Computer power eliminates doubt. All doubt arises from past experiences. But the past is disappearing. We used to know the past but not the future. This is changing […] We need a new theory of time

Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

In Who Owns the Future? Jaron Lanier gives a description of computing from a thermodynamic point of view:

Computation is the demarcation of a little part of the universe, called a computer, which is engineered to be very well understood and controllable, so that it closely approximates a deterministic, non-entropic process. But in order for a computer to run, the surrounding parts of the universe must take on the waste heat, the randomness. You create a local shield agains entropy, but your neighbors will alway have to pay for it.¹

This interaction between thermodynamics and computation roughly determines that the more certainty a computer generates, the more heat and uncertainty it will throw into the world. In other words, the more predictions are made by surveillance capitalism, the more noise and randomness those of us who do not have access to the system will have to absorb in order to continue operating at a much lower computational level. The search for certainty from massive amounts of data (10.12) posed by surveillance capitalism is unsustainable in the long run because “the rest of the world cannot indefinitely absorb the increased risk, cost and waste”² dispersed by its operation.

Elsewhere I already asked: “If, according to Marx and Engels, capitalism produces its own gravediggers, is it possible that these are not us as the cyber-proletariat (10.13, 10.14) but the waste heat, the entropic noise that it expels out into the world in ever increasing magnitudes? Is it possible that surveillance capitalism’s enormous efficiency in producing surplus value is its own undoing?”³ In other words, the disproportion between the certainty generated by the surveillance capitalists and the complete randomness to which the rest of the population are subjected could lead to socioeconomic collapse.

Among the possibilities of systemic collapse of capitalism is the FROP (falling rate of profit) hypothesis, which postulates that the imperative to reduce labor costs to produce more profit, in combination with the emergence of new technological means of production, produces a short-term competitive advantage that, as soon as technological progress becomes widely adopted, the rate of return stagnates until it produces stasis and generalized crisis. A further possibility of collapse is the growing imbalance between the imperative to lower wages to generate profits and simultaneously raise consumption to stimulate the market. Such a situation could lead to a scenario of overproduction and underconsumption.

Given its predictive capacity, could surveillance capitalism foresee its eventual collapse?

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1. Lanier, Whoe Owns The Future? 143. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Mauricio Loza, “Capitalismo, entropía negativa y el robo de la experiencia y el futuro humano”. Author's translation. ↩︎