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Consumtariat
The Internet age’s pathetic underclass, those who are left behind or outside the digital world, isolated in their minimal social activities and reduced to mainly devoting themselves to the Internet society’s lowest common denominator: the vulgar, passive consumption of mass produced goods and services.
The disappointment is not even about the audience not wanting to see individualist X or Y per se. Rather, it is about individualism as such having become vulgar and boring and that no one wants to see any individual at all any longer. To the extent that there is any audience at all for anything at all in the old media, preferences are firmly oriented towards sundry variants of ironic freak show. This is the anxiety-relieving evening and weekend entertainment of consumtarians made passive (see The Netocrats) The truth is that only a small minority, the netocracy, understand and have mastered the Internet and can utilise the medium to their own advantage. This is in spite of the fact that almost the entire population of the world are already living their lives in the new social arena. In his book Average Is Over the American economist Tyler Cowen estimates that approximately 15 per cent of the American population will succeed in the transition to netocrats in a productive interaction with the Internet and the torrents of newly automated processes in society, while the remaining 85 per cent of the population will establish themselves as just a consumtariat, the fast-growing underclass in a social, cultural and also increasingly economic sense.
In 2013 statistics were made public revealing that the gaps in the socio-economic classes in the Unites States had returned to the same levels as in 1917. An entire century of energetic political attempts to level out class differences with egalitarian taxation, allowances and educational measures had come to nothing. Even in other parts of the world, these gaps are widening, and regrettably there is nothing either to suggest that they will decrease once the full power of the Internet revolution comes into effect. And then we have not even touched on the even more dramatic social and cultural class differences that are being created in the attentionalist society that is replacing the capitalist society online (see The Netocrats). Only a handful of Twitter users have access to hundreds of thousands of followers, but they are sitting on the netocratic megaphone, they really have attentionalist power. Meanwhile the great mass of people are pseudo-babbling on Twitter straight out into the void without any of the people in power caring at all. This goes on until they tire and, having given up, are forced to accept their powerlessness and total lack of influence in their capacity as faceless biomass in the great, vegetating consumtariat.
It is only when the Internet arrives with full force towards the late 1980s and early 1990s that society is endowed with an environment where holism and generalism are fostered at the expense of the academic world’s atomism and specialism. It is also only after the advent of the Internet that criticism of the individualist axiom begins to grow. The new paradigm with its new power structures requires a new mythology; a new narrative of the developing information, communication and network society in the Internet age. The informationalist paradigm is characterised by interactivity as the dominant form of communication, the cyber world as the geographical arena, attention rather than capital as the driving force socially, as well as the production, consumption and above all social reproduction of media as the main occupation (we have written about all of this extensively in The Netocrats). Informationalism is driven by the event as its metaphysical horizon, and is dominated by the conflict between the new classes, the small but wholly dominant netocracy and the considerably larger but in every respect subordinate consumtariat.
Attention is in essence a completely unique kind of value, a historically emergent phenomenon, arisen out of the acute lack of overview in the informationalist society. And it acts de facto without connection to any form of capital. The driving ambition of the attentionalist society, hardly surprisingly, is imploitation rather than capitalism’s exploitation. That which is constantly desired is a value that can be saved for the few and thereby is maximised – rather than being spread to the many, which would mean that it would thus be diluted and minimised – an option that surfaces as a historically emergent effect of attentionalism’s victory over capitalism. This explains why the netocrats are obsessed with the search for authenticity, the metaphysical reward promised by imploitation, while the informationalist underclass, the consumtariat, is characterised by its very search for exploitation and its desire to let itself be exploited, totally oblivious of the constantly ongoing but incomprehensibly symbol-laden netocractic imploitation that is transpiring in parallel, but all the while out of reach and out of sight.
Since relationalism drives the new physics, it is hardly surprising that the metaphysics of the Internet age – from Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze via Alain Badiou to Slavoj Zizek – revolves around and is driven by the notion of the emergent event. Interactivity produces a class structure with the netocracy as the upper class and the consumtariat as the lower class. While the consumtariat is relatively uniform – consumtarians are of course defined by what they are not rather than what they actually are – the netocracy can be divided into three distinct categories. The first of these is the netocratic pioneers; the second category is the netocratic aspirationists who copy the pioneers at an early stage and successfully, and if possible milk an even greater surplus value out of their creativity than the pioneers do: imitation is the mother of survival. The third category of netocrats is the experimentalists, who, while they initially fail in copying the pioneers and who are rather too late to copy the aspirationists, for precisely this reason they are forced to and subsequently succeed in inventing their own original solutions, which motivate their position within the netocracy. The consumtarians meanwhile have their plate full passively chewing the nonsensical content, the calming and soporific entertainment that is produced in various trashy networks with no status whatsoever.
But when the individual no longer functions in a society built on networks, the Internet age’s netocracy seeks a new human ideal. One does this while the consumtariat also desperately seeks a new potential identity other than the tragic state of being the last individual. The new, attentionalist human ideal that appears is the dividual, the divisible rather than indivisible Man (see The Body Machines), a body experiencing pleasure, involved in constant networking with all interesting humans and machines in its surroundings. The dividual is a protean creature, powerfully coloured by schizoid creativity. If we study the netocratic categories more closely, we see how the concepts dividual and event interact in a clear quest to capture and strengthen the new attentionalist human ideal.
It is unreasonable to ask of the consumtarians that they should be able see through and be able to distance themselves from late capitalist consumption society. They are not even authentic social producers in a Foucauldian sense: rather, they are social consumers, thereof the tragic term the consumtariat. It is about a consumption proletariat which, in contrast to the classical workers’ proletariat, is no longer united around a proud productivity, but has been reduced to an underclass that have the passive consumption of entertainment and identity production in prefabricated mass editions as their only cohesive factor. Resistance against the corrupt system must instead come from inside the netocracy, which constitutes the subversive branch of social production. However, there are no indications suggesting that the netocracy will stand united in the political struggle under informationalism, no more than the bourgeoisie were politically united under capitalism once it had managed to push through its formative struggle for liberal democracy.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58