Proletariat

Deep Knowledge Ventures

On 13 May 2014, a press release from Deep Knowledge Ventures, a Hong Kong-based venture capital fund specializing in biotechnology, age-related disease drugs and regenerative medicine projects, announced that it 'formally acknowledges VITAL, a crucial Artificial Intelligence instrument for investment decision-making, as an equal member of its Board of Directors'.

VITAL was the product of Aging Analytics UK, a provider of health-sector market intelligence to pension funds, insurers and governments. Developed by 'a team of programmers, several of which have theoretical physics backgrounds', the system 'uses machine learning to analyze financing trends in a database of life science companies and predict successful investments'. VITAL 1.0 was a 'basic algorithm', but the goal was 'through iterative releases and updates ... to create a piece of software that is capable of making autonomous investment decisions' (Fontaine 2014). Apparently, however, Deep Knowledge Ventures thought VITAL was already pretty good: it told reporters the program would 'vote on whether to invest in a specific company or not' (BBC 2014).

All this sounded very futuristic. As commentators quickly pointed out, however, it was really 'publicity hype' (BBC 2014). This was not because decision-making algorithms are impossible, but, on the contrary, because their use, often in forms far more complex than VITAL, is commonplace in today's capitalism. Such programs are, for example, central to the operations of the financial sector, whose high-speed multi-billion trades are entirely dependent on algorithms – and whose bad decisions brought the world economy to its knees in the great Wall Street crash of 2008. The press release was a stunt because the future to which it seemed to point exists now.

Whatever interest VITAL's debut may have stirred was immediately eclipsed by more sombre news. On the same day 301 workers died in a massive explosion at Turkey's Soma coal mine. The mine, once publicly owned, had been privatized in 2007. The disaster was caused by neglect of safety equipment generally attributed to profit-boosting cost-cutting. The miners' charred and choked bodies were pulled to the surface from two miles underground: they would not be needing regenerative medicine and anti-aging treatments, to which, of course, they would never have had access anyway.

Turkish trade unions declared a one-day general strike. At the same time, street protests burst out in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and other cities across Turkey. Students calling on the government to resign wore hard hats to show solidarity with the miners. They were met with tear gas and rubber bullets. These protests were a continuation of the social turmoil that had raged intermittently since the occupation of Gezi Park in Istanbul's Taksim Square in May of 2013. That occupation, started to protect a grove of trees from the construction of an Ottoman-barrack themed shopping mall, had rapidly become a focus for discontent with the religiously conservative neoliberal capitalism of President Erdogan's regime. It lasted for 17 days. In some 5,000 related demonstrations across Turkey, 11 people were killed and more than 8,000 injured, many seriously.

Throughout the unrests, protests and criticism of the government had been mobilized through social media, provoking a farcical attempt by the Erdogan regime to ban Twitter and YouTube. This ban, though universally violated, had only been formally rescinded six weeks before the Soma disaster. Now, social media again disseminated news, first of the scale of the catastrophe, initially minimized by the government, and then of the fresh protests: a photograph of an advisor to President Erdogan savagely drop-kicking a demonstrator held down by security forces in the streets of Soma circulated widely (Saul 2014).

The same-day news of the algorithmic boss-entity and the mine disaster was coincidence. Yet it condenses paradoxes and contradictions central to this book. For a start, it starkly highlights the coexistence within contemporary capitalism of extraordinary high-technologies and workers who live and die in brutal conditions often imagined to belong in some antediluvian past. This coexistence is also a connection. Mines and artificial intelligences seem to belong to different worlds, but they are strongly linked. Although only a small part of production at Soma went to power plants, similar coal mines around the planet provide – at appalling, biosphere-endangering environmental cost – the basic energy source on which all digital technologies depend: electricity. Other mines, for columbite tantalite, gold, platinum, copper rare earths and other minerals, many with working conditions as or more dangerous than those at Soma, provide the materials from which computers are made.

At the same time, computers are being applied not just to the creation of artificial bosses but even more strenuously to the cost-cutting automation of work. From West Virginia to South Africa mining is on the front lines in a new wave of robotization that could wipe away whole tranches of manual labour. The automation of hard and hazardous work underground by drones, driverless trucks and robot drills might seem an unqualified good. Yet for communities with no other source of waged work it does not necessarily appear so simple, for it places them at risk of joining a deepening pool of unemployed populations no longer required by digital capital. This, however, is an issue not just for manual workers, such as miners, but also for intellectual workers, such as the students who donned hard hats in the support of the Soma community. These students might, hypothetically, one day themselves be building artificial intelligences or designing new pharmaceuticals. Yet they too face the possibility that the professional and technical careers for which they train may suddenly be automated out of existence.

In recent years a complex array of revolts around the world against exploitative work, the misery of worklessness, and ecological disasters revolts sometimes closely allied, sometimes distant from or even hostile to one another – have all thrown into question the basic structures and processes of advanced capitalism. In yet another apparent paradox, such uprisings themselves increasingly use digital technologies. The Twitter-storm of Turkey's demonstrators is just one example of this insurgent use of networked social media, even as such movements also put people bodily into city streets and squares, conversing with each other in popular assemblies and in physical confrontation with security forces. Both in terms of the crises that cause them and the weapons they take up, such unrests are thus situated within capitalism's whirlwind of technological change.

What then is the relation between cybernetic capitalism and its increasingly disposable working class? What are the interactions between segments of that class with different, yet also sometimes shared, relations to...