite sensing, computer modelling and Big Data informatics have come to shape a dominant, if particular, understanding of the world, how it works and the status of the humans that inhabit it (Halpern 2014a; Chandler 2018). Climate change, for example, was a key discovery of predictive computer modelling (Edwards 2010). The juxtaposition between the international closure to the circulation of political praxis and the expansion of data connectivity and its new remote sense-making tools is a formative tension that runs throughout this book. To put this another way, since the 1990s there has been an associated growth in physical and existential ‘remoteness’ from the world that is being compensated by the digital recoupment of distance. Remoteness, however, is ambiguous. It is negative, as in a loss of familiarity, while also being a positive condition – that is, as a challenge for technoscience to overcome.
A negative remoteness is not only reflected in the erection of physical and technological barriers to stop the circulation of political praxis; it can be seen at many levels, including the fragmentation of nations. With examples spanning the globe, over the last three or four decades many erstwhile multicultural or mixed societies have been wrenched apart, fragmenting and polarizing along inimical ethnic, cultural and religious lines (Gregory 2008; Sorensen 2014; Mishra 2017a). Mid-level technological societies have been reduced to – or, should we say, ‘revealed’ as – a chimera of competing tribal amalgams (Usborne 2004). As if designed for it, the trend towards individuation, separation and polarization has taken to social media with alacrity (McBain 2014; O’Callaghan et al. 2014; Cadwalladr 2017). As discussed in chapter 7, through a combination of risk aversion and political push-back, a loss of familiarity can also be seen in the increasing absence of grounded international aid workers, journalists and academics within ‘challenging environments’ (Healy & Tiller 2014). President Trump’s travel ban on selected Muslim countries, and the current uncertainty over the future of EU nationals in Brexit Britain, are symptoms of this pervasive, and often violent and discriminatory, tendency towards distancing and a loss of familiarity.
Remoteness, however, also has a positive dynamic that springs from the ability of connectivity to leap across, sidestep or pass beneath the ground friction3 of a dangerous world productively, while simultaneously creating new ways of knowing and appropriating that world. First identified over fifty years ago, the inverse relationship that technoscience establishes between familiarity and distance is what Hannah Arendt called ‘world alienation’ (Arendt 1998 [1958]: 48–254). The paradox of exploration is that, while its aim was to widen horizons, the maps and charts of the early modern age ‘anticipated the technical inventions through which all earthly space has become small and close at hand’ (1998 [1958]: 251). This shrinking of the globe has continued through the surveying capacity of the human mind, ‘whose uses of numbers, symbols, and models condense and scale earthly physical distance down to the size of the human body’s natural sense and understanding’ (1998 [1958]: 251). The shrinkage of the Earth, however, has been compensated for by the objectivity that distance gives. Objectivity necessitates a disentanglement ‘from all involvement in and concern with the close at hand’ (1998 [1958]: 251). For Arendt in the 1950s, the decisive technology of shrinkage was the aeroplane. The advent of satellites, geospatial technology and interactive broadband, however, redoubles her point. The ability to leave the Earth, either physically or as an Internaut,4 ‘is like a symbol for the general phenomenon that any decrease of terrestrial distance can be won only at the price of putting a decisive distance between man and earth, of alienating man from his immediate earthly surroundings’ (1998 [1958]: 251).
World alienation is the hallmark of the modern age and is ‘inherent in the discovery and taking possession of the earth’ (1998 [1958]: 254). As the political history of maps suggests (Wood 2010), remoteness and distance call forth new sense-making tools which furnish new ways to strategize and project power – and, thus, to appropriate and reappropriate the Earth.
As a function of the reappropriation of the modernist legacy currently under way by the agents of the new economy (Boutang 2011 [2008]; Srnicek 2016), the recoupment of distance through digital connectivity has its own history of abstraction and violence.5 The textured histories, motivations and justifications of distant or now-hard-to-reach people, once familiar through face-to-face exchange or the ethnographic encounter (see chapter 4), have been transformed for the convenience of mathematics into electronic data. To make behavioural patterns amenable to visual representation, knowledge has been reworked into digital signals and alerts able to be recorded and algorithmically analysed by machines (see chapter 5). As a tool for knowing and appropriating the world afresh, the supplanting of the grounded ontologies of circulation/knowledge with those of connectivity/data has not been frictionless or straightforward (Amoore 2011). Moreover, it has been far from natural, or a simple matter of technological change.
As world history suggests, knowledge can be put to many uses, including vile, repressive and genocidal ones. However, while murderous dictators may wish otherwise, knowledge is never closed to itself. Knowledge affords its own critique. Even the slaves of San Domingo could dream of freedom through the Enlightenment texts that their masters betrayed (James 2001 [1938]). Data is different from – even antagonistic to – knowledge (Galloway 2013; Chandler 2015). Knowledge is open to intentions, justifications and causes. It emerges from empirical experimentation, ethnographic encounters and deductive causal reasoning. By comparison data focuses on the potentialities of individuals as derived from the inductive statistical analysis of their past behaviour.
Knowledge admits to a distinction between the ‘reality’ of lived experience and an existing and structurally defined ‘world’ inhabited by actual, present and sentient subjects. The space, or commons, between reality and the world allows room for different truths, competing theory and critique (Rouvroy 2012). Knowledge is inseparable from the contested political commons producing it. Data allows no such distinction or space. Reality and the world are indistinct, and existence is a condition of the pure, unmediated factuality of virtual and probabilistic subjects. Whereas knowledge allows for consciousness, reflexivity and theorizing, data is more concerned with signals, alerts and reflexes, and the unconscious or unreasoned dimensions of human behaviour (World Bank 2015). As such, the very possibility of theory and reasoned critique is questioned (Anderson 2007).
Despite knowledge and data being antagonistic regarding how we understand the world and what it means to be human, the current hegemony of what Antoinette Rouvroy (2012) has called ‘data behaviourism’ in explaining social and environmental phenomena has largely escaped critical concern. If anything, its rise has been welcomed and seen as fortuitous given the ‘complexity’ of the problems we face. As discussed in chapter 4, this is partly explained by the dominance within the academy of empirical and behavioural modes of understanding and methodology. Included here are the various strands of work often drawn together as post-humanism (Braidotti 2013). For example, the new empiricism, speculative realism and actor network theories that variously draw on process-oriented behavioural ontologies of becoming, in which materially embedded individuals are held to exist in an unmediated empirical relationship within their enfolding environments (see Galloway 2013; Chandler 2015). Like data behaviourism, the pure factuality of a post-human existence also casts doubt on the distinction that knowledge produces between reality and the world. Without this distinction, the world becomes smaller than the sum of its parts (Latour et al. 2012). An individual’s mental horizon reduces to the immediate who, where and when of their changing network connections and disconnections.
Post-humanitarianism goes beyond the smart forms of humanitarian intervention and design that have emerged from the rubble of 1990s liberal interventionism following the West’s foreign policy disasters in the Middle East. This book does not add to the growing pile of optimistic declarations of a fresh humanitarian start based on these technologies (Meier 2015). Post-humanitarianism is the international face of post-humanism. It gives Arendt’s notion of world alienation through growing technoscientific remoteness a new dimension and meaning. At a time of deepening polarization, fragmentation and anger, the post-humanitarian turn to narrow empiricism, unmediated experience and data behaviourism as the international optic of choice is short-sighted, to say the least. Allowing no distinction between reality and the world, and asserting the design principle over any need for radical change, post-humanitarianism lacks any political, historical or moral perspective save that of its own importance. Yet it is also a positive and active force. Post-humanitarianism is central to capitalism’s moving beyond the enclave or special economic zone to incorporate the vast informal economies of the global South – a move discussed in chapter 9. It is a key departure in fashioning the disaggregated biopolitical technologies necessary to support the social reproduction of an expanding global precariat in a post-social world (see chapters 11 and 12).
The emergence of post-humanitarianism is intimately bound up with the computational turn – that is, the steady penetration, since the 1980s, of computers, the internet, mobile telephony, interactive broadband, software platforms, social media and automating apps into all aspects of personal, social, national and international life tout court. Given the antagonistic relationship between the knowledge/circulation and data/connectivity registers, what is remarkable about the computational turn is its seamless, unremarkable and almost natural arrival. To paraphrase John Robert Seeley’s reflection on the British Empire, we seem to have readily transferred to machines the ability to think on our behalf, in a fit of absent-mindedness. Yet, this naturalness is illusionary.
The arrival of the computational turn was preceded by a wide range of contributory and anticipatory developments. Before the commercial arrival of computers, the transformation of textured knowledge into mathematical data was already under way. These anticipatory developments prepared the ground, as it were, for the seamless datafication of society. As argued in this book, a strategic site for the transformation of knowledge into data, and the current refinement of the smart technologies that have emerged, is the global North–South interface. Moreover, since the 1980s, the changing understanding of what constitutes a humanitarian disaster has been instrumental (see chapter 5). The anticipatory and developmental role of disaster is a contemporary example of what Hannah Arendt called the ‘boomerang effect’ (Arendt 1994: 155; also Foucault 2003: 103).
For Arendt, the moral licence and lack of restraint that characterized nineteenth-century imperialism served as a trial run for the European totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Throughout the colonial period, the colonies functioned as general laboratories, testbeds or sites of anticipation for emerging capitalist relations and new modes of governance that would materialize in Europe. These ranged from prison reform through public health to centralized policing and modernist urban planning (Rose 2000: 107, n25; Rabinow 1995).6 While the boomerang effect has a history, it also operates in the present. Relatively deregulated and with weak data protection laws, the global South continues to be a testbed for new technologies (Jacobsen 2015). The boomerang effect is a disruptive concept. It unsettles modernist ideas of developmental and temporal sequencing by according the global South an experimental or forward-looking role; the South is where our post-humanitarian future lies.
In seeking to understand the shift from optimism to political pessimism, this book examines how the reason and human agency associated with the former have been seamlessly transferred to the automatic devices and smart technologies that underpin the post-humanist turn. In analysing the arrival of the computational turn, seeing its roots in the positive or creative urge driving contemporary capitalism has been central. Chapter 2 addresses this issue through the idea of a new spirit of capitalism. Ironically, this spirit drew much of its energy from the international revolutionary and countercultural upsurge that peaked during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and which is here called the May ’68 critique. Recouped as a progressive neoliberalism, the resulting problematization of the alienation, hierarchy and patriarchy of welfare-Fordism played a formative role in the transition to a personalized, computer-based new economy. In the process, the new spirit has been willing to exchange the security of welfare-Fordism for the freedom of the market in a post-social world – that is, a world where social protection and state provision are attenuated or no longer exist. The idea of the post-social, its anticipation in the global South, and the social automation necessary to make it a reality, are essential constituents of post-humanitarianism.
During the 1960s, however, these outcomes were still uncertain. The postmodern age has been shaped by a questioning of the sovereignty of the subject from many competing viewpoints. Chapter 3 looks at the contrasting positions of New Left Marxism and cybernetics on this issue. The former, through the negative dialectic, saw the possibility of capitalism’s decent into a techno-barbarism unless prevented by revolution. For cybernetics, the problem was one of avoiding entropy by using the command and control functions made possible by a science of information able to govern human–machine interaction. In the transition to post-Fordism, it was cybernetics that triumphed. As chapter 4 argues, the May ’68 movement was the last time an autonomous intelligentsia was able to make a stand against the rising tide of empiricism and behaviourism within the academy. To provide a comparison with the isolating risk aversion of the present, the chapter concludes with a review of the structural method and immersive anthropological fieldwork that were still possible in the mid-1970s.
As examples of the boomerang effect, chapters 5 and 6 present non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the changing nature of international aid during the 1980s as a preparatory stage for the computational turn and appearance of post-humanitarianism. In relation to the present, it was a phase of both anticipation and rupture. A new ontology of disaster emerged. Rather than a modernist separation from society, disaster became a defining characteristic of society and its inner vulnerabilities and weaknesses. The earlier social and political views of famine gave way to complexity thinking and indeterminacy. Experimentation with early warning transformed famines into the signals and alerts thrown off by behavioural change. Rather than theory, the new emphasis was operationality. These developments exemplified the coming of age of an essentially cybernetic understanding of liberal security. In anticipating the post-social, the fantastic NGO invasion also piloted the projectized forms of livelihood support and community development. While anticipatory, however, the project form, together with the direct humanitarian action of the period, were still vested in the primacy of human agency and grounded engagement.
With liberal interventionism now buried in the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, chapter 7 examines the West’s growing inhibition and retreat from the world through the culture and architecture of the fortified aid compound. Field-security training is used as an example of how the shift from circulation to connectivity is not natural, as it were, but must be taught. Training instils remoteness and how to view the world in post-human terms. Rather than a product of history and causation, the outside is now an unmediated flux of green, amber and red behavioural cues and environmental alerts. Resilience training reinforces a refocusing on the inner-self. The fortified aid compound functions as a therapeutic structure offering refuge and mental respite from an uncertain world that is no longer fully understood. While a cultural dead-end, the fortified aid compound provides a counterpoint to the liberating leap that has been made into the electronic atmosphere – the last global strategic plane where one-sided economic, political and cultural action is still possible.
The creation of a global precariat has been the single most significant achievement of capitalism’s new economy. Precarity is also the governmental object of post-humanitarianism. Chapter 8 examines the blurring of economy and disaster that brought the precariat into being. Made possible by the spread of mobile connectivity throughout the global South, new ways of valorizing the social reproduction of the precariat have emerged. As argued in chapter 9, smart technology folds downwards into the inequalities and mobility differences encountered. It has enabled capitalism to move beyond the confines of the special economic zone to enrol the precariat within the circuits of the global economy.
The remaining chapters focus on the new distance-recouping and sense-making tools that have emerged as part of the computational turn and form the technological basis of post-humanitarianism. Chapter 10 examines remote satellite sensing and how refugees are now understood ecologically – that is, as part of the environments in which they are embedded. Crisis informatics has rediscovered disaster events as distributed information systems, and enabled, among other things, the appearance of a new generation of hyper-bunkered post-humanitarians. Chapter 11 takes this analysis further by focusing on the disaggregated biopolitics of the biohuman as reflected in the notion of humanitarian innovation. This includes the emergence of a suite of attentive self-acting objects and smart technologies that have now absorbed the individual and collective human agency associated with earlier direct humanitarian action. These technologies are celebrated as enabling the precariat to survive in a post-social world, a key feature of which is the absence of a fixed infrastructural grid.
In drawing the book to a close, the Conclusion discusses the post-humanitarian attempts at streamlining and automating social reproduction among the precariat through cognitive science. Such developments dovetail with the long postmodern trope of a caretaker society – that is, having solved all important social and political problems, all that is now needed is piecemeal technological change. Such elite complacency, however, sits awkwardly with the paradox of connectivity – that is, the more connectivity, the greater the ground friction and political anger generated.