Review: Jonathan Crary, ‘Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World’
Review of Jonathan Crary’s Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (Verso Books, 2022), 144 pages.
Abstract
Jonathan Crary’s Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (2022) presents a piercing critique of Western techno-consumer culture and the innumerable digital landscapes now created by the internet. Drawing on sociology, politics, optics, and cultural theory, Crary argues that a sustainable and liveable future must be one that refuses the totalising grip of trans-national capitalism and our growing addiction to online simulations. His thinking is provocative in its urgency for collective intervention and shockingly accurate in its depictions of a present now on the verge of global catastrophe. This review argues that Crary’s essay comes at a critical juncture in understanding the effects and consequences in continuing to entertain the fantasies of 24/7 capitalism.
Reviewed by Henry Powell
Few could argue that the current globalising trajectory of capitalism can be sustained without catastrophic and irrevocable devastation to civilisation and the fragile biosphere which supports life. Yet, even fewer argue, as Jonathan Crary does in his essay, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (2022) that, ‘[i]f there is to be a liveable and shared future on our planet it will be a future offline, uncoupled from the world-destroying systems and operations of 24/7 capitalism’ (1). Unsurprisingly, Crary’s polemic is radical, alarming, and uncompromising in its call for some form of ‘eco-socialism or no-growth post-capitalism’ (5). Loosely organised around three untitled chapters, the essay begins by surveying the landscape of the ‘internet complex’. The latter is a neat neologism that Crary uses throughout the text to describe the vast array of digital platforms, protocols, and physical infrastructure that he notes has ‘become inseparable from the immense, incalculable scope of 24/7 capitalism’ (2). Over the next 56 pages that makes up the first chapter, Crary attempts to deconstruct the ideological operations of the ‘internet complex’ to show how its infiltration into nearly every corner of social reality has left individuals politically impotent and dispossessed from a sense of lived time.
He does this by first offering a brief historical account of the internet. Starting from its inception as a tool adopted by the military and then later by institutional research organisations, the chapter pinpoints the mass adoption of the internet in the mid 1990s as a phenomenon driven by a ‘reconfiguration of capitalism’ (10). For him, this revised model of capitalism is characterised by the widespread adoption of ‘informal, flexible and decentralized forms of labour’ (10). Crary then links the commercialisation of the internet to the emergence of neoliberal politics and the growing economisation of the social body. Consequently, the internet we know today—with its innumerable products and financial services—was borne not out of a desire to emancipate individuals towards greater forms of political autonomy or create the conditions for collective group agency, but rather to remake individuals into ‘entrepreneurs of their human capital’ (10).
The popular notion of the internet as an egalitarian and democratic digital platform is dismissed by Crary who instead regards it as ‘the comprehensive global apparatus for the dissolution of society’ (11). The chapter does much theoretical signposting to support this view. Drawing from the likes of Marx, Debord, Arendt, Deleuze and Guattari, Crary considers the spread of social media platforms that he notes have become the new engine houses of ‘addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory and social disintegration’ (2). Part of this problem is our complete acceptance of the internet into the deepest crevasses of social existence, which Crary remarks ‘function[s] as an unending announcement of its indispensability and of the insignificance of whatever life remains unassimilable to its protocols’ (3). Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s view that the internet and its supporting platforms are tools that drive the ‘mass production of behaviour’ (21), Crary dismantles the notion of the ‘digital divide’ (21) and its premise that the internet access should be a basic human right because it functions as a gateway to greater social mobility, career progression and economic equality. He goes on to argue that the internet drives individuals towards unhealthy habits and subjectivities of digital consumption.
The second chapter presents an arresting characterisation of techno-capitalism. Here Crary charts our changing and often subservient relationship to digital technology. For him, the defining feature of technocratic capitalism is a world in which ‘human agency and creativity has been deleted’ (68). Again, Crary covers a significant amount of theoretical ground here to show how science and technological innovation have been driven by the interests of capitalism rather than for human purposefulness or need. AI, 5G networks and the IOT (Internet of Things) are used as case studies which exemplify the transformation of Western culture into a giant digital worksite that privileges principles of speed, ‘connectedness’ and the shallow flow of data over any ‘deep’ or meaningful interactions between social groups or individuals. Yet, the increasing tempo of capitalistic production, consumption and exchange cannot last forever, or so he argues. For him the limits of capital occur when ‘–human productivity is not just augmented by technology but replaced by it’ (61). While advances in technology have ushered in new disciplines of labour and commodity production, it could be argued that humans will always retain an intrinsic value to the system of capital regardless of the capability of technology.
Exactly how the rejuvenating properties of capital will disintegrate and usher in a ‘post-capitalistic’, hyper-modern’ system of exchange is largely side-lined by Crary who instead moves to describe the significance of ‘presentism’ as a fundamental feature of the internet complex. Here he suggests ‘presentism’ ‘include[s] all the technological innovations designed to abolish time or function in “real time”, which privilege the “now” and foster the illusion of instantaneity and immediate availability’ (62). Many scholars (Virilio 2012; Fisher 2015; Bauman, 2017) have similarly commented on the ‘freezing of time’ as a defining characteristic of modernity. For Crary, our growing expectations for instantaneous consumption cement the notion that our economy operates ‘unmoored from spatial, material, or temporal constraints’ (62).
Although the shortest, the third chapter of Scorched Earth is arguably the most captivating. Here Crary’s critique of the ‘internet complex’ moves to explore the rise of retina scanning and the ubiquity of facial recognition technology, something he argues functions as an appendage to ‘surveillance capitalism’ (126). The social theory of the Frankfurt School in particular, Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of capitalism together with Guy Debord’s notion of ‘spectacle’ is crucial to Crary’s thinking—though both theories feel underdeveloped in the context of his critique, he examines how our immersion in digital landscapes works to erode the social glue that binds communities together. Starting with a description of technocratic values which he argues aim to fuse the libidinal impulses of wants, needs and desire with cultural products that impose a set of conformist behaviours. Crary explains how the often ‘playful’ and ‘creative possibilities of technology’ (102) inaugurate new techniques of domination and subservience.
For Crary, the development of computerised speech and AI voice technology is diminishing our capacity to relate and empathise with others. As he remarks, ‘we are losing the ability to see a face or hear a voice in its temporal depth, to apprehend the signs and sounds of experience gathered over a lifetime’ (131). The visual-auditory history of the face and speech as a marketing tool is examined and used to expose our increasingly disembodied status as consumers trained by machines to sound like machines. Despite his illuminating analysis it remains unanswered how participants of technocratic culture should ‘radically refuse’ (5) these mechanisms of social control to reclaim an authentic sense of self. Crary then draws on the thinking of Martin Buber, who contends that the ‘face was important as a defining element of human encounter in which speech (or the withholding of speech) was made possible’ (132). With the rise of new digital communication platforms (Zoom, Twitter, Facebook etc.) it’s hard to deny Crary’s claim that we are seeing the gradual ‘mechanization of emotion’ (128), something that is eroding the authenticity and unpredictable nature of the physical meeting. Ultimately, ‘As more platforms become voice powered, human speech is processed into behavioural information, and robotic voices are made to simulate emotional interactions with users, while being continually upgraded to seem more “likeable” and “trustworthy” (135).
The second half of the chapter explores the idea of ‘visual illiteracy’ (123). In a thought provoking and stimulating discussion Crary declares that ‘the omnipresence of electroluminescence has crippled our ability or even motivation to see, in any close or sustained way, the colours of physical reality’ (123). For him, our 24/7 consumption of digital images that emanate from television screens, smart phones, and the mass-media together without our increasingly urbanised lifestyles drain us of our ability to perceive the subtle colours created by nature. We almost become blind to colour. The result of this ‘visual illiteracy’ is a collective indifference and apathy to our natural environment. Consequently, Crary argues that our dissociation from natural sources of colour is pushing us to consume greater quantities of manufactured colour—an industry which itself is causing irrevocable damage to ecosystems around the world. As he reminds us, much of the synthetic colour produced today is derived from plastics and other harmful substances which continue to pollute the environment in vast quantities. Crary stops short in offering any prescriptive solution to these issues—something which undermines his call for in how ‘no growth capitalism’ might function.
In sum, Scorched Earth adds a much-needed critical voice to the growing discontent surrounding the usefulness of the internet and the digital technologies which penetrate ever deeper into our everyday lives. Yet, the path to a new sustainable paradigm of existence that is in harmony with the delicate eco-systems of the planet will not be an easy one to follow. As the author contends, ‘we may abstractly deplore the millions of lives and species rendered disposable by capitalism or the devastation of ecosystems on which we depend, but we cling to our disembodied routines and to the illusion that the internet complex is somehow not a primary agent of this catastrophe’ (126). The question then becomes what, if anything, will shake us from these embedded habits and spur us to take not only individual responsibility, but collective action to avoid a permanently scorched Earth? Although there is much to celebrate in the quality of Crary’s scholarship, with such a wide range of topics and thinkers being covered it feels as if his analysis and ideas at times move too quickly to fully grasp. Moreover, the omission of chapter titles, introductions or summary arguments similarly makes identifying central theoretical themes problematic. Despite these setbacks, Scorched Earth is a fascinating study that brings fresh and imaginative perspectives to issues of living, working, and consuming in our technocratic digital cultures.
References
Bauman, Z. (2013). Consuming Life. Hoboken, Wiley
Fisher, M. (2013). Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative? Winchester, O BOOKS.
Virilio, P., & Richard, B. (2012). The administration of fear. Los Angeles, CA, Semiotext(e).
Henry Powell is an independent researcher and English practitioner interested in the overlap between neoliberal politics, popular culture, and film. His recent doctorate (undertaken at Kingston University London) explored the critical potential of failure as a tool to subvert neoliberal politics.
Contact: hpowell98@gmail.com
