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Futurability

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This is exactly the origin of power: the insertion of automated selections into the social vibration. Automation is programmed by the human mind according to its projects, visions, ideologies, preconceptions: the automaton replicates the embedded intention and the established form of the relation. — location: 176 ^ref-31940

deterministic trap, a trap in which the possible is captured and reduced to mere probability, and the probable is enforced as necessary. — location: 191 ^ref-37909

Financial capitalism is bound up in techno-linguistic implications that pretend to be natural and logical. They are not. They are rather artificial reductions of the range of possibility to the narrow string of probability. — location: 254 ^ref-34128

The possible is captured and reduced to mere probability, and the probable is enforced as necessary. — location: 276 ^ref-45550

The possibility of emancipation of social time from the obligation of salaried work still exists: it is located in the cooperative knowledge of millions of cognitive workers, but this possibility cannot surface at the present because of the political impotence that in this book I want to describe, analyze and find a way to exceed. — location: 296 ^ref-31018

the social organism is behaving like a beheaded body that still retains its physical energies but no longer possesses the ability to steer them in a reasonable direction. — location: 318 ^ref-62268

The only coherence of the world resides in sharing the act of projecting meaning: cooperation between agents of enunciation. — location: 338 ^ref-16984

The flight that leads to knowledge is foolish (witless), as it defies the established limits of reason. — location: 351 ^ref-25760

at the end of the capitalist cycle, the richness produced by labour is turned into misery and the freedom of knowledge is restricted by a new theology based on economic dogma. — location: 359 ^ref-50996

When labour time and value start diverging, when the speed of info-stimulation is too fast for rational elaboration, then madness becomes the general language of the social system. — location: 361 ^ref-30420

Capitalism is a dead dog, but society is unable to come out from under the rotting corpse, so the social mind is devoured by panic and furious impotence, until finally it turns to depression. — location: 362 ^ref-42788

the social mind has been taken in by a vortex of bipolar disorders: a long succession of euphoria and sadness have led to the present secular stagnation and to a state of steady depression. — location: 373 ^ref-8288

absolute capitalism is based on this deceptive trick of logic. Accumulation, profit and growth are surreptitiously turned into natural laws, and the field of economics legitimises this deception. — location: 379 ^ref-36443

the political will, and particularly the democratic process of decision, is unable to counter financial power. The relation between social life and the financial system is automated, inscribed in the technical network of governance. — location: 1369 ^ref-48740

Cooperation without physical proximity is the condition of existential loneliness coupled with all-pervading productivity. — location: 1394 ^ref-18601

the subjection of individual activity to the spirit of enterprise, the overall recoding of human activity in terms of economic rentability, the insertion of competition into the neural circuits of daily life. These are the trends that Foucault foresaw and described. — location: 1434 ^ref-32134

Over the last thirty years, society has been transformed into a sort of blind system of inescapable obligation and interdependence, a prison-like condition of togetherness in which empathy is void and solidarity is forbidden. — location: 1441 ^ref-1821

new understanding of the postmodern becoming of the world, based on the contradictory and complementary relation between automation and terror. — location: 1457 ^ref-54082

if we start from the original decision of the Founding Fathers to displace the house of God from the old continent to the New-Found Land, we can acknowledge that ‘America’ is not the name of a territory but rather the name of a deterritorialization. — location: 1470 ^ref-24706

America is the deterritorialized dimension of digital dis-identity. A virtual and recombinant dis-identity. Desiring to be American while simultaneously hating the United States, is the paradox of many world populations. — location: 1476 ^ref-33228

After 1989, the US political and military hegemony appeared indisputable, but 11 September 2001 changed this view dramatically. Twenty-five years later, it’s hard to claim that the US still has hegemonic potency — location: 1488 ^ref-20705

More than ten years later, surveying the political impotence of the Obama administration from beyond the grave, Osama bin Laden can legitimately say: mission accomplished. — location: 1496 ^ref-46302

If we look at things from a geopolitical point of view, we can conclude that the US has defeated itself as a national potency. However, America means more than a nation state. — location: 1500 ^ref-52582

the deterritorialization of monetary flows has provoked the loss of authority of the nation state in the financial field, while big corporations are managing volumes of capital much larger than most nation states do. — location: 1518 ^ref-47880

but the true actor of our time is digital abstraction, financial automatism and the process of automation of cognitive activity. — location: 1526 ^ref-46840

More and more, social control is incorporated in the biotechnical sphere. Neither politics nor military force can command the increasing complexity of life forms, social knowledge and productivity that are spreading in the networked world. Control must be transferred to the bodies themselves, to the relations among bodies. This is why we speak of bio-power. — location: 1529 ^ref-29096

Neoliberal deregulation has given birth to a worldwide regime of necro-economy: moral prescriptions and legal regulations have been annulled by the all-encompassing law of competition. — location: 1695 ^ref-45903

Their shared goal is to extract a maximum of money from investment in the most exciting products of the contemporary economy: terror, horror and death. — location: 1699 ^ref-52329

Financial capital is not interested in the territory, nor in the future of the community, as it has no contact with extra-bunker spaces. Financial profit is realized in the dimension of simultaneity and virtual exchange. — location: 1719 ^ref-20411

it is necessary to dislodge the population of villages who live in areas like the Cuenca de Burgos. According to Mastrogiovanni, mass murders in the area have been planned and accomplished to achieve this purpose. — location: 1759 ^ref-61621

capital flows freely everywhere and the labour market is globally unified, but this does not lead to the free circulation of women and men, nor to the affirmation of universal reason in the world. Rather, the opposite is happening: as the intellectual energies of society are captured by the network of financial abstraction, as cognitive labour is subjugated by the abstract law of valorization and human communication is transformed into abstract interaction among disembodied digital agents, the social body has become detached from the general intellect. — location: 1793 ^ref-10129

the abolition or weakening of legal limitations on the activity of enterprise, particularly of global corporations that have been displacing their investments from regulated areas to deregulated areas of the world. But the freedom of global enterprises has generally been the cause of the worsening condition of the lives and salaries of workers, and of the destruction of the natural and urban environment. — location: 1826 ^ref-51750

‘It takes more hours to make the same money or support the same lifestyle.’ — location: 2051 ^ref-1281

resistance to work is the source of technical innovation inasmuch as it enables the reduction of labour time. — location: 2088 ^ref-29370

the connected brain was uncoupled from the social body and the potency of knowledge was uncoupled from social welfare. — location: 2097 ^ref-51724

capitalist code transforms the expansion of the useful into financial accumulation and the impoverishment of daily life. — location: 2109 ^ref-63885

capitalism implies a transliteration of the real world of usefulness into the abstract world of value, recoding richness into misery, abundance into scarcity, potency into powerlessness. — location: 2114 ^ref-10614

The nomination of social relations is part of the process of internalization of capitalism as a natural form. We designate certain kinds of human activity ‘work’: time exchanged for a salary, the source of the accumulation of capital. — location: 2166 ^ref-40153

Doing for free what you like may be a good thing, but the problem is that one must pay rent, and pay back the bank for university loans. Ends do not meet. — location: 2235 ^ref-25070

The link between work and salary is loosening, but only capitalists profit from the ensuing randomness and precariousness as long as the emancipation of time from salary is grounded in the superstition of salaried work. — location: 2237 ^ref-41019

Salary, therefore, has to be exposed as the superstition that obscures from view what is crystal clear: that work is less and less necessary for survival. — location: 2296 ^ref-17205

The emancipation of knowledge from capital accumulation is the only key that may open the door out of the hell, even if at the moment we seem unable to find that key. — location: 2321 ^ref-22355

we have been told that the essential thing to do is repay the debt (i.e., displace common resources towards the financial system). — location: 2399 ^ref-60176

the subjection of knowledge to profit, which equals the subjection of knowledge to war, — location: 2543 ^ref-4722

the educational system is changing in its nature: in the spirit of neoliberal reformation, it is no longer the space for the integration of technical skills and humanist culture. It is being transformed into a space of mere acquisition for specialized knowledge, a space where individualism and competition are cultivated to the detriment of solidarity and consciousness. — location: 2585 ^ref-29600

the economic powers tried to submit cognitarians to the ideology of merit, or meritocracy, in order to destroy the social solidarity of the intellectual force. — location: 2603 ^ref-59012

the concept of the meritocracy acts as the Trojan horse of neoliberal ideology. Meritocracy is the hotbed of precariousness, fostering competition: when individuals are obliged to fight for survival, intellectual and technical abilities are reduced only to tools for economic confrontation. — location: 2605 ^ref-52521

meritocracy is also a stimulus for ignorance. As the evaluation of merit is acknowledged by the authority, and as the criteria of evaluation are fixed by those who have power, the learner is invited to adopt the evaluation criteria corresponding to the existing powers. Education has been the most powerful factor of social autonomy. If we accept meritocracy, we renounce the autonomy of the learning process and accept that the evaluation of our formation is wholly in another’s hands. — location: 2608 ^ref-2109

contemporary imposition of the economy’s primacy, however, implies the cancellation of the autonomy of knowledge. Identifying the economy as universal criterion of evaluation has in fact re-established a sort of theology in the relation between learning and (economic) absolute truth. — location: 2615 ^ref-62276

Public education has been impoverished by the neoliberal ruling class: dismantled, precarized, and finally replaced with a system of market-driven recombination of fragmented skills and competences whose meaning escapes even the learner. Innovation is celebrated, but it is only allowed within the framework of the theological dogma of private profit and infinite growth. — location: 2620 ^ref-15561

The capitalist’s life has been devoted to the transformation of the infinite richness of knowledge into the infinite misery of money. — location: 2669 ^ref-55425

Economists are more priests than scientists. Their discourse aims to submit the activity of other intellectuals to the rule of economic expansion. — location: 2689 ^ref-29279