The Strangefolk, they coveted the jewels in these caves above all things

And soon they began to mine the mountain

Its rich seam, fueling the chaos of their own world  

Gorillaz feat. Dennis Hopper, Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head

The state of exception to which we were silently and unsuspectingly subjected by Google laid the foundations of a new topology associated with those we have investigated so far: a virtual variety of paradeisos. The emergence of this new hunting park is linked not only to the evolution of the terrible place that we have traced throughout this work, but to the very development of capitalism. This process can be clearly seen in the “commodity fictions” that historian Karl Polanyi describes in The Great Transformation (1944). The first of these fictions, I summarized in another essay,

determined that human life and time could be integrated into the market and converted into “labor” and “man-hours” that were available to be bought and sold; the entry of chronological time into the market optimized and accelerated the rise of capitalism. The second fiction determined that the natural world could be converted into capital and understood as “property” or “real estate.” From then on, the world became just another commodity to be exchanged in a market that began to encompass the entire planet. The third fiction, and the most important of all, determined that all exchange could be codified as money, whose objective was to be capitalized over and over again.¹

Today, Shoshana Zuboff tells us, “owners of surveillance capital have declared a fourth fictional commodity expropriated from the experiential realities of human beings whose bodies, thoughts and feelings are as virgin and blameless as nature’s once plentiful meadows and forests before they fell to the market dynamic. In this new logic, human experience is subjugated to surveillance capitalism’s market mechanisms and reborn as behavior.”². Now, if the surveillance capitalists have claimed sovereignty over our experience in order to turn it into “behavior” it is because in their eyes we have become bare life, which is the representation that sovereignty makes of zoē, natural life (0.10).

In these circumstances it is not at all strange that at the hands of Silicon Valley’s digital kleptocracy we have become just another natural resource to be exploited, a virgin wood of experience in Zuboff’s words. We have become the ultimate embodiment of the Other that is the natural world, an inner world to be conquered, colonized and tamed (0.24, 10.5). This shift points both to the depoliticization of society—that is, to the disappearance of the polis as the legitimate scenario of human relations—at the hands of the forces of the market and media, as well as to the minimization of any factor that refers to the bios (0.19, 9.24). We are, in the eyes of our leaders, on the verge of being completely dehumanized to become hunting prey in a new virtual paradeisos.

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1. Mauricio Loza, “Capitalismo, entropía negativa y el robo de la experiencia y el futuro humano”, lecture presented as part of the installation “Monumento al tornillo desconocido” by Gabriel Zea, nominated for the X Premio Luis Caballero). ↩︎
2. Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 100. ↩︎