Becoming-imperceptible in the age of data capture

Speaker: Casey Capitalism has taken a dark turn: the inherently totalitarian nature of state-power in capturing (bodies, surplus-value, ideas, and information) has fused with the extensive scope of global capitalism. The result, following Shoshana Zuboff, is a “surveillance capitalism” that now renders available the personal data of everyone worldwide to the capture of largely clandestine entities (Big Tech, data brokers, intelligence agencies, etc). Understanding the emergence of this new model of power over information is crucial in developing tools that can reverse it, making the Internet finally a place for private and free exchange. Before the advent of the Internet, Deleuze and Guattari offered a philosophical model for understanding both the differences between state power and capitalism: while the state can be defined by a mechanism of “capture,” capitalism liberates flows in order to extract a maximum of financial value. These mechanisms of “territorialization” and “deterritorialization,” however, are far from opposed: what surveillance capitalism shows is the novel combination of these techniques in a new paradigm of informational exploitation. Capitalism deterritorializes information access so that new modes of state and corporate capture to exploit it. Thankfully, there are many traditions of technological resistance at our disposal: not simply encryption to protect the content of our communications, but also novel network systems capable of scrambling the metadata traces our encrypted activities leave behind everywhere for capture. This presentation will focus on mixnets as one available tool. What mixnets accomplish is a concrete network-level “becoming-imperceptible,” abstractly proposed by Deleuze & Guattari, for all users. By passing all web traffic through a “noisy” network designed to confound surveillance capture, the possibility of an internet secured by default anonymity, or imperceptibility, becomes a route of escape, or a “new earth” on which to live.