Cognitarians Revolt, You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Brains!

Cognitive Capitalism, Brain-Computer Interfaces, and Community Resistance Strategies

I haven’t been able to write for a few days. Quite honestly, I’ve been dealing with a sense of overwhelm. The migrant crisis is one element of this — over a thousand asylum-seekers from South America, Africa, Sri Lanka and other far-flung corners of the world arrive each day. Many of them line up at an abandoned Catholic school on my corner each morning. They wait long hours in the cold to get assigned temporary shelters, then mill around in Tompkins Square Park. They flee failed states and ecological collapse.

My friend Reverend Billy, an activist/performance artist who runs Earth Church on Avenue C, has created a welcome center for the asylum seekers, collecting donations for them and teaching them some basic English.

A number of recent conversations have contributed to this temporary sense of overwhelm or dislocation. I met an old friend, the artist Warren Neidich, for lunch at Russ & Daughters on Orchard Street. Warren is the author of Glossary of Cognitive Activism, a useful resource for understanding many new concepts.

Warren believes we are undergoing a transition to “cognitive Capitalism:” The manipulation of our brains and our subjectivity becomes the new frontier of extension for technocratic Neoliberalism. “In cognitive capitalism the brain and mind are the new factories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” he notes.

Having colonized and permeated the external world, the mechanistic forces seeking ever-more domination and control are moving inwards, invading the interior domain of subjectivity and self-awareness itself — even the very organization of the brain. The goal is to remake human identity, human consciousness, as a pliant, defenseless appendage of the Technium.

Warren writes:

We are no longer proletarians working on assembly lines, using our physical labor to perform abstract labor, but rather cognitarians, swiping and clicking in front of screens and creating data that is bought and sold in the big data marketplace. New technologies like ChatGPT, brain-computer interfaces, and optogenetics interact with the material brain and are just some of the new technologies that may pose an ethical and moral challenge in the years to come. The possibility that these technologies could intervene in the brain’s capacity for change—it’s so-called neural plasticity—is real and dangerous. The possibility that our brain waves could be set to work is not confined to science fiction: brain wave clicks could in time substitute for mouse clicks. The code that is necessary to engage a brain wave to move a mouse on a screen in order, in turn, to move a robotic arm or a wheelchair could be reversed and retro engineered— so as to enable an external intelligence to intervene in our neurophysiology and thought processes. As a society we, and especially the art community, must have the knowledge and tools that are necessary to confront this future reality.

During brunch, Warren used the example of Google Maps and its impact on the spatial navigation abilities of young people. Apparently, during the ages of 10 and 15, the Hippocampus forms fully and, during this time, we learn how to locate ourselves in space — to find our way home from the nearby forest where we were playing with other kids, for example.  As Scientific American notes, “the hippocampus is deeply associated with supporting spatial memory, spatial navigation and mental mapping." By outsourcing this capacity to their smart phone from a young age, children may permanently damage their capacity for spatial awareness navigation. Even worse, a healthy Hippocampus is also linked to memory itself:

Anthropologists have gone so far as to suggest that navigation needs might have been the starting point for all memories (as discussed in Nicholas Carr’s book The Glass Cage). For example, mnemonic techniques for remembering large numbers such as the digits of pi often rely on the “memory palace” (or “method of loci”) made famous by Cicero, with multiple floors and connected chambers in which one mentally stores the digits. One can then recall a long sequence of digits through an imaginary navigation, revisiting the chambers of this memory palace.

Warren notes that, having made an entire generation dependent on GPS systems and Smartphone navigation, Google and Apple will eventually be able to charge whatever they want for this service.

Progressively, we have outsourced our inner capacities and resources to the world-engulfing Technium, without even realizing it. This has been going on for a long time and seems to progress via inexorable systemic logic. As an example, in traditional societies, the community would gather together around the fire at night to tell stories, song, and remember the myths of the community. Capitalist modernity substituted the television—where we watch our myths alone or in isolated family units—for the tribal fire.

Communities used to take care of their own children. Now working parents outsource childcare to daycare centers or nannies, if they can afford it. We used to drink fresh water from local streams. Now, if we seek healthier water, we buy plastic bottles of spring water extracted from Fiji or France. And so on.

We generally don’t even think about this ongoing alienation from life and nature as anything bizarre or eerie. We almost expect—we almost welcome—this ongoing, ever-deepening exploitation. We have been conditioned to somehow think all of this—no matter how overtly dystopian—represents the social movement, the “progress” that our tech overlords deem necessary. But even they are just functionaries, somehow, trapped within this same system of disruption.

Cognitive capitalism represents a deeper threshold of invasion from an increasingly autonomous and ubiquitous control system. If we think about the likely evolution of Artificial Intelligence and Chat GPT, we can envision a trajectory where people, from a young age, increasingly outsource their capacity to think and reason to these computational systems, which are progressing rapidly in their ability to mimic human-like responses.

One French philosopher that Warren references often is Bernard Stiegler, who was imprisoned for armed robbery as a young man and committed suicide a few years ago, after writing many treatises on technics, time, and society. In The Age of Disruption (2019), he explored how our increasingly networked or “reticulated” society causes intensifying alienation and fragmentation:

Digital reticulation penetrates, invades, parasitizes and ultimately destroys social relations at lightning speed, and, in so doing, neutralizes and annihilates them from within, by outstripping, overtaking and engulfing them. Systemically exploiting the network effect, this automatic nihilism sterilizes and destroys local culture and social life like a neutron bomb: what it dis-integrates, it exploits, not only local equipment, infrastructure and heritage, abstracted from their socio-political regions and enlisted into the business models of the Big Four [Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple], but also psychosocial energies – both of individuals and of groups – which, however, are thereby depleted.

I completely understand how (without direct access to transcendence) this kind of thinking can lead to deepening existential despair, or what Stiegler called “a murderous dis-articulation of the I and the we.” In another work, he called for the need for “an ecological critique of the technologies and industries of the spirit,” showing that “the unlimited exploitation of spirits as markets” leads to ruin and “a global social explosion, that is, toward absolute war.” It does feel, sometimes, as if we are entering into some kind of final or “absolute war” between organic, spiritual, natural life and the Technium or the Technosphere, and that those who still identify with spirit and nature are on the losing side of this titanic if one-sided struggle.

As I was a bit consumed by such gloomy thoughts, my friend Ian MacKenzie, a Canadian filmmaker, sent me his new documentary, The Village of Lovers, on the intentional community Tamera in Portugal, which he has been working on for eight years with John Wolfstone and Julia Maryanska, two other friends. I will be speaking at Cry for the Future, a 5 Day Online Gathering organized around the film (you can check it out and sign up here).

Here is some info on the film, which can be screened online from February 7 - 14 (just in time for Valentine’s Day):

The Village of Lovers shares the 45 year story of the Tamera Peace Research Village in Portugal, the most successful Ecovillage in the world.  Tamera began in post WWII Germany, with a vow to build a model for a culture of peace, taking responsibility for the horrors of the war to never happen again. They quickly however encountered the core shadows of human community, particularly in the realms of money, love, sex, and power, leading them to realize that regenerating trust was the turn-key to a true global revolution that would ensure a viable future for all.  The Village of Lovers shares their story and their secrets for the first time.The film will be released to stream online starting February 7th, by a ‘pay what you determine’  model, a gift from the filmmakers to humanity – REGISTER FOR THE FILM 

I wrote about Tamera in How Soon Is Now (2016) — I consider it a valiant, important experiment pointing toward possible communities of the future reoriented around Eros. I hope to offer some more reflections on the community and the film, next time. They have worked to restore basic trust and connection, exactly those elements that Stiegler, and many other theorists, argue that post-human postmodernity, the Technium, has stolen from many of us.