As a mode of life beyond the social – that is, beyond the former realities of modernity in the global North and its promise in the South – precarity is a historically novel form of dispensation. It reflects an expanding life-world that exists at the interface between economy and disaster. Post-humanitarianism encompasses the data-based interventions, design frameworks and ethical orientations geared to augmenting precarity in contexts where political change has been negated by resilience, and where a progressive neoliberalism is the dominant window on the world. It embodies an anticipatory, socially disaggregated biopolitics that, through datafication and remote sensing, seeks to optimize logistically the body’s fitness, recuperative and cognitive capacities sufficiently for smart humans to exist in the post-social wild. Long anticipated in artistic and critical thought (Gibson 1984; Hayles 1999; Dillon & Reid 2009), post-humanitarianism is the realization within the laboratory of the global South of a biohuman essence that blurs the distinction between mind and market, and human and nonhuman systems.
Third-wave globalization, to which post-humanitarianism belongs, is deepening the break with modernism that the fantastic invasion of the 1980s began. Post-humanitarianism denotes the automation of aid, together with the embrace of remote management and the new commercial and private actors that are inseparable from these technologies. Rather than automation being exceptional, humanitarianism is following a consistent trend for an ever- widening range of previously grounded knowledge-based activities to be captured by what Bernard Stiegler has called automatic society (Stiegler 2016). Apart from the computational turn and rapid diffusion of mobile telephony, humanitarian automation builds on several key developments. Besides austerity pressures to reduce costs, an important justification has been the risk-related retreat of international aid workers, journalists and academic researchers from challenging environments and disaster zones. However, as a hollowed-out and restricted engagement with the outside world has become naturalized, a much more positive and rejuvenating ontological force has been harnessed. Following their mauling by the May ’68 movement, there has been a rehabilitation and subsequent rise to dominance within the academy of positivist, empiricist and, not least, behaviourist strands of thought, under the rubric of post-humanism (Braidotti 2013).
While approaches like speculative realism (Harman 2010), the new materialism (Coole 2013) or actor network theory (Latour 1987) have internal differences, reflecting Marcuse’s (1968) critique of technological society, they tend to privilege flat, process-oriented ontologies of becoming that cast individuals as relationally embedded within the pure factuality of their immediate environments (see Galloway 2013; Chandler 2015). Rather than a dualist separation between individual or concrete ‘reality’ and a higher-order ‘world’ – accessible through theory and open to critique – life is more an exercise in pure or unmediated factuality, as monadic individuals constantly connect and disconnect from others and things across horizontal data landscapes. As David Chandler has argued, by bringing the interactions and interrelationships between the semiotic and the material to the surface, thus making them ‘readable and thereby governable’, Big Data has allowed post-humanism to come of age (Chandler 2015: 838). Paradigmatically, this ontology achieves a clear expression with regard to the ordering effects of the screen interface. No longer dependent upon circulation, the connected ‘world’ becomes so many fragmented and personalized linear connections between friends, feeds and member forums. As Chandler points out, post-humanism’s coming of age can be measured in its effortless passage from critical outlier into the policy mainstream (2015: 849). Big Data plays an enabling role in the sense of authoring post-humanist ‘ways of governing the world based upon process-based understanding and relational ontologies’ (2015: 838).
Post-humanism gives intellectual coherence to post-humanitarianism. In beginning to explore this coherence, this chapter examines from an infrastructural perspective the expansion of mobile connectivity among the global precariat. If connectivity has enabled the flat ontologies, pure factuality and behaviourism of post-humanism to come of age, it has also underpinned a major shift in the spatial organization of network capitalism. From an earlier reliance on fenced-off special economic zones that formally exempted capital from the law, third-wave globalization and the datafication of the vast informal economies of the global South constitute a movement beyond the enclave, rendering society as a whole an economic zone of exemption and disruption. At the same time, however, in terms of the techno-pastoral aesthetic, there is a curious feeling of smart technology presiding over unchanging landscapes of poverty and decay. This is the terrain of post-humanitarianism.
Taken together, the existing physical world of wires, buried pipes, dams, power stations, telecommunications networks, transport links and urban architecture constitutes an engineered environment that traditionally functioned, often in the background, to maintain circulation. The foundations for much of today’s critical infrastructure and urban design were dug during the period of capitalist acceleration prior to the 1980s (Graham & Marvin 2001). Before its extensive privatization, this infrastructure could be seen as a large-scale, fixed-capital technical grid (Balakrishnan 2009). At the height of the welfare-Fordist period of mass manufacture, this universal fixed-grid, together with its inbuilt redundancies, standardized tariff systems and universal connection protocols, was associated with nationalized or state-regulated essential services such as transport, water, energy, public housing, health and telecommunications. The fixed-grid aimed to provide public access to a universal set of standardized utilities and services through fixed tariff regimes. It marked a time when rich and poor, so to speak, were connected to the same water, electricity and sewage systems. Its growth since the nineteenth century is inseparable from a political economy of urban modernism and the improvement of living standards through normative interventions concerning health, education and employment conditions (Rabinow 1995). Prior to the 1980s, in the erstwhile Third World, attaining a similar universal fixed-grid of utilities and services embodied the modernist aspirations of states when development still meant economic catch-up with the West (Rostow 1960). In aspirational terms, the universal fixed-grid promised a collective levelling-up for society as a whole.
The infrastructure supporting a fast-expanding global connectivity includes the satellites, fibre optic cables, towers, routers and wires that interconnect a growing network of climate-controlled data warehouses with billions of roaming screen interfaces. This infrastructure also constitutes a political economy (Terranova 2004; Lesczynski 2012; Easterling 2014).1 Rather than directly replacing the old universal fixed-grid, this data-hungry global ecosystem acts upon, reinvents and transforms it. Rather than renewal as such, harnessed to neoliberalism the spread of connectivity has been associated with the privatization of the fixed-grid, the undoing of social or normative welfare, and the commercialization and marketization of the life-worlds it supported (Spreeuwenberg & Poell 2012). As reflected in the phenomena of jobless growth and increasing inequality, privatization has largely been parasitic on the universal fixed-grid – fragmenting and globalizing while under-investing in repair and replacement as it feeds zombie-like on the dead labour it has acquired (Balakrishnan 2009). Of itself, increased connectivity has not closed the growing gap between global requirements and the slow pace of infrastructure renewal and reconstruction (Mckinsey Global Institute 2016). In terms of the sprawling slums and ruined landscapes in question, this gap directly impacts the global precariat.
Technoscience and the business world have responded to the infrastructural gap through the ethos and medium of smart technology. Rather than renewal per se, smart technology is more a replacement that operates through bricolage and the leverage of existing infrastructure through the development of new business models and marketing strategies. Such leverage has reached Byzantine proportions, for example, in relation to the UK’s railways, domestic energy and broadband supply. A privatized fixed-grid has provided a foundation for the creation and regulation of several artificial markets. While the state may have shrunk, an expanding network of private providers, confusion marketing and diminishing public accountability have more than compensated (Agamben 2013). At the same time, the administrative and transaction costs that were once absorbed by business and state sectors have now been passed to customers.
In urban development terms, smart technology has facilitated a move away from normative city planning towards selective gentrification, gated communities and the privatization of public space that draws physical and cognitive lines between better-off areas and the food and amenity deserts of the precariat (Davis & Monk 2007; Minton 2009; Spencer 2016a). Contrary to the levelling-up logic of a universal fixed-grid, smart technology levels downwards; it folds into and reproduces the varieties, differences and inequalities within the human terrain. In relation to these differences, connectivity provides a sense of democratization and empowerment. Indeed, it proclaims as a universal right that smart technology should engineer different speeds, tariff bands, access protocols, technical fixes and customized packages according to the societal inequalities and varying bandwidths encountered. As Peter Redfield points out, smart technologies in the global South ‘must adapt to an absence of support infrastructure. They must survive a perilous environment and cannot depend on a regular supply of electricity. To be successful, humanitarian goods must recognize their users, adjusting to the reality of their worlds even as they seek to change them’ (Redfield 2015: 15).
Smart technology folds downwards into the social fabric. It codes, maps and digitally reproduces the startlingly unequal fitness landscapes of network capitalism. Like resilience, however, smart technology is not designed to eradicate the root problems that lie behind the inequalities encountered. On sliding scales of cost and effectiveness, it promises ‘the connected’ ways of sidestepping ground friction as they navigate the old circulatory spaces of a residual urban modernism that is now the new wild.
Integrating the vast shadow systems of precarity within global value chains represents a complex challenge for business logistics. That such a challenge is conceivable, however, rests upon the rapid diffusion of mobile information technology across the global South. Since the mid-2000s, through subsidies, engineering innovation and software for data deals, cheap mobile telephony has, to use a phrase from the early days of satellite coverage, ‘leapfrogged’ over decayed or absent terrestrial telecommunication systems (Skinner 2010). According to the World Bank, mobile telephony is now the largest distribution platform in the world. Between 2000 and 2012, the global number of devices rapidly expanded from 740 million to nearly 7 billion, with three-quarters of these located in the global South (Easterling 2014: 17). Today, even in remote areas, the precariat have access to at least some bandwidth through basic mobile devices (de Bruijin et al. 2009; Donovan 2013; Nielsen 2015). This deployment is of world-historic importance. To get a sense of its effects and potentialities, it is worth considering leapfrogging not as a horizontal process of technology transfer but as a prime example of smart technology levelling downwards. As Kelly Easterling has pointed out, while the prospect of Development 2.0 is widely celebrated, ‘the discipline is under-rehearsed in an analysis of the spatial dispositions attending broadband infrastructure’ (Easterling 2014: 97).
During the decade following the late 1980s, most of the world was connected by fast, undersea fibre optic cable. In terms of its political economy, this surge of digital connectivity stands comparison with the laying of the analogue submarine telegraph cable network during the nineteenth century (Headrick 2012). Fibre optic cable came relatively late to Africa. From less than ten landfalls by 2009, mainly along Africa’s west coast, by 2012 this grew rapidly to more than thirty, which now encircle the continent (Song 2015). Before connection, East Africa, for example, represented only 1 per cent of global broadband capacity (Easterling 2014: 95). The region had earlier relied on older and expensive satellite technology, for which the auxiliary infrastructure was created in the 1970s. Between 2009 and 2010, while of relatively low capacity, three commercially owned cables made landfall at Mombasa on the Kenyan coast (2014: 113). As with the rest of the continent, these cables are buried in the ground and generally follow the main arterial routes from the coast to the interior. Looking at a broadband trunk cable map of Africa,2 one is struck by its similarity to the topology of the colonial railway system. With the exception that fibre optic cables now often cross frontiers, they are similar in usually being single-tracked, moving inward from the main ports, and linking a few principal towns and main export centres while carving out huge intervening white spaces. The difference from an average European or American city is striking. Here, fibre optic cables are locally and densely interwoven, buried along railway lines, main roads, streets and cul-de-sacs in a bid to connect as many individual homes, schools, offices and businesses as possible. In addition to the primacy of battery-powered devices, this infrastructural difference suggests that last-mile broadband connectivity across Africa’s huge electronic white spaces remains, and will continue to remain, an atmospheric problem.
In Kenya, the main trunk cables are buried alongside the Mombasa–Nairobi highway. While two-lane for much of its length, its surface is poorly maintained and difficult to navigate in places. This reflects the paradox of the diffusion of mobile telephony: it exists alongside high levels of precarity and the neglect or disrepair of auxiliary infrastructure (2014: 98). While a few enclaves are connected along the way, in the main, the cables make for the capital and beyond. Relying on these trunk cables for bandwidth, mobile telephony adds a new ‘atomized typology of microwave towers and handsets’ (2014: 98). Interconnecting battery-powered devices, these numerous towers create an electronic atmosphere of varying density stretching out from points of access to the high-speed fibre optic backbone. Compared to earlier satellite technology, this surface atmosphere of microwave towers greatly increases last-mile connectivity and roaming ranges through the medium of battery-powered mobile phones (2014: 97). The mainly local or regional service providers that sell and transfer broadband between the overlapping systems of cables and towers add another infrastructural layer comprising ‘a cluster of switches or points of access’ (2014: 97). Monopolies, bottlenecks and competition can develop ‘within these linear, atomized, and clustered topologies’ (2014: 97).
Besides local and regional telecommunications companies, Silicon Valley is also involved. This includes the retrofitting, or levelling-down, of corporate software platforms to work in the low-bandwidth conditions encountered. Retrofitting involves lower-density graphics, advanced caching techniques and improved batteries to optimize off-grid roaming (Honan 2014). Moreover, in their bid to capture the 4 to 5 billion people globally still unconnected – a billion of whom are said to be in Africa – Google and Facebook are both investing in new stratospheric communication infrastructures operating at lower altitudes than satellites (Naughton 2014). In the words of Mark Zuckerberg, this willingness to adjust to poor tele-economic conditions is an indication of Facebook’s desire to develop new platforms ‘based on the principle that different communities need different technical solutions’ (Zuckerberg 2014).
In order to reduce costs, and to avoid terrestrial regulations and, not least, the potential insecurity of ground installations, interconnecting satellites, trunk broadband cables, relay towers and millions of roaming screen interfaces from the stratosphere has advantages. Google, for example, is exploring high-endurance balloons capable of drifting well above the Earth’s surface, using stratospheric winds to navigate (Google 2015). Facebook is investing in high-altitude solar-powered drone technology, with the aim of creating unmanned vehicles able to stay aloft for months at a time, rather than weeks or days (Zuckerberg 2014). Called Aquila, after the Latin for eagle, the first successful test flight took place in May 2017 at the Yuma Proving Ground. With the wingspan of a Boeing 747, fleets of these drones will eventually, according to Zuckerberg, ‘beam internet connectivity across the world’ (Associated Press 2017). These rival technologies are similar in that they seek to operate from the stratosphere, or more than 20 kilometres above the Earth’s surface. Not only is the stratosphere well clear of ground friction, from a legal perspective it is like the high seas. It constitutes an ambiguous space that is, literally, above the law (Neocleous 2013). Unlike the ground versions of ‘ungoverned space’, however, which are prone to insecurity, political push-back or access denial, the stratosphere is being colonized by the digital corporations. Even the laser-beam technology (free space optics communications, or FSO) that is being optimized for fibre-like speeds of data transmission between drones and the terrestrial tower network uses a part of the radio spectrum that is outside international telecommunication regulations (CableFree 2017).
Claims for the leapfrogging potential of atmospheric connectivity in the global South are not new. In the 1970s and 1980s, futurologists imagined that satellites could bypass the terrestrial fixed-grid by simply beaming down a communication infrastructure (Easterling 2005: 136). In practice, however, satellites could not solve the last-mile problem. The necessary auxiliary equipment required a fixed electricity supply and dedicated fibre and cable access points. For such reasons, satellite technology favoured the creation of well-resourced infrastructural enclaves that serviced urban elites and took the form of office parks and special economic zones (2005: 138). Mobile connectivity radically changes this socio-spatial configuration. Bottom-of-the-pyramid economics signals a shift in the nature of global capitalism. Third-wave globalization involves moving beyond the off-shore manufacturing enclaves and special economic zones that underpinned Northern deindustrialization during the 1980s and 1990s (Amsden 1990; Beijing Review 1992). The special economic zone was an authoritarian economic construct typical of second-wave globalization. Such enclaves are usually ‘an isomorphic exurban enclave that, exempt from law, can easily banish the circumstances and protections common in richer forms of urbanity’ (Easterling 2014: 15–16). Special economic zones are fenced-off and securitized spaces where national tax liability, safety requirements or investment regulations either do not apply or can be negotiated in the interests of business (Cowen 2014). The zone is where bare labour enters to meet the external investment it has attracted.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, based upon the infrastructural platform of mobile connectivity, capital is now reaching out beyond the enclave to embrace the precariat. In so doing, it is discovering in the informal sector another environment that, while different in some respects – especially in terms of its vast low-end consumer potential – is also structurally similar to the special economic zone. Shadow economies are de facto also ‘exempt from the law’. As with the behaviour of digital corporations, avoiding taxation and national regulations has long been a defining feature of informality. Through incorporating the social reproduction of the precariat, third-wave globalization from the electronic atmosphere has the potential to transform the global South as a whole into a vast ‘special economic zone’. Given that shadow networks are valued for their autopoietic powers of production, reproduction and consumption, and that these are possible in part because of their self-exemption from tax and the law, one can expect electronic globalization to deepen the casualization of work (Meagher 2015; Meagher 2016). One could go further, and join Genevieve LeBaron and Alison Ayers (LeBaron & Ayers 2013) in recognizing in casualization the logic of a modern slavery – modern in the sense of breaking the traditional ownership link between master/slave, yet still riven by abjection. A post-social capitalism breaks all ties of responsibility between finance capital and labour, while connectivity helps to manage the huge distances and multiple organizational relay points that now separate them. If we can use the term ‘modern slavery’ in relation to the precariat, it refers to the abject dependence that is generated by a capitalism that now has the power to hold labour in a state of permanent emergency.3 Repacked as development, with all the celebratory hype this entails, capital’s absorption of a self-reproducing precarity looks set to expand.
In Kenya, which is not untypical, the explosion in mobile phone usage is remarkable. Pricing is so low that, even before the landfall of broadband, devices were socially widespread. Between 2000 and 2008, subscriptions increased over a hundredfold, from 127,000 to around 16 million. With the arrival of broadband, they nearly doubled again between 2008 and 2012, to some 30 million devices among a total population of 48 million (Easterling 2014: 96). However, to draw out the real significance of this increase in connectivity, it needs to be flagged that Kenya has one of the largest informal sectors in Africa (UNECA 2015a: 66). Involving around 12 million people, informal employment in Kenya represents 83 per cent of the total. This includes small retailers, street vendors, unlicensed motorcycle taxis and casualized employment in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors. Women are particularly involved in shadow trading networks. Formal employment, providing a regular wage or salary, has continued its consistent decline, resting at just over 4 per cent of the workforce in 2014 (2015a: 16). Varying widely according to location, in 2009 the average level of extreme poverty was estimated at 45 per cent (2015a: 24). According to the UN’s Economic Commission for Africa, having no formal safety nets, the Kenyan precariat ‘operate under a high degree of informality and vulnerability, resulting in small and unpredictable income, poor working conditions and low productivity. Such informality is likely to trap people into poverty’ (2015a: 67).
Nairobi has 2.5 million slum dwellers, comprising some 60 per cent of the total urban population, yet they live on only 6 per cent of the land. Kibera is the largest of Nairobi’s informal settlements and is the largest slum in Africa (Kibera 2017). Overcrowded, with 90 per cent of the population having no tenancy rights, there are no government clinics or hospitals. Having a wide range of health issues and lack of education provision, basic services are provided by NGOs. Only 20 per cent of the settlement has electricity, and potable water for sale is supplied by access points off two piped supplies. Other than shared pit latrines – in some cases, dozens of overcrowded shacks to one latrine – there is no fixed sewage system. Unemployment is high despite a widespread involvement of slum dwellers in the informal sector (Kibera 2017).
Not all Kenya’s precariat live in slums or earn less than $1.90 a day, the current UN marker of extreme poverty. Moreover, there are gaps in the statistical data and a danger that such an overview ends up comparing apples with oranges. However, given that Kenya is not an exception with regard to the intermeshing of informality and connectivity in the second decade of the twenty-first century, these estimates give some indication of the historically singular milieus that are emerging in the global South. Vast and populous urban and peri-urban post-social zones, themselves vulnerable to disaster and external shocks, where a connected and actively unemployed autopoietic precariat is effectively contained. Having few if any assets, its coping strategies, and physical and cognitive labour, are realized within informal and insecure global markets increasingly mediated and controlled by digital logistical platforms. However, using the moral compass of inclusive capitalism, this development is not viewed as a failure or affront. Just as the dominance of atmospheric connectivity establishes an infrastructural difference between North and South, third-wave globalization is creating a new set of anticipatory possibilities among the milieus that capitalism’s crisis of social reproduction is creating.
In 2010, the World Bank was already arguing that the model of market liberalization that had hitherto been followed in Europe and the USA ‘is not directly relevant to the region of Sub-Saharan Africa’ (quoted by Easterling 2014: 108). As in Kenya, a new strain of liberalism is emerging:
a liberalism associated with the platforms of exchange made possible by new technologies. In countries like Kenya the low prices and large customer volumes of mobile telephony align with the new ‘trickle up’ business and management models emerging from populous countries of the global south. The idea is to sell a limited inexpensive service or product like the cell phone to a large number of people. (2014: 108)
Kenya is being hyped as a potential ‘silicon savannah’, and broadband is now written into government policy and development goals (2014: 97). Entrepreneurs are trying to identify multipliers, find new bottom-of-the-pyramid business models, refine crowd-sourcing techniques and develop apps to capture the producer and consumer markets that the precariat, due to its increasing size and low overhead costs, represents. As Easterling notes, companies like TATA, MTN, Safaricom and Huawei have so far been bypassing their Western counterparts in developing such approaches. However, reflecting the relatively low capacity of Kenya’s undersea fibre optic cables, while atmospheric connectivity is adequate for ‘boot strap’ capitalism, despite the Development 2.0 hype, the country is ‘sorely lacking high-capacity premium fixed bandwidth for business and education’ (2014: 96). In other words, bottom-of-the-pyramid economics is just that. It continues the trend established in the 1970s and 1980s of denying, for one reason or another, that the global South is suitable for what used to be called a modern industrial future, with all its implications.
Current moves can be condemned as threatening to digitally reproduce anew the old development–underdevelopment divide. However, there is a danger of missing the point. Experiments in recycling and streamlining the precarity and insecurity that the new economy has produced in the global South is where the future of capitalism, North and South, is to be found. While critical attention is rightly directed towards the consequences of deepening social automation in Europe and the USA (Stiegler 2016), the future of network capitalism will be equally defined by its ability to valorize the global precariat in all its ‘bandwidths’. Whether the enterprise will succumb to the anger, violence and resistance that austerity first engendered (Walton & Seddon 1994; Bush 2007), and which increasing casualization is deepening (Mishra 2017a), is an open question. It does not instil confidence, however, to realize that Silicon Valley elites are preparing for the future by buying properties in New Zealand (Donnell 2017) or constructing and furnishing wilderness hideaways (Bartlett 2017).
The tension between the people and things that have leave to circulate, and those that are territorially immobile and denied movement, is now a major security issue along the globally expanding, heavily policed and electronically surveilled migratory interface of barriers and checkpoints (Brown 2010). The spatial and temporal asymmetry between mobility and immobility creates a number of post-humanitarian demands for otherwise restricted or hyper-bunkered aid managers – for example, the ability to connect with distant and contained populations, for humanitarian commodities or technologies that can be self-administered and operate off-grid, and for means of remote evaluation and identity verification. There is a demand for cheap humanitarian technologies that are conducive to both aid automation and remote management. The issue of humanitarian innovation is examined more fully in chapter 11. Here, it is sufficient to say that its logic follows that of smart technology. Humanitarian design adapts to absences, inequalities and speed differentials by folding into them, while, at the same time, reproducing them. Preferring design over revolution, the dominant aesthetic of post-humanitarianism is the already-mentioned techno-pastoral (see chapter 8).
An early example of the techno-pastoral aesthetic can be traced in Alvin Tofler’s Future Shock published in 1980 (Tofler 1980). In a chapter aptly entitled ‘Ghandi and Satellites’, this prescient work foresees technoscience as providing a third wave of development that resolves the contradictions between a first-wave agrarian traditionalism and second-wave industrialization. Satellite and other advance technologies, rather like today’s mobile telephony, were seen leapfrogging over existing first-wave conditions and impediments, enabling betterment without full industrialization and thus the need to sacrifice cultural values, communal mutuality, religion or indigenous practices: ‘Given the wider range of options brought by the Third Wave, cannot a people reduce infant mortality and improve life span, literacy, nutrition, and the general quality of life without surrendering its religion or values and necessarily embracing the Western materialism that accompanies the spread of Second Wave civilization?’ (1980: 337). Advanced technoscience would enable local forms of development that would not overemphasize the economic factor ‘at the expense of ecology, culture, religion, or family structure and the psychological dimensions of existence’ (1980: 337; also Easterling 2005: 136–8). While Tofler was not able to foresee the widening inequality that progressive neoliberalism would produce, it is interesting that, nearly four decades on, humanitarian innovation remains trapped within what is now an old futurology (Barbrook 2013).
Rather than radical change – indeed, this is rejected – humanitarian innovation celebrates how technoscience has fabricated a range of digital infrastructures, humanitarian objects and smart technologies that enable the precariat to survive off-grid within essentially unchanging poverty landscapes. Countless photographic images, installations and promotional brochures attest to the difficulties that post-humanitarianism has in visualizing progress. Instead, we find a recurrent techno-pastoral aesthetic where timeless scenes of poverty, slum dwelling and everyday survival are product-placed with mobile phones, solar-powered lamps, flat-pack shacks or other examples of humanitarian design. Complete with smiling people, these are so many homely tableaus of Halpern’s (2017) ‘hopeful resilience’. Since Tofler’s day, the only difference is that the slums are now wired. The techno-pastoral aesthetic is forcefully expressed in the work of the photographer Ruben Salgado Escudero, whose series of stylized ‘solar portraits’ of the precariat ‘within their environment’ condense a discomposing feeling of progressive entropy.4 Whereas Tofler saw the third wave as offering a dignity to traditional values, and community mutuality that remained independent and autonomous, a parasitic inclusive capitalism, while it praises the same autopoietic qualities, is now incorporating and absorbing them.
The remainder of this book examines the essentially entropic logic of post-humanitarianism. The next chapter begins this task with an analysis of remote satellite sensing and the emergence of data informatics as the new tools that now make sense of precarity from a distance.