Mapping the Black Box

Whatever the nomenclature, one fact is ubiquitous: the personal data underworld “wants your bloodstream and your bed, your breakfast conversation, your commute, your run, your refrigerator, your parking space, your living room, your pancreas”¹ to fuel new economies of extraction, hidden from public knowledge, almost unmappable. Individuals are constantly traced, tracked, and analyzed by the platforms they use, masked by the interface; concepts such as Shoshana Zuboff’s “shadow text”² on hidden surveillance exploitation, Frank Pasquale’s “black box society”³ on the concealed financialization of society, and Benjamin H. Bratton’s “black stack”⁴ on new modes of governance and political realities formed through the digital, only theoretically outline the opacity of Big Tech’s operations. These concepts take form in Vladan Joler’s digital counter-map, New Extractivism (2020). Engaging with it implores the user to embody and enact a resistance to neoliberal exploitation of the individual, the environment, and society as whole.

is “one big messy assemblage of different concepts and ideas, assembled into one semi-coherent picture or let us say a map, a worldview”—an outline of the “machine-like superstructure” that is extracting from every corner of our perceivable world. Aesthetically, it resembles a scrollable architectural blueprint, with an accompanying guide and footnotes supplying contextual analysis. Joler places Facebook, Amazon, and Google as the apex of this operation and, throughout the work, explores the multitudinous ways the user is confined, surveilled, and forced to labour—in digital spaces as well as in the planetary-scale supply chains that fuel (a fictional world catered and presented to you as truth, in this case by algorithms online). The map begins from the illustrated point of an anonymous individual slowly falling into the black hole of any of the major corporations that govern the digital space and gradually charts what is happening on either side of the interface. This allows the viewer to understand how their digital behaviours create profound new economies—of scale, scope, and action—in which they have no stake.