We have moved from an age that valued reason and human agency to a world where their stock has depreciated. Indeed, our society celebrates their transfer and absorption into automatic devices and smart technologies. The resulting existential remoteness from the world is all the easier to accept because, by common consent, the world is more complex, uncertain and dangerous than it used to be. Faced with an unpredictable environment, the digital recoupment of distance through new sense-making tools and smart technologies appears, if not providential, then at least fortuitous. Penetrating all areas of personal, national and international life, this transfer has been rapid, complete, and affects us all. Yet – making it all the more remarkable – it is only now, when all but complete, that this enfoldment has started to attract the wider critical attention it deserves (Morozov 2013; Carr 2015; Foer 2017; Taplin 2017).
In trying to render some of this historic capture accessible, this book has focused on the changing global North–South interface. In particular, it has interpreted humanitarian disaster as part of a boomerang effect, or feedback loop, interconnecting the North and South during the transition from Fordism to capitalism’s new network economy. In relation to the computational turn, and the transfer of human agency to self-acting technologies, humanitarian aid is revealed as a process of anticipation and rupture. To draw this process out, previous chapters have examined the driving spirit of the new economy, delineated some of the transitional forms between knowledge and data, discerned patterns of technological incorporation of precarity, and described the new sense-making tools, disaggregated biopolitics and governmental logics that are now shaping a post-social world.
By way of concluding, the prospect of social automation, which these developments are variously calling forth, is a worthy topic. Central to such automation is the cognitive turn – that is, the privileging of the unconscious and automatic thought processes upon which Homo inscius is reliant. Building on the preceding chapters, the Conclusion outlines current attempts to streamline the social reproduction of precarity through attentive cognitive designs and smart feedback. Of particular importance, however, is how these initiatives – together, the general thematic of the book – dovetail with the long postmodern trope of the caretaker society. Having solved all major social and political problems, all that remains for such a society is the continual round of piecemeal technical adjustment. In such a world, the allure of design has vanquished politics and dreams of radical change. There is, however, a paradox at the heart of commercial connectivity. The remoteness and consequent complacency of elites is deepening at the same time as unprecedented societal polarization, fragmentation and visceral anger spread.
The World Bank’s 2015 World Development Report is entitled Mind, Society and Behaviour. Tracing a link to the work of Fredrick Hayek (World Bank 2015: 5), the Report is a major statement on the importance of cognitive science to international development (Alcock 2016). Mind, Society and Behaviour has been welcomed by developmentalists keen to draw parallels between the Bank’s work and current leading-edge initiatives among NGOs, such as Doing Development Differently1 and Thinking and Working Politically2 (Green 2014; Ramalingam 2014). What can be called cognitive development, aspects of which were anticipated during the fantastic invasion (chapter 5), has moved to the foreground, in parallel with the emergence of crisis informatics and humanitarian design (chapters 10 and 11). Indeed, cognitive science interleaves these initiatives. It provides a neurological framework that is receptive to and actionable by behavioural technologies. When addressing precarity from a cognitive perspective, the terms ‘developmental’ and ‘humanitarian’ lose their former distinctiveness. Since the chronically poor and the disaster-affected are one and the same people and constantly change place, these terms have blurred and become interchangeable. Using the Bank’s Report as a point of departure, the Conclusion first examines the contribution of cognitive science to optimizing the social reproduction of the precariat under conditions of permanent emergency.
Mind, Society and Behaviour brings two key elements to international development. First, as seems common following the scare of the 2008 financial crisis, is a rejoinder that, despite everything, global capitalism does not require any fundamental change or reform. Claims that poverty results from the political and economic system being stacked against the poor, which thus could be solved by ‘quotas or a large-scale redistribution of resources’, are rejected as incomplete (World Bank 2015: 80). It is argued that redistribution would not ‘address the cognitive resources required to make a decision, especially when material resources are in short supply and when people’s willingness to act upon their desires may be constrained’ (2015: 80). While one could be forgiven for thinking that the purpose of redistribution would be to provide such resources and easements, this strange argument is only tenable if you believe that the poor, compared to the rich, are cognitively challenged. But, there again, that’s the point of the Bank’s Report.
Following from this, the second important element is the redefinition of poverty in terms of ‘bandwidth’, or the sum of the enfolding infrastructural or environmental mental aids and resources – or lack of them – that are available to a sentient being. Mind and behaviour are thus determined by one’s social milieu. An example is given of a poor indebted farmer, the harvest still months away, pressed to decide whether to make a long-term investment in the education of a child. This is happening when there is a hole in the roof, the kerosene has run out and finding clean water is a constant effort. In addition, his neighbour is expecting help with pressing medical bills because the farmer’s family received similar support from his neighbour in the past.
From this behavioural perspective, poverty is not a structural or social outcome: it’s a personal experience. It is the result of the constant grind of having to make hard choices: educate a child, fix a roof or invest in communal reciprocity? Relentless hard choices ‘in effect tax an individual’s bandwidth, or mental resources. This cognitive tax, in turn, can lead to economic decisions that perpetuate poverty’ (emphasis added, 2015: 81). At the same time, off-grid environments that lack regular water, electricity or sanitation services also increase the cognitive levy. A high mental tax creates poor frames of thought and makes for impaired decision-making. For the World Bank, thinking is a zero-sum game. The more ‘bandwidth’ the poor consume in their daily grind, the less they have for making important decisions. Presumably, the greater the privation, the more mindless the poor become. Reducing this cognitive tax – and cutting tax is always a popular neoliberal move – consequently leaves more bandwidth for better decision-making. And better decision-making on the part of the poor, as mentioned above, fortuitously negates the need for ‘a large-scale redistribution of resources’.
While it is tempting to reject this ideological edifice as so much intellectual detritus, since Mind, Society and Behaviour has been warmly received among high-bandwidth elites, the reframing of poverty as a cognitive tax has to be taken seriously. Aside from reconfirming the centrality of neoliberalism’s Homo inscius, it sidelines understanding poverty as structurally implicated in the production of wealth in favour of seeing it as a personal experience. Behavioural economics thus draws freely on the sociological and anthropological literature to emphasize the constant hassle and uncertainty of precarity. Reflecting the post-humanist turn, it highlights the direct and unmediated relationship of the poor to the perturbations of their enfolding environments. In one respect, this is useful. Behavioural economics does, indeed, draw attention to the constant daily struggles, hardships and insults endured by an expanding global precariat. Mind, Society and Behaviour is full of such examples, like the poor indebted farmer previously cited. This evidence, however, is not being used to call for significant social change or radical reform. In fact, the opposite takes place. During the nineteenth century, a growing professional awareness of the plight of the poor helped to catalyse a long process of political mobilization and incremental reform, eventually resulting in universal suffrage and the welfare state (Rabinow 1995). At a time when global inequality is at record levels and new forms of post-social servitude and abjection are appearing (LeBaron & Ayers 2013), the reactionary repositioning of poverty as an experience open to cognitive massage now uses a narrow behavioural empiricism (see chapter 11) to reject a structural dimension to want, and thus any need for meaningful change.
Cognitive development and crisis informatics interconnect within the thematic of early warning. Following the rapid spread of mobile telephony, the discovery of disasters as distributed information systems builds on and radically extends the analogue model of early warning that first emerged in the 1970s and 1980s (see chapter 5). Disasters generate abnormal behaviour patterns that, as distinct signals and alerts, can be recorded, analysed and acted upon. The daily hassles faced by a connected precariat as they make difficult choices likewise leave a data trail. Living on the edge between economy and disaster, the informatics of precarity usefully sums up the UN’s Global Pulse project. Made possible by remote sensing and mobile telephony, working in near real-time, you can now ‘figuratively take the pulse of communities’ (UNGP 2009: 8): ‘disaster affected communities have become increasingly “digital” as a result of the information revolution. These new digital technologies … are evolving a new nervous system for our planet, taking the pulse of our social, economic and political networks in real-time’ (Meier 2013b: 3).
Big Data analytics and, importantly, the feedback loops created by mobile telephony and interactive devices have built on the basic early warning model and, as the trajectory of Facebook suggests (Foer 2017), transformed it into a powerful tool of behavioural analysis, prediction and manipulation. The notion of humanitarian disaster has expanded beyond its traditional focus on major political and environmental scourges and upheavals. As discussed in chapter 9, smart technology levels downwards, encompassing the micro-level world of hard choices among the precariat as it enfolds the everyday workings of a connected world. If living on the edge, as reflected in the hard choices made by the precariat, can be recorded and visualized as behavioural patterns, behavioural economics seeks to reverse-engineer this situation through feedback.
Cognitive development involves the packaging and delivery of designed, context- specific information to optimize precariat decision-making. A feedback loop has four distinct stages. First, behaviour must be captured, stored and algorithmically analysed. Second, the returned information must be personalized to the individual or group in a way that resonates emotionally. Third, this value-added information must illuminate a way forward. And, finally, there must be ‘a clear moment when the individual can recalibrate a behaviour, make a choice and act. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviours that inch us closer to our goals’ (Geotz 2011).
Behavioural economics is premised upon the constant tailoring and readjustment of information ‘to fit the human body and its cognitive abilities’ (World Bank 2015: 2). Not only does the feedback of value-added information free individuals from the burden of having to sift through gigabytes of noise and distraction, as discussed further below, but also the need to make decisions can be timed to occur when the poor are at their most attentive. This approach informs, for example, the idea of Doing Development Differently through processes of adaptive design, an initiative captured in the slogan ‘from best practice to best fit’ (Ramalingam 2014).
Streamlining has already been discussed in relation to digital infrastructure – in particular, how smart technology levels downwards by shaping itself to the inequalities and differences encountered. The external tailoring of the infra-informational environment of the cognitively challenged subject to shape desired behaviour goes to the heart of algorithmic governmentality (Rouvroy 2012). The authority for such affect management rests upon a practitioner consensus regarding the ‘necessary ignorance’ of neoliberal’s Homo inscius. For behavioural economics, human consciousness divides into ‘reflective’ and ‘automatic’ systems. The former relates to the use of reasoned deliberation to achieve conscious goals. The latter, however, is held to be far more important in the shaping of actual behaviour. Operating below the level of conscious reason or recognition, it hinges on the automatic play of unconscious heuristics, environmental cues, mental shortcuts or the unreasoned operation of group preferences and shared models (World Bank 2015: 3–4).
While having serious implications for transparency and democracy, such assumptions and related technologies remain politically unchallenged (Alcock 2016: 102–10). Who decides what optimal behaviour is? From predictive marketing and ‘nudge’ politics through to enfolding parametric architectures (Thaler & Sunstein 2008; Spencer 2016a), these technologies seek to shape our cognitive environment. Amid accusations of fake news and social media manipulation, the election of Donald Trump suggests that these technologies have also disappeared into the wild, so to speak (Cadwalladr 2017). The application of behavioural informatics, honed in the personalized consumer markets of platform capitalism (Srnicek 2016), to precarity is thus not unique to the interface between economy and disaster. It is more a question of market expansion as third-wave electronic globalization now folds itself into the sub-prime tele-economic conditions of the global South. What we are seeing is a double movement. On one level, this is an extension of cognitive capitalism (Boutang 2011 [2008]) into the relations and interactions that maintain the social reproduction of the global South’s precariat. At the same time, given the post-social context of precarity in the South and its vast extent, there is also the experimental level of the boomerang effect whereby new forms of social automation and nomadic servility can be anticipated.
In chapter 8, it was argued that the current wave of automation in the global North is reducing the number of professional and middle-class jobs that depend on logical or algebraic modes of thought. Machine learning finds such tasks relatively easy. More difficult to master are lower-level sensorimotor skills that rely on perception, mobility and dexterity (Joshi 2017). Low-waged, insecure, temporary and often technologically stagnant ‘service sector’ jobs reflecting such skill sets is one of the few areas of employment that is expanding. Rather than a temporary phenomenon, it is contended here that regional variations on such activity, if available, reflect the future of work for the global majority. In this respect, Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre’s (2016) challenging argument concerning the emergence of ‘enrichment economies’ in the ‘post-industrial’ global North, which are characterized by ‘a patrimonial class of growing importance on the one hand, and a badly paid, insecure precariat on the other’, deserves serious attention (2016: 36, n7). Reflecting the irony of the negative dialectic, as capitalism adjusts to make the most of its precarious outlook, thousands of platform entrepreneurs, politicians, software engineers, financial innovators, academics, development practioners and humanitarian designers, for the best of intentions, are rising to the challenge of making an entropic and barbaric future liveable.
For the World Bank, those aspects of social reproduction among the precariat that can be cognitively targeted for behavioural optimization include household savings, energy consumption, educational priorities, mental and physical productivity and, not least, maternal and child health (World Bank 2015: 2). These elements span the individuated post-social biopolitics that reproduces the cheap, territorially immobile and dispensable low-level sensorimotor skills that drive the vast informal economies of the global South. Mind, Society and Behaviour emphasizes in several places that cognitive techniques are attractive because they cost relatively little, need not be complex and are already widely practised in the private sector. With regard to existing aid programming, rather than requiring radical change, it is largely a question of ‘nuances of design and implementation’ (2015: 3). Taking ‘the cognitive taxes of poverty into account’ (2015: 81) might simply involve changing the timing of cash transfers, altering the labelling on foodstuffs, simplifying processes or service take-up, sending out regular reminders, marketing new social norms or ‘reducing salience of stigmatised identities’ (2015: 3). The cognitive tax on the precariat could be significantly reduced by shifting the timing of critical decision-making regarding, for example, education, health or employment ‘away from periods when cognitive capacity and energy (bandwidth) are predictably low’, and, alternatively, by ‘targeting assistance to decisions that may require a lot of bandwidth’ (2015: 81).
Another important dimension for easing the burden of thinking relates to infrastructure. Having to daily exert a great deal of mental energy just to access such basic necessities as food and clean water means the precariat ‘are left with less energy for careful deliberation than those who, simply by virtue of living in an area with good infrastructure and good institutions, can instead focus on investing in a business or going to school committee meetings’ (2015: 13). Thus, the absence of a universal fixed-grid ‘like piped water, organised child care, and direct deposit and debit [accounts for] earnings – encumbers those living in low income settings with a number of day-to-day decisions that deplete mental resources even further’ (2015: 81). For Mind, Society and Behaviour, cognition-aware policy instruments ‘such as cash transfers and the development of infrastructure, institutions, and markets’ could serve ‘to lessen the distractions and cognitive burdens of poverty’ (2015: 81). In this respect, cognitive development provides a neurological rationale for the personalized and attentive humanitarian objects discussed in chapter 11 that have been specifically designed to support wild forms of nomadic off-grid survival.
Just as the objectivity of the satellite image relieves the public of the burden of having to read human rights reports, the World Bank similarly sees behavioural economics as easing or streamlining the task of thinking among the poor. Everywhere, it would seem, mnemonic technologies and attentive practitioners are striving to free us from the efforts, burdens and risks of thinking. From disasters to the gig economy, feedback loops are optimizing us logistically to be in the right place at the right time (Reid 2006). We are now all enrolled in the politically unremarked – and, for the most part, unrecognized – creation of what Bernard Stiegler has called automatic society (Stiegler 2016). Regarding the social reproduction of the precariat, we can see anticipatory forms of cognitive streamlining, value-added feedback and aid automation in the global South that are moving in this direction. In biopolitical terms, informal economies are being envisioned and celebrated as capable of self-reproduction and self-organization under conditions of permanent emergency. Moreover, apart from some design initiatives, this requires minimal effort or outlay from the global North and, especially, no need for radical change. In this respect, the ontologies and technologies discussed in this book reproduce the long-anticipated self-adjusting society. This time, however, rather than this being a subject of imagination, we are now seeing early attempts to operationalize it and make it real.
At the end of the Cold War, the West’s economic and political ascendancy seemed assured. Reflecting this spirit, in 1989 Francis Fukuyama published his polemical article ‘The end of history?’ (Fukuyama 2002). For Fukuyama, this ending was signalled by the demise of grand theories and the growing suspicion and rejection of struggles that continued to call for recognition or demand justice – especially those willing to use violence to press such demands. Although the coming world would be more peaceful and secure, lacking such history-making sacrifice, it would not be a particularly exciting place. A self-satisfied inertia would descend as societal administration becomes routinized around continuous, ‘economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history’ (2002: 178).
At the end of history, the destructive clash of divergent interests and competing world-views is replaced by progressive moderation and political pragmatism (see also Sloterdijk 2013 [2005]). This imaginary, however, is not new. In 1960, Daniel Bell published his celebrated book The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Bell 2000 [1960]). Having failed to stop World War II, the grand humanist theories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were argued to have outlived their usefulness. While ideology still characterized the often-violent political emergence of the Third World, more pragmatic and restrained beliefs were taking root in the West. Among sensible people, reason had transmuted into reasonableness. Rather than radical change, piecemeal technical adjustments would now shape future society.
The thematic similarity between the ‘end of ideology’ and the ‘end of history’ is striking. In addition, both emerged at a time when the West temporarily stood victorious after major global struggles against external political enemies. It was assumed, moreover, that these successful struggles had also helped to resolve the important internal social and political issues of the time. In both cases, the future was one of piecemeal technological adjustment and, to use Fukuyama’s phrase, perpetual caretaking. Without the clash of ideologies or recalcitrance of history, society is seen as sliding into a culture of complacency. While both propositions were derided at the time, the thread of smugness that connects them suggests an enduring celebratory role in excess of any explanatory power they may have. Appearing a half-century after Bell’s book, and almost two decades since Fukuyama’s contribution, Bruno Latour (Latour 2008) revisited the caretaker trope in a conference paper entitled ‘A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design’. Having previously pronounced the death of grand narratives and critique (Latour 2004), the conference paper rehearses how the design principle has supplanted a revolutionary political urge. One is tempted to suggest that, in the figure of a cautious Prometheus, a self-satisfied world trapped in a spiral of technological lassitude has now found a suitable anti-hero.
As an elaboration of his critical stance towards modernity (Latour 1992), Latour speculates on how the separation between materiality and design that characterized modernity has weakened and blurred. Since encountering the scale and complexity of the ecological crisis, we are all now designers rather than modernizers. Across a wide arc of operational discourse, designer attitudes reflecting such sentiments as ‘attachment, precaution, entanglement, dependence and care’ have all but replaced earlier and more reckless commitments to ‘emancipation, detachment, modernization, progress and mastery’ (Latour 2008: 2). In this fashion, Latour asserts that the ontopolitics of the design principle – the need to work with the world as it is, rather than how it ought to be – has now effectively supplanted the idea of revolution. It would be difficult, he suggests, to find feelings or sentiments like humility, attentiveness or ethics as having played any formative role in the revolutionary movements of the past. The caretaking of design sits awkwardly with a Promethean urge to raise and construct – and, in consequence, to tear asunder and destroy.
Latour is no doubt correct to assert the centrality of design within the postmodern canon. In that case, alongside the end of ideology and history, since they are the basic ingredients of political life, the caretaker society now adds the death of politics as well – at least, that is, a politics that is staked on the commons between reality and the world, and dares to use the former to critique the latter.
There are differences, however, within this enduring trope. Ideology and history ended at moments of geopolitical victory over the external enemies of fascism and totalitarianism. The end of politics seems to mark a different kind of reckoning: less a victory, more a defeat. In particular, it signals that failing of nature by society that has produced humanity’s negligent own-goal of the Anthropocene (Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016) – the discovery of which, incidentally, has been the most important to date for predictive computer modelling (Edwards 2010). The current embrace of caretaking and design does not result from a triumph over external enemies. It is more a retreat from radical change because, in the last analysis, the Promethean ‘victories’ of World War II and the Cold War were in fact Pyrrhic. In the drive for industrial mastery, did they not call forth the ecological crisis? An ontopolitics of caretaking design is now necessary because, as history shows, left to themselves, humans make things worse. Whereas past victories were geopolitical and ideological, this failure is more behavioural and biopolitical. Moreover, this time around, caretaking benefits from the fortuitous arrival of Big Data and new automatic sense-making tools and logistical platforms that, because humans are now out of the loop, are hyper-objective (Spencer 2016b).
The enemy is now internal; it is human behaviour itself (Reid 2006). The tragic ignorance of the War on Terror lies in the choosing to outlaw a set of behavioural patterns (Chamayou 2015 [2013]). Given the impossibility of victory over such an enemy (or, perhaps worse, that one is being enforced regardless), one cannot help feeling that today’s caretaker is more disquieting than its earlier rather nerdish iterations. The urge to record, monitor and adjust to ensure things remain within accepted parameters feels more extreme and determined. As discussed in chapters 8 and 9, in the techno-pastoral, this attentive caretaker has even created its own aesthetic of a timeless precarity. However, as the transfer of reason and human agency to self-acting technologies increases, the homely entropy of this aesthetic loses its gloss. Rather than empowered aid beneficiaries resiliently adapting to endless emergency as they smile from agency advertising brochures, the post-social world now in formation has more the appearance of expansive ruined and wild landscapes riven by desperate struggles against new and emerging patterns of off-grid servitude.
When technoscience replaces politics as a means of international problem-solving, there are repercussions. As argued in this book, there is a formative ontological and epistemological relationship between a world seen as complex and dangerous and the data-based sense-making tools used to establish and understand this condition. For conventional wisdom, however, they appear unconnected in any intrinsic or formative sense. The utility of machine-thinking, for example, lies in its ability to uncover objectively pre-existing complex relations in the outside world that are otherwise beyond human comprehension. At the same time – and this is the rub – since those complex relations pre-exist computer analysis, the same machine-tools can be confidently used to resolve the dangers only they can disclose. For this computational capture of responsibility to work, it helps if one believes that new technologies are in fact ‘new’ – that is, they have somehow leapt immaculate and ready-made into the present. As analysed in relation to the boomerang effect, however, these technologies have a long history of appropriation. They are implicated not only in contested ontological and methodological changes regarding how the world is understood, but also in a profound shift in the nature of capitalism. In many respects, the computational turn feels more like an arrival – or, better, an epistemological closure – rather than a new beginning. The corporate machines, as it were, are now consolidating the two or three decades of anticipatory cybernetic and behavioural ground work that preceded their arrival. As a way of gaining greater perspective, the idea of a paradox of connectivity is useful.
The paradox draws on the contrast, used to introduce this book, between the revolutionary optimism of the past and the political pessimism of today. It takes into account not only the pulling apart of previously culturally mixed societies but also the resulting loss of familiarity. The striation of international space into fast and slow lanes is important, as is the blurring of economy and disaster to produce a global precariat – perhaps the new economy’s single greatest achievement. Precarity draws attention to the blurring of North–South dynamics, growing inequality between and within countries, declining living standards, jobless growth, the casualization of work and the migration crisis. Young people everywhere no longer expect the life-chances their parents, or even grandparents, enjoyed. However, rather than from the Munich Security Report (MSR 2017) cited at the beginning of this book, the paradox draws more from the key parameters of Pankaj Mishra’s (2017a) Age of Anger. Instead of a rising tide of illiberalism, authoritarianism and populism per se, these are the epiphenomena of a more fundamental change: a political rejection of the bankruptcy of progressive neoliberalism and the cosmopolitan values and universalism it espouses. A new global society is struggling to free itself from the old, with all the problems of disjunction, incoherence and contradiction that this necessarily involves.
While ‘isolation’ can be said to be the opposite of ‘connection’, they have no separate or mutually exclusive existence. They always exist together and are socially constitutive of each other (Read 2016). How a person connects – which in terms of the technology involved is historically given – defines the quality of their isolation or remoteness. Indeed, following Arendt’s argument regarding world alienation, we can suggest that remoteness and connectivity are directly related; the greater the connectivity, the more distance or isolation. The paradox of connectivity, however, introduces a real-world consideration. It holds that the greater the reach and speed of connectivity, the more ground friction is generated. How speed and distance translate into ground friction lies in the history of connectivity – especially, its role in the trajectory of contemporary capitalism. Connectivity generates ground friction because, as argued in chapter 2, it is integral to new forms of network exploitation and the abjection of the slow and immobile.
Technoscience displaces or side-steps difficult political problems, such as the need for a new formula for sharing the world with others, by transforming them into easier or more do-able technical challenges – for example, the need to make sense of distant disaster zones now deemed unsafe for international aid workers; or how to provide access to clean water without a fixed infrastructure; or ways to optimize the decision-making capacities of the poor while avoiding any genuine democratization or redistribution of resources. This process of displacement marshals the positive energy and empathy of innumerable researchers, entrepreneurs and politicians in the quest for solutions. However, the hard political problems remain. Moreover, since these problems easily become compacted and amplified, the main result is to produce new and recurring rounds of ever-distant global challenges. One could say that the negative dialectic, or the sequential journey of capitalism towards an entropic barbarism, proceeds on the basis of good intentions and the best evidence available.
Since the 1980s, as connectivity has increased, the number of physical and legal barriers preventing the free movement of people have multiplied, social and economic inequality has grown and the world of work has been casualized. At the same time, recalcitrance, anger, political push-back and international no-go areas have spread. The paradox of connectivity goes against the grain of conventional wisdom. As stakeholders in the new forms of appropriation and governance that it has made possible, for the status quo increased connectivity is the best tool we have for solving global problems. While this may yet still be the case, within the present framework of the commercial ownership and control of the data, algorithms and smart technologies involved, such an outcome is unlikely. The paradox of connectivity lies at the heart of a design-dependent caretaker society. Connectivity is a pharmacon. It is simultaneously a benefit and a scourge (Stiegler 2016). It is useful for a post-social capitalism but a disaster for the global precariat in formation. As the remoteness and complacency of elites deepens – and the World Bank’s view of cognitive precarity is a case in point – continuing polarization, fragmentation and anger appear set to continue shaping the future.