Parasitoid

By Zac Rogers

Governments under the neoliberal veil have become janitors for tech billionaires. When the state can't or won't pay to clean up, the mess falls to citizen-consumers, who become wards of disorder by default. The growing disorder engenders yet greater dependence on the magic dust of big tech, even as the detritus it produces grows on the vines of

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Circus Bazaar Company
• Release date: Sep 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9780645003710

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They said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar.

First published by The Circus Bazaar Company in 2021

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Copyright © Zac Rogers 2021

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Parasitoid

An organism, usually an insect, that lives on or in a host organism during some period of its development and eventually kills its host.

Same as parasitic.

Some parasitoids influence their host’s behaviour in ways that favour the propagation of the parasitoid.

Acknowledgments

This book is a product of relationships between places and people and the spaces among them I have occupied over the past several years. Shane Alexander Caldwell at The Circus Bazaar Company made the project possible well before he made it an operational reality. Flinders University and the Australian Government provided me with structure and opportunity during and since my PhD candidature, my colleagues there – Maryanne Kelton, Emily Bienvenue, Sian Troath, Don Debats, and Michael Sullivan all contributed to the ideas explored in this book in important ways. Hyatt Nidam was an amazing and generous last-minute proof-reader. My community, family, and friends are longstanding certainties without whom a project such as this would not have been possible. Countless authors whose writing I have loved echo through my own. Responsibility for the content and any errors herein are mine. This book, finally, is for Ingrid. Home by Sea.

INTRODUCTION

Part I: Invasion

Where to now for the monism of markets?

Attempts at apprehension?

Disaster capital – ushering in the corporatist state

The crippling politics of social engineering

Part II: Occupation

Surveillance capital

Lifelogging

The quantified self

Limbic capital – the decade of the brain

Cyberspace: the perfect crisis

A.I.: permanent magic

From the invisible hand to magic algorithms –

gnostic fantasies will not die

Part III: Metamorphosis

Fooled one more time

It’s the computers, stupid.

War and the digital age

Two half-steps to nowhere

Autopoiesis and cognition – staying whole

Persons re-imagined

Part IV: Exit, home

A little breath

A shift of scene

The iconoclast’s hammer swings sideways

Synonymica

Two types of radical freedom

Conclusion

Notes

Introduction

Part I: Invasion

Part II: Occupation

Part III: Metamorphosis

Part IV: Exit, home

Bibliography

Introduction

The chief power source of neoliberalism lies in its exploitation of the humanist impulse. Entering the body politic after WWII, neoliberal discourse deployed a multi-layered dynamic; able to at once recite classical liberal tropes of freedom, markets, and individual choice outwardly to a befuddled public audience, while inwardly speaking to itself new languages of social engineering, nouveau control, and the re-regulation of society from the ground up. With this outward-inward dynamic, by which it was able to retain a certain logic of internal coherence while deflecting and disorienting observers, it effectively gaslit the political opposition into submission. But submission is a dialogue between domination and dependence. Neoliberalism deployed humanism as spear, crutch, and shield – sweeping the rug out from under humanist feet as it cherry-picked from the post-war, post-human sciences, while deepening control over the body politic by freezing the western episteme in its humanist Aristotelian tableau. There it remained – two half-steps to nowhere – as the post-human sciences and the scientisms they invoked and deployed through technologies of scale, and humanist speculation gathered like detritus on the vines of political agency up to, and including, our present moment.

Its capacity to turn humanism against itself while benefiting from the struggles of its victim can be likened to parasitism. Parasites normally don’t kill their hosts. There are exceptions. Parasitoidism is one of six major evolutionary strategies within parasitism, distinguished by the invader’s entry into its still-living host, its use of the host for sustenance, protection, and metamorphosis, and ultimately, a fatal prognosis for the host.¹

Parasitoids make a risky bet. They use the occupation to supply their own survival needs, often using the behavioural change induced in the host for a survival advantage. Their survival and capacity for reproduction depends on a delicate set of circumstances which, when considered together, makes them one of nature’s more remarkable risk-takers. If nothing else, the parasitoid is an opportunist. Among the most significant risks for parasitoids, however, are unpredictable changes in the defences of the host organism, and changes to the behavioural response to the invasion and occupation, including its premature death.

The cant of this book is that the post-war neoliberal project is analogous with this subclass of parasitism. The risks it now encounters are accelerating rapidly, as the changes its invasion and occupation has rendered in its host – the contemporary body politic in the United States and other advanced Occidental societies – are veering rapidly toward premature mortality. The neoliberal parasitoid, having entered its host in the post-war era, consuming and disfiguring as it went, aimed to achieve a fundamental metamorphosis in both parasitoid and host which was, at its heart, epistemological. It is now facing the catastrophic failure of its host’s capacity to survive the occupation, and the metamorphosis is nowhere to be seen. In fact, it moves in an unexpected direction. This book argues it’s this elementary struggle – of parasitoid, host, and a failed metamorphosis – that is at the core of our contemporary condition, not only in the U.S. but to varying degrees in the polities where it has played out. And it’s this analogy I invite the reader to keep back of mind, as we discover the contemporary contours of this process, and what measures are available to the host in the wake of its collapse. The most important feature of the argument harks back to epistemology. Neoliberalism is a way of thinking before it is any particular item of thought. It’s on that basis that its collapse is unstoppable, and on which the resolution presented here – the thawing of the western episteme and a full step into nominalism – is wrought.

The rather intimidating backdrop to this work is the lengthy cross-disciplinary tradition in which the social, political, and economic implications of the species of thought known as neoliberalism are continuously debated. Whether taken as an intellectual swear-word, an illusion, a flag-bearer for American capitalism, or something else entirely,² the discourse on neoliberalism is impossible to side-step when attempting apprehension of any part, not only of the contemporary political economy, but of national security and strategic affairs as well. It’s also impossible to fully traverse without falling into any number of traps – some of them purposefully set, some of them accidental. Our purposes, and our references here to the tradition as a whole, are thankfully delimited somewhat by its relationship to what might fit reasonably well under the contemporary experience of, and discourse on, ‘disorientation’ and narrower still, in its expression in the emerging national security discourse on cognitive insecurity.

These same purposes are served in nomenclature by three notable works and their surrounding discourses. First, Naomi Klein’s 2008 encounter with neoliberalism, in which she dubbed the subject at hand ‘Disaster capitalism’.³ Second, Shoshana Zuboff’s account of the digital age mass surveillance economic model she first dubbed ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ in 2015 and followed with her watershed book in 2019.⁴ And third, David Courtwright’s ‘Limbic Capitalism’⁵ – his 2019 overview of the historical genesis of addiction-based consumerism, now running rampant in many post-industrial societies.⁶ For narrative purposes I position the latter two conceptions as mutations prefigured in and flowing from the first, though each cross-fertilises, informs, and reproduces the other. Klein’s account described measures taken by a global cohort of corporate, financial, and bureaucratic elites, loosely managed via US-dominated international institutions, to implement a host of nominally market-based reforms informed primarily by the edicts of Chicago School economics, which have exploited and exacerbated periods of social, political, economic, and environmental crisis to encroach on and weaken the public sphere – not only subverting the state’s traditional role as societal institution of last resort in times of crises – and not only blurring the line between public and private into extinction – but disfiguring the very relationship between public expectations, institutional authority, and the legitimacy and status of knowledge, which operated at the core of the modern post-war liberal democratic nation-state.

Humans with grand designs intervening in complexity are history’s fools. But it’s the concept of the wholesale and concealed disfigurement of societal discourse that is most critical to understanding the implications of the neoliberal ascendency, and the nexus of the argument here. Contrary to common misunderstanding, neoliberalism is not an extension of classical liberalism, but a radical alteration of it. The central classical liberal tenets, of constraining the power and reach of the state and tolerating conflicting human values, is transformed by a project aimed at wrenching the state’s power toward service of convoluted ideological ends. As Mirowski summarises, ‘Its major distinguishing characteristic is instead a set of proposals and programs to infuse, take over, and transform the strong state, in order to impose the ideal form of society, which they conceive to be in pursuit of their very curious icon of pure freedom’.⁷ Invasion – occupation – metamorphosis. The disaster and rolling crisis noted by Klein and many others are thus less an instrument wielded by neoliberals, however ham-fistedly, than an inherently protean feature of the project itself, one in which they, as bien pensants, are often swept along, and the ‘curious icon of pure freedom’ lies in the project’s self-assigned mandate to impose itself on the societies it infuses, takes over, and transforms – whether domestic or abroad. In this way, neoliberalism is part parasitoid, part cannibal. This subtlety sits at the heart of how and why its proponents have evaded, and continue to evade, the consequences of their actions. They are in fact able to claim that neoliberalism does not exist at all, rather it is just part of the natural flow of events, or indeed a fait accompli, and its critics are ever the reactionaries.⁸ Contrary, also, to the mistaken belief in some quarters that neoliberalism perished in the aftermath of the 2007-8 global financial crisis, this process is still very much unfolding. We aim to illuminate its contemporary face here.

A curious but serviceable way to be sure that something exists; if looking straight at the thing itself proves dauntingly complex (or unrelentingly controversial or, in fact, already completed and roundly ignored in the same breath)⁹; is to examine the world around it for change – to see if any auxiliary contributions might be added (as the proverbial last straw perhaps). It’s the changes we find in the two notable mutations in disaster capitalism’s many offspring that we hope helps extinguish the illusion thesis.¹⁰ Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism describes the generation and extraction of digitised human behavioural data, micro-targeting of individuals and groups, and real time manipulation of behaviour for material profit and influence by Silicon Valley’s digital giants – subverting and making incursions into public and individual sovereignty in a number of ways, which both flow from and reinforce the actions of disaster capital. We will argue that beneath the veneer of tech-vanguardism is in fact a wholesale re-embracing of social engineering; an unannounced return to what was arguably the most despised and ridiculed concepts of the twentieth century – re-equipped and reimagined, just as the failings of neoliberalism as a macro-economic project became undeniable.

David Courtwright’s conception of ‘limbic capitalism’ describes the concurrent emergence in the post-war period of a host of concepts and methodologies which have come to dominate the vanguard of competitive commercial activity, aimed squarely at manipulating the addiction-triggering brain chemistry of the consumer for profit and control, and subverting the historically typical societal capacity for resistance or reaction by the body politic to its own exploitation and marginalisation. The conditions for limbic capitalism accelerated in the 2000s ‘decade of the brain’ by an explosion of insights into the neuro-chemical features of human cognition,¹¹ combining with the digital age in which computational models of human cognition meshed.¹² In rising to such heights of unrestricted exploitation, the successes of surveillance and limbic could only be prepared by the ravages of disaster capitalism. Hence the trident of terms deployed here, as we grope toward an understanding of how mass surveillance, automaticity, market design, and neuro-chemical addiction represent the next phase of the neoliberal project to re-regulate society from the inside-out and the bottom-up.

Crossing a final disciplinary boundary, we find the national security, intelligence, and defence (NSID) communities of the U.S. and some of its allies increasingly convinced they are fighting a ‘cognitive war’ – in many ways a mutation of the more familiar but no less problematic ‘information war’ of yesteryear. Naturally enough, the NSID finds an enemy at its gates, using Sun Tzu-like skulduggery with non-kinetic digital and para-biological weapons at hand to deliver death by a thousand cuts¹³ – the mythical victory-without-fighting – while organisational and intellectual inertia stifle the military response.¹⁴ Disorientation and disfigurement applies doubly here too. Barely two decades ago much of the same community in the West was confident it was going to be the deliverer, not the receiver, of such disruptive strategic effects. How could this happen? Maybe the NSID community should never have listened to economists? Keynes’ warning about the propensity of practical men to be ‘slaves of some defunct economist’ rings ever truer. Except this time, the defunct economist is an automaton.

We use the preceding analysis to show why the cognitive war is less an invention of any beguiling adversary and more a distinct consequence of disaster, surveillance, and limbic capital, when their implications are combined with developments in cyber and A.I. and properly understood. It’s only due to some of the very recent literature examined in the preceding analysis that we can make such a claim at understanding, with much work yet to do. The upshot for the NSID community is more a story of the monster-under-the-bed than the enemy-at-the-gates, with significant implications for how the thing we still think we are defending – open, democratic, rule-of-law societies – might think about responding. The monster in this instance is a disfigured and uncontained corporatist state, deeply entangled with the protean effects of its own interventions, largely in the form of automation and market design, and a regime of technologies it does not understand and cannot control, which have moved profoundly against any pretence of serendipitous alignment between unconstrained markets and the strategic prospect of open democracy.¹⁵ The essence of the cognitive war is endogenous and unspeakable in mainstream discourse: the parasitoid is killing the host. The attack is itself epistemological; so must be the response. In Part IV: Exit to Home, we consider the possibilities presented by nominalism as an episteme in response.

I

INVASION

Where to now for the

monism of markets?

Espoused most famously as an article of secular faith by the acolytes of Chicago School economics,¹⁶ unrestricted capitalism retains its claim as the ‘the greatest prosperity engine ever built’.¹⁷ In terms of its extraordinary capacity for the generation of economic activity and of constant self-reinvention, this is indisputably the case. What is also observed, and the cause of severe cognitive dissonance not only among some of its followers, but in anyone observing post-war P.E., can be likened to a form of cannibalism. On abundant available evidence, capitalism as informed by neoliberal economic doctrine tends to consume the basic foundations of human order in which such doctrine is pursued in the first place. It has taken some time for it to sink in – that this cannibalised social and international order is a feature, not a bug, in the neoliberal project. Neoliberalism is not laissez faire. It fronts the fetish of choice and the quasi-religiosity of ‘systems science’ to conceal its own status as a parasitoid – eating out the institutions and processes of the state only to wear the remnants like a bloated shell.

But available evidence has never really been the point.¹⁸ The neoliberal project has demonstrably coincided, conflated, and colluded with a decades-long culture war over the authority of knowledge in the United States¹⁹ – a fact seemingly lost on commentators and scholars left