Capitalism and Schizophrenia

On "alien drones," CEO assassins, social murder, and desiring machines

We confront phenomena that seem, at first, unrelated, except by temporal coincidence: A barrage of UAP or “alien drone” sightings caught on video over suburban New Jersey, and the assassination of an insurance CEO by a handsome 26-year-old computer programmer from a wealthy family. Both capture the public’s flickering gaze and galvanize our imagination. Both, somehow, reveal the deepening destabilization and insecurity of our society, as we slide toward despotism.

Both stories are, at least in part, stories about technology. If technological progress once meant scientific rationality, shiny modern gadgets, and ever-increasing prosperity, it has turned increasingly Janus-faced. These days, technology reveals shadowy layers of ambiguity, inducing deeper levels of alienation, social inequality, while threatening violence and vengeance. The sorcerer’s spell has turned against us.

The technology angles around Luigi Mangione’s apparent slaying of Brian Thompson include his 3-D printed 9mm gun and silencer; his capacity to track his intended victim to a specific time and location; the role of surveillance videos (probably used illegally by the government) at McDonald’s and Starbuck’s to locate the killer; the social media trail left by Mangione on Twitter, Goodreads, etc, as well as the speed with which his feeds were removed or blocked by Internet companies. We are all transparent to surveillance systems, subject to cancellation and at least partial erasure at any time.

In his four star review of Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future on Amazon, Mangione wrote:

When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution. Fossil fuel companies actively suppress anything that stands in their way and within a generation or two, it will begin costing human lives by greater and greater magnitudes until the earth is just a flaming ball orbiting third from the sun. Peaceful protest is outright ignored, economic protest isn’t possible in the current system, so how long until we recognize that violence against those who lead us is justified as self-defense.

These companies don’t care about you, or your kids, or your grandkids. They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck, so why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive?

This doesn’t exactly seem like the rantings of a lunatic. But let’s get back to that later.

As for the UAPS or “alien drones” flying over wide swathes of New Jersey, also appearing over restricted military bases there: Both state officials and Pentagon spokespeople admit they are happening but have no idea what it is. Yet both sources confidently state the UAPS are neither a project of foreign government nor coming from our own military. So what is it then?

I’ve written many times about the inherent liminality of UFOs and extraterrestrials, which never seem to take a definitive shape or lead to a conclusive encounter. Patrick Harpur proposes that such phenomena is inherently daemonic, designed to flicker between the literal and the imaginal, like a quantum phantasm. In this case, the “alien drones” may turn out to be a secret government program or an intervention by the Chinese government to test America’s response capacity (like the mysterious Chinese spy balloon a few years ago). Or we may never know.

As I toggle between TikTok footage of the mystifying UAPs and Youtube analyses of Mangione’s backstory and motives and the media’s response to his very real yet deeply symbolic act, I think of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a surreal masterpiece of post-structuralist critique. They looked at capitalism as a massive social machine — a “megamachine”—that harnesses and channels flows of desire.