Posthumanism Meets Surveillance Capitalism

"This book shows how both 'right' and 'left' accelerationism are ultimately undermined by contemporary machine learning-based AI. Gamez not only develops an original position in the field of posthumanism, but also shows how machine learning-based AI, through its confrontation with accelerationism, prometheanism and folk psychology, has direct and important philosophical implications." 

—Dionysis Christias, Academy of Athens, Greece

“With impeccable scholarship and rare critical precision, Patrick Gamez takes the most important and radical arguments of recent Promethean and accelerationalist thought as a foundation upon which he builds a compelling and timely critique of platform capitalism and of our responses toward it today and tomorrow.”

—Richard Iveson, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, UK

The core contention of this book is that, when viewed through the lens of contemporary posthuman theory, contemporary uses of AI under platform capitalism not only undermine our sense of the “human” but also our frameworks for conceptualizing ourselves as “subjects” or “selves” at all. This radical conclusion raises issues forces us to reckon with a new, disorienting horizon for critical thought at the intersection of technology and politics.

This book demonstrates that two major streams of posthuman thought—namely, accelerationism and Prometheanism—can be interpreted as attempts to liberate our desires from our reason or our rationality from our all-too-human desire, each through the offloading of various tasks to emerging technologies. But, Patrick Gamez argues, the rise of opaque, unexplainable machine learning algorithms to predict and shape our behaviour undermines the common-sense models of mind through which we ultimately make sense of both the human and the posthuman.

Patrick Gamez is the Director of the Reilly Dual Degree Program in Engineering/Arts & Letters, as well as Assistant Teaching Professor, in the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame.