Reevaluation of Jean Baudrillard: The Economy of the Future
by Dr. Alan N. Shapiro

Introduction

This article is a part of my book “Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction Hyper-Modernism, Hyperreality, and Posthumanism” that brings into an encompassing framework many cultural, media, and science fiction theory ideas which I have developed in recent years. The framework that unites and gives coherence to the work is an investigation into the concepts of hyper-modernism, hyperreality, and posthumanism. These are three cultural theory concepts of how digital media technologies affect society and the lives of citizens of late capitalism.

In this article, I share my reflections on the reevaluation of Jean Baudrillard’s Media Theory and the Simulacrum, while also exploring selected aspects of the economy of the future.

Smart Contracts

Macro languages are being developed that will be used by software literate attorneys, and which are halfway between law and code. Henning Diedrich’s Lexon is a programming language that anyone can read.^[1] It is a breakthrough in computational law and the first language of its kind of a new generation of languages. It moves software code away from being a technical language for programmer specialists and towards increased democratization and intuitive connection to human thought and semantic meaning. Lexon enables the writing of blockchain smart contracts or digital contracts where the text is both legal agreement and self-executing software agent. Diedrich makes a science fictional reference to Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and points out that Lexon gives you the capability to think almost philosophically along the line of stipulating your own situational ethics directives.

Lexon has specific sentence grammar, vocabulary of keywords, and document structure. It is an outstanding example of natural language processing, human-readability, and the coming together of meaning and automatic computation. It uses abstract syntax trees which outline the syntactic structure of the language’s source code. Each node of the tree denotes a construct occurring in the code. The possible applications of smart contracts written with Lexon are as vast as the regions of the legal-social-economic cosmos: contracts, bills of exchange in trade and commerce, governance systems, moral monitoring of AI algorithms, digital asset markets, academic certification, terms of service, financial products, supply chain logistics, regulations and oversight, data privacy protection, escrow, wills, crowdfunding, and mediated agreements in the post-capitalist sharing economy, to name just a few.                      

Smart contracts enable decentralized payment processing platforms with builtin and full-fledged trust and reputation systems. In the smart contract, rules and procedures are spelled out in the code and algorithms. Human parties to the contract must comply during execution of the agreement or face penalties which have been agreed upon from the start. The contract is the payment (or the money). It is not something to be separately fulfilled in a “step two.” It does not depend on someone doing the separate act of payment. Execution is guaranteed. Money becomes automatically mobile. Intermediaries for financial transactions are no longer needed. The code is decentralized and distributed. It does not run on any specific physical computer. It cannot be stopped or shut down.                                                  

Between Law and Code                                                   

Laws attempt to restrain criminality as well as to regulate the unethical and exploitative excesses of capitalism. Law is a moral instance of society that, in one of its crucial domains, engages in a detailed way with technology. In their book Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code, the law, technology and society scholars Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright investigate systematically the challenges which the liberal state and regulators face in dealing with the present and future of the autonomous systems brought into existence by the spread of blockchains.^[2] These new software technology artefacts threaten to develop and spread beyond the superintendence of humans and their applications of jurisprudence, to become roughly the equivalent of the dangerous echo chambers in platform capitalism social media politics, or the dreaded AI Superintelligence takeover of power from humanity. Blockchains might ominously lead to a world of many small niches of private and uncontrollable regulatory frameworks. De Filippi and Wright fear AI autonomy in the bad sense: the decline of morality and the social fabric as code-based systems provide “people with new financial and contractual tools that could replace key societal functions.”^[3]

What is perilously appearing on the horizon is the rule of what De Filippi and Wright call lex cryptographica – a potentially anarchic (in the bad sense of chaos) unruly regulatory frameworks of lawless (dis)order – blockchain programmers and economic actors operating transnationally and free from oversight. We are menaced by the possible replacement of the rule of law by the rule of code in the organization of economic and social activity. To avoid autonomous systems becoming lawless systems, the opportunities of disintermediation which blockchains enable must be carefully steered instead of portentously being allowed to run wild according to the mistaken credo that whatever can be done technologically should be done. The unity of law and code advocated by De Filippi and Wright is a perspective related to the unity of morality and code articulated in the present study.

The authors acknowledge that the codification of legal covenants is beneficial. Software code furnishes precision and modularity. Legal agreements are often poorly worded or hampered by bad writing. The increased clarity provided by code could take something of the adversarial tension out of contract litigation and disputes. It could reduce much frustration, misunderstandings, and legal costs. The rigorous symbolic logic of software programming could “decrease contractual ambiguity by turning promises into objectively verifiable technical rules.”^[4] The modularity of code could have the advantage of leading to the establishment of libraries of smart contract software components and boilerplates. As open source, these libraries could be maintained and enhanced by participating communities of legal and ethical experts. The libraries could be transparent to the public.                                          

De Filippi and Wright see the new Internet of blockchains as suspended in a tension between the rule of law and the rule of code. This perspective is understandable since they are experts in the deeply established and important academic field of law. However, the transdisciplinary study of law, society, and technology compellingly calls on us to think more outside the box into the area of the dialogical embedding of ethics and morality into code. The authors do indeed invoke the potential of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations to be effective in influencing social and community norms, “shaping the moral or ethical standards of the community of users and miners supporting a particular blockchain-based network.”^[5]

Decentralized Autonomous Organization

Bitcoin, Litecoin, other cryptocurrencies, micro-payment systems, tipping, donations, Creative Commons licenses, crowdfunding without a centralized broker, collaborative open-source projects, and other creativity-to-capital conversion mechanisms built on top of the blockchain infrastructure are elements of the Internet of Creators. These emerging phenomena put into circulation new varieties of economic and non-economic value. The hyperlink, interconnectivity, and multimedia features of the World Wide Web Internet belong to a network emphasizing communication. The blockchain – with its principle of distributed transparent data duplicated on many computers – promises to lead to a network emphasizing value. How can one design a network that enables this radical bottom-up democracy and direct expression? Poetics restores symbolic exchange at the heart of language, against economic exchange and the semiotic code. Can a new kind of social relationship be established with blockchain?

The architecture of blockchain introduces advanced computer science concepts of trusted transactions, the public ledger, virtual replication to near infinity of all records and histories, the smart contract, the unification of agreement in principle and execution of the agreement, and the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). Trust in technology will compensate for the lack of reciprocal human trust that exists in our competitive society. The blockchain is mirrored tens of thousands of times on every computer in the world that participates as a software client in the blockchain of blockchains known as Ethereum (or similar backbone). The blockchain is a different kind of database with a special kind of stored procedure mechanism. By copying everything to everyone, there is ironically no copying (the problem with conventional digital architecture is that everything can be copied). Total validation replaces the centralized control of middlemen like banks who currently profit too much from their institutional guaranteeing of the enforceability of transactions.

The DAO acquires resources, attracts value, carries out transactions, maintains itself, and self-evolves and writes its own new software code. The DAO consists of a set of complex smart contracts where rules and procedures are spelled out in the code and algorithms.

The DAO is not owned or run by humans but rather entirely by smart contracts and algorithms. In his 1986 book Rights, Persons and Organizations, Meir Dan-Cohen first proposed the idea of a self-owning company.^[6] The DAO finances its own operations through a cryptocurrency account. It sells tokens of investment as a sustainable economic entity to human speculators and contributors. No one directly controls the behavior of the DAO. Examples of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations would be Uber-like ridesharing or Airbnb-like vacation rental marketplace applications in the post-capitalist sharing economy.

Code-based systems of algorithmic governance can be the basis for realizing the old left-anarchist dream of a post-scarcity economy where logistics are off-loaded away from the control of power-seeking humans to moral and trusted posthuman entities and processes organized from the bottom up. Opportunities for human greed and corruption will be removed. Humans still play a vital role in their creation of software and interactions with the DAO.            

Between Corporate Intellectual Property Rights and the Rights of Users

We live in a capitalist society where almost everything that is produced is privately owned by the individual or corporate entity who or which produced it. Yet this capitalist dimension is but one instance of our socio-cultural existence that is supposedly offset by the alleged democratic dimension of the so-called public sphere. If the public sphere is no longer a valid concept nor a vibrant viable reality, then we must rethink how we can regulate the excesses of capitalism. We also live in a democratic society where it is said that all citizens have certain universal and inalienable rights to certain goods, services, and experiences. Democratic rights extend beyond political and social rights to cultural rights. Democracy extends to culture. Yet this is also but one instance which is supposedly offset by the intellectual property rights of those who have produced the cultural artefacts and environments which consumers or users partake in. There is a continuous tension between these two aspects of cultural existence, a dialectical tension between capitalism and democracy that often goes unrecognized.

In the sixth century, St. Columba, an Irish Gaelic missionary and one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland, transcribed by hand a copy of a book loaned to him by Saint Finnian of Moville, a Christian missionary. The copy was preserved as the Cathach of St. Columba. It is more famous than the original. The dispute over the ownership rights of the copied manuscript led eventually to the Battle of Cul Dreimhne in 561, where three thousand people were killed. The disagreement led to the establishment of the intellectual copyright principle, laid down by the High King of Ireland acting as arbitrator: “To every cow belongs its calf; to every book its copy.” A copy of an intellectual production belongs to the owner of the original.

The argument about intellectual property rights needs to move beyond the question of originals and copies to the question of what is cultural citizenship? The argument needs to move on to the context of how the cultural artefact becomes part of the lives of the cultural citizens of a democratic society, who have certain rights over their own edification and the enjoyment of their own lives. The private producers of cultural artefacts know that the consumer sphere for which they are producing is a cultural sphere. This cultural sphere is a democratic sphere. According to democratic principles, the capitalist producers must make certain compromises with the democratic consumers. Just as, according to capitalist principles, the consumers make compromises with the producers. The producers of cultural artefacts have the right to reap the monetary benefits from what they have produced. These cultural artefacts are part of a democratic culture dedicated to the development of the personalities of individuals.   

Fiction and Power in Postmodernism

The aspect of postmodernism that interests me the most is the turn towards the recognition of the crucial role that narratives and fictions play in the exercise of power and control in the media-technological society. An appreciation of fiction is crucial for “future design research.” To anticipate the future, we need knowledge of the fictional dimension of “the social.” The more we understand about the present, the more we can foresee aspects of the future. If we exclude fiction, then what we call “reality” is a restricted idea of what is going on. I will briefly consider the idea in postmodern media theory of power and control exercised via narratives and fictions in Castoriadis, Haraway, Foucault, Baudrillard, and Deleuze.

Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society

In the final section of his 1973 book The Mirror of Production, entitled “The Radicality of Utopia,” Baudrillard exhibits the anarchist or “autonomist” dimension of his thought, and comments on the student uprising of May-June 1968 in France.^[7] He quotes extensively from Paul Cardan, a pseudonym of the eminent Greek political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis (who lived in Paris for a long time), whose “libertarian socialist” texts associated with the ex-Trotskyist Socialisme ou Barbarie intellectual group of the 1950s were a major influence on the 1968 student movement at Nanterre and the Sorbonne.^[8]

In 1975, Castoriadis published his major work The Imaginary Institution of Society.^[9] Writing against both Marxist and sociological-functionalist interpretations of social history, Castoriadis develops a theory of human societies based on granting an elevated ontological status to “the imagination.” His key concepts are the “radical imagination” or “radical imaginary” of the psyche of the individual and the “imaginary of society” which is the collective version of this “imaginary,” and which inaugurates the social institutions of any given historical society. Operating incisively without any dualism between individual and society, Castoriadis sees both the human psyche and social-imaginary significations as creative, inventive, flexible, and in the flow of continuous changes. Images and symbolism play decisive roles in shaping the distinct historical formation of specific societies. The imaginary and “the real” are always entangled. Radical imagination precedes any separation between real and fiction. Its “world of significations” is what enables a “reality” to form. This “reality” tilts either towards anti-power on the spectrum of power and control in a society of conscious autonomy, or towards power in a society in which institutions are unconsciously autonomous with respect to the citizenry.

There is an uninterrupted circular and reciprocal relationship between the social institution and the individual. The social imaginary engenders the social institution, which, in turn, shapes the psyche of the individual person. Society establishes a “magma” or world of significations, which the individual then internalizes. The atomized selfauthoring individual is a myth. Castoriadis writes:

Every society up to now has attempted to give an answer to a few fundamental questions: Who are we as a collective? What are we for one another? Where and in what are we? What do we want; what do we desire; what are we lacking? Society must define its “identity,” its articulation, its world, its relations to the world and to the objects it contains, its needs and its desires. Without the “answer” to these “questions”, without these “definitions,” there can be no human world, no society, no culture – for everything would be an undifferentiated chaos. The role of imaginary significations is to provide an answer to these questions, an answer that, obviously, neither “reality,” nor “rationality” can provide.^[10]   

But what is Castoriadis’ position on postmodern society? Is the degree of “fictionalizing” increased in the post-Second World War consumer and media culture, or do all human societies have an equal degree of fictionalization? Castoriadis is known as the “philosopher of autonomy.” He theorizes how societies can become more directly democratic, self-managed, egalitarian, and cognizant of their own “imaginary” institution, which can come under their conscious control and choices against rampant power relations. Autonomy refers to the condition of “self-institution” whereby an individual or a society creates its own laws in full self-awareness. Although every society apparently forges its own institutions, only autonomous societies view themselves as the innate source of justice. Most societies stagnate in the condition of self-alienation or heteronomy.In contemporary capitalism, imaginary significations are more dominant than in any previous society. This is an economy that purports to be highly rational yet is perpetually engaged in manufacturing the artificial “needs” of consumers and the built-in obsolescence of consumer goods. Its claim to rationality resides in its insistence that wellbeing is materially measurable and subject to permanent upgrade through the progress of science and technology. It is an economy stuck on the treadmill of having to endlessly satisfy the new “needs” that it itself has generated. In his essay “The Retreat from Autonomy: Post-Modernism as Generalized Conformism,” Castoriadis comments on the general retreat from autonomy into cultural and political conformism in the postmodern era.^[11] There is a disappearance of political imagination. Social institutions become “autonomous” in an unconscious, bureaucratic, and ossified way, as opposed to society becoming consciously autonomous in the democratic and pragmatic-utopian sense. Alienation and power relations prevail. Castoriadis writes:

Alienation occurs when the imaginary moment in the institution becomes autonomous and predominates, which leads to the institution’s becoming autonomous and predominating with respect to society… Society lives its relations with its institutions in the mode of the imaginary, in other words, it does not recognize in the imaginary of institutions something that is its own product.^[12]

Donna J. Haraway on the Informatics of Domination

In “A Cyborgs Manifesto,” Donna Haraway writes about power and control in postmodernism.^[13] In her two-column tabular listing of historical pairings called “The Informatics of Domination,” Haraway enumerates many features of the transition from modern to post-modern “epistemologies,” indicative of the paradigm shift brought about by the advances of science and technology, and the hegemony of information.^[14] The modernist-postmodernist pairs include: the passage from representation to simulation in aesthetics; the passing from the realist novel to science fiction in literature; the movement from organism to bionics and techno-implants in the life sciences; the turn from reproduction to replication of “offspring”; the crossing from dual public-and-private spheres to cyber-cultural citizenship in the topology of social space; the change from work to automation/robotics in the accomplishing of economic tasks; and the progression from mind to Artificial Intelligence in the answer to the question “what is thinking?”

For Haraway, there is a paradigm shift from the “comfortable old hierarchical dominations” of modernity to the “scary new networks” of postmodernism where power is exercised via science fictions, technoscience narratives, simulations, communications and genetic engineering, cybernetic systems logics, cyborg citizenship, and “women in the integrated circuit.” Anticipating hyper-modernism, Haraway implies already in the 1980s that domination was becoming primarily implemented via informatic and bio-technological codes. She writes of the “translation of the world into a problem of coding.” “Microelectronics is the technical basis of simulacra – that is, of copies without originals.”^[15]   

Michel Foucault’s Analytics of Power

The philosopher Michel Foucault’s political theory of freedom is not a liberal theory. Foucault is most well-known for his theory and studies of relations of power in modern society. But in “The Ethics of Care for the Self as the Practice of Freedom,” Foucault writes:

One must observe that there cannot be relations of power unless the subjects are free. If one or the other were completely at the disposition of the other and became his thing, an object on which he can exercise an infinite, and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of power. To exercise a relation of power, there must be on both sides at least a certain form of liberty.^[16]

In contrast to the opposition between power and freedom in liberal political theory, where freedom is generally considered abstractly as being the absence of external constraints imposed by the state or other large institutions/organizations, power for Foucault operates in and through everyday life practices. The discovery of freedom is to be made in understanding how we have been manipulated in the most intimate areas of personal existence, and how we can concretely and creatively transform that. This is a process of experimentation. One cannot know at the outset of each freedom-forging experience what the outcome is going to be.

Foucault famously studied psychiatric institutions in The History of Madness in the Classical Age (1962), hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic (1963), the Panopticon prison architecture of power in Discipline and Punish (1975), and the discursive construction of sexuality in the four-volume History of Sexuality (1976, 1984, 1984, 2018).^[17] The Panopticon is primarily an arrangement of virtual deterrence power or self-surveillance whereby the observed prisoner is not literally seen by a human guard, but who modifies his own behavior because he fears himself to be under surveillance.

The conjuncture of power and knowledge is present throughout Foucault’s work. In his later work, this mutates into the concept of governmentality. There are analytics of “disciplinary power” and “biopower.” Power operates through knowledge, discourses, everyday life, culture, social customs, individuals, networks, and relationships. Power functions not only on the level of institutions but it “reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies, and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes, and everyday lives.”^[18] Power is everywhere and in all interactions. In postmodernism, power is increasingly virtual. Foucault writes in “The Subject and Power”: “Power relations are exercised, to an exceedingly important extent, through the production and exchange of signs.”^[19]

As Foucault explains in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, power is a set of “force relations” which happen at the “molecular” or “micro-physical” level. Power is not possessed but rather exercised. Power comes from below. Power is embedded in networks and systems more than in the agencies of power holders. Power relations are processes. They are in a constant state of flow and transformation. Power relations underlie and precede institutions. Power relations are not in “politics.” They are rooted in the entire networked fabric of “the social.” There is always resistance to power. Those at the subordinate end of a power relationship can consent or rebel. Humans have freedom to not submit to the exertion of power.

Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault

Baudrillard somewhat self-destructively damaged his reputation in 1977, especially in France, with the publication of his small volume Forget Foucault.^[20] In that text, he takes aim specifically at the theory of power elaborated in Discipline and Punish. Is there something of value in Baudrillard’s apparent critique of Foucault (which is not a critique since Baudrillard claims to have abandoned the mode of writing of critique in favor of a “radical” or “fatal” theory)? Parallel to Baudrillard’s farewell to Marx in The Mirror of Production (Marx unwittingly mirrors the logic of capitalist industrial production which Marx intends to criticize), Foucault, according to Baudrillard, has written a “mirror of power,” an unwitting reflection of the system of power and domination which Foucault purports to criticize.                            

By writing so brilliantly, and in such detail, about power, Foucault perpetuates and extends the system of power, which in postmodernism exercises itself primarily through discourses. Paradoxically, Foucault is wrong because he is too right. Since power instantiates itself more and more via rhetoric, an elaborate discourse about power is itself power. The perfection of Foucault’s vast chronicle of power is possible because the historical era of literal power is over. Forget Foucault is not a critique of Foucault, but rather the opposite: Foucault has painstakingly set up his discourse on power as a discourse without limits, hence perfectly impervious to critique and appropriate for the era of the eclipse of critique. Baudrillard writes:

If it is possible at last to talk with such definitive understanding about power, sexuality, the body, and discipline, even down to their most delicate metamorphoses, it is because at some point all this is here and now over with.^[21]

Power and sexuality as frontal objects of knowledge inquiry depend upon a strong reality-principle and a strong truth-principle. It is precisely these strong referents which disappear with simulation and simulacra. As Roland Barthes wrote (contrasting American culture to that of the Japanese “empire of signs”), “sexuality is everywhere except in sex.”^[22] Postmodern culture is everywhere pornographic in its universal visibility and availability of “shocking” or voyeuristic images of every possible “erotic” and “trans-erotic” minutiae which no longer shock. Power and sexuality are experiencing an implosive crisis, not a productive explosion to ubiquity, as Foucault suggests. Power is nowhere because it is everywhere. The supersession of the real by the hyperreal is also the end of literal power and literal sexual desire. Baudrillard writes:

Foucault unmasks all the final or causal illusions concerning power, but he does not tell us anything concerning the simulacrum of power itself… Behind power, or at the very heart of power and of production, there is a void which gives them today a last glimmer of reality.^[23]

Power is a challenge, a play of theatre and appearances. Power is symbolically reversible. It is only a “perspectival space of simulation,” like the trompe-l’oeil artistic technique which creates the optical illusion of a three-dimensional space. Power is invented on the shoulders of signs.

Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”

In his 1990 essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze acknowledges Foucault’s magisterial historiographical contribution in naming the essential characteristics of the “disciplinary societies” of the phases of modernity and early capitalism that ascended in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and reached their height in the early twentieth century.^[24] The citizen of the capitalist disciplinary society lived in the spaces of physical enclosure of family, school, hospital, prison, military, factory, and office. The disciplinary society, for Deleuze, is superseded by a new system of domination which is the “society of control.” Deleuze cites theorist Paul Virilio as “continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system.”^[25] Media technologies have dissipated the borders among the enclosed spaces.

The corporation, with its flexible games of psychological motivation and competition among colleagues, has replaced the factory. Lifelong perpetual training has replaced school. In the society of control, one is never finished with anything, but rather in a state of eternal recurrence or endless cycling between corporation and educational system. The society of control is based in a numerical language that manages access to information. The human becomes a piece of data, a record in a database, a statistical sample. Computers are the archetypal machines of the society of control. Computers are subject to jamming, piracy, and viruses. The body is subject to network controls. We are in orbit in a continuous network. It is a mobile and free form of neo-enclosure. The system tracks us through our transactions and our momentary movements. The computer follows our virtual position – physical barriers and definite locations become irrelevant. The financial system replaces the gold standard with the floating rate of exchange and the global electronic flows of capital.

Early capitalism emphasized concentration, production, and property. The property-owning class of capitalists built enclosed spaces like the factory and – derived from the factory as model – the school and the family home. The late capitalism of the society of control is no longer engaged primarily in the production system of acquiring raw materials from Third World countries which it then converts to finished products. Now capitalism buys shares of stocks and sells services. Marketing replaces production. One controls the market via gimmicks and tricks, by grabbing control, no longer through good old-fashioned raising quality and lowering costs. The citizen is in lifelong financial debt to the system. Control is continuous and without limits.

Fiction, Power, and Codes in Hyper-Modernism                                                        

The most significant facet for my perspective is that, in hyper-modernism, the power and control exercised via narratives and fictions in the media-technological society now get implemented on much more detailed micro-levels via algorithmic-informatic codes and digital, virtual, and cybernetic technologies. We have become an informatic society. We are subjected to algorithms, data collection, Big Data analytics, surveillance, the deterrence of self-surveillance, and mutual surveillance in every area from participation in simulation-social media to targeted advertising to bureaucratic interactions with governmental agencies. We are immersed in systems of informational and informatic power. We are coded as subjects of human data processing. New data analysis techniques for categorizing us while providing us with the illusion of personalization are continuously developed and experimented on us. We are interminable feed and fodder for the algorithms. We have become our data.                                      

Data does not only record who we have been and who we are, but it is an active force in reshaping our “becoming.” In this sense, the role of data can already be illuminated with some basic media theory insights à la Marshall McLuhan. Data is widely seen as being a useful tool for communication and administration, but it is much more than that. Data is exercising power and a performative molding of who we are. The self undergoes datafication. “Info-power,” as defined by Foucault-inspired philosopher Colin Koopman in his book How We Became Our Data, is a distinctive paradigm of power and control that unceasingly reformats the body, mind, and conduct of the individual.^[26] Koopman derives the term “info-power” from Foucault’s chain of terms of disciplinary power and bio-power. Racial bias and discrimination are also deeply built into the data and algorithms.    

Algorithms construct and tell us narratives about ourselves. The info-power of algorithms comes to the fore via the narratives that they engender about us, and the individual “enjoyment” they propose to us. In the informatic society, our lives are increasingly given their meaning and their guidelines for action by algorithmic processes. The algorithm notes your viewing history, figures out your “affects” and desires, and then weaves its designed, packaged, individualized narratives just for you. The algorithm brings to realization the feedback loop originally conceived and promised by Norbert Wiener’s first-order cybernetics.

In the political arena of simulation-social media, the filter bubble and the echo chamber show you exactly what you want to see. The same computing paradigm is deployed in “politics” and in online shopping. As a Deep Learning neural network, the algorithm is permanently “training” itself at your expense, with you as its test “experience,” you are the data provider. The algorithm perfects its seduction of you, deploying the feedback mechanism to refine its narratives to endearingly stroke your narcissism. Your personalized sales or newsfeed stream at Amazon, Facebook, or TikTok. Technology or code itself is the author of these narratives. From the narratives of postmodernism to the code/algorithms/Big Data of hyper-modernism, one major persistent continuity is the profit-seeking of techno-capitalism: institutions and large organizations which seek power and control now want to use code to automate their power.

Thinkers in Science and Technology Studies (STS) like Ludwig Fleck and Bruno Latour put forward the idea that, as knowledge gets deployed for the exercise of power, the human being becomes a scientific fact.^[27] In the hyper-modern era, the human being becomes an informatic fact. The human body was earlier an object of science, the target of medical and other discourses of rationalizing control. There were many mono-sciences rich in content. The“reality” which science took as its noble mission to understand was always already a simulation model. With informatics, the individual sciences get overtaken by the generalized practice of digital models and algorithmic Deep Learners. Knowledge-content is overtaken by the statistical representation of knowledge. “Reality ” becomes hyperreality of the rule of data.

In the media genre of the computer game, narrative and code come together. Navigational permutations and emergent behaviors are coded into the game in both deterministic and indeterminate coding paradigms. Game designers link intimately their story construction plans with the intricacies of software toolkits. One can analyze science fiction films about computer games in a transmedia study. Films like Tron and Tron Legacy (both starring Jeff Bridges), Free Guy starring Ryan Reynolds, David Cronenberg’s eXis-tenZ, Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, Chris Marker’s Level Five, Black Mirror: “Bandersnatch,” and the Polish/Japanese co-production Avalon are exemplary in this respect. One can also contemplate films which are adaptations of a computer game, like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. What is the significance of the POV perspective in the genre of games – the special relationship between player and avatar – for narrative? To write the software code for new games, is it possible to develop a narrative-centered Creative Coding development environment, parallel to how Processing is a visual-centered Creative Coding integrated development environment?

It would be difficult to extend the conceptual framework of Castoriadis to the hypermodern situation of the hybrid narrative-and-code-based power and control assemblage of algorithms. The “imaginary” is seen by him as existing on the level of society and on the level of the individual. A kind of Freudian psychoanalytical connection is made between the two. For Castoriadis, there is a constant tug-of-war going on in history between the poles of the conscious autonomy of self-managed, self-instituting societies and the alienation of institutionally frozen and degenerated societies. This dialectic seems to not foresee a configuration like the “pretzel”-like paradoxical logic of algorithms which bestows on the socially constructed “individual” a pseudo-autonomy that is an extension of postmodern narcissistic consumer culture. Castoriadis would only be able to fathom hyper-modernism as a furthering of the “retreat from autonomy” which is already operative for him in postmodernism.          

In her writings about “The Informatics of Domination,” Haraway was prescient about the important role that code would play in narrative-driven power and domination relations in hyper-modernism. Haraway foresaw the hegemony of information. She already underlined the ubiquity and potency of informatic and bio-technological codes. She wrote of the “translation of the world into a problem of coding.”^[28] Foucault’s analytics of the “micro-physics” of power lend themselves very well to adaptation to the conditions of hyper-modernism. He underscores the relationship between power and knowledge, and between power and discourse. The architecture of power of the social media platforms of “surveillance capitalism,” or of the Internet as a whole, can be trenchantly analyzed as a revised next generation configuration of the Panopticon. Power in hyper-modernism adds to semiotic signs the supplement of electronic signals. William Bogard, in The Simulation of Surveillance, succeeds in synthesizing Baudrillard’s concept of simulation and Foucault’s concept of surveillance.^[29]

Deleuze’s concept of the “societies of control” lends itself well to an upgrade for hyper-modernism and digitalization. He wrote already about how informatic technologies would be deployed to support power relationships. Digital systems of control monitor our movements in a virtual networked sense. Our physical location in designated spaces of confinement recedes to secondary importance. We are visible to the digital behemoth via our real-time transactions. Foucault’s “disciplinary society” of surveillance is superseded by Deleuze’s “society of control,” which is about the management of flows. The interest in turbulence unleashes the potentiality of indefinite production and signification for the era of free-floating bio-cybernetic capitalism, with its global financial transactions and money circulation via electronic impulses. Entropy becomes useful for work in the form of turbulence, chaos, and “female” flows.

John Armitage on Hyper-Modernism

In the 1999 publication Machinic Modulations: New Cultural Theory and Technopolitics, John Armitage poses the question if “modern and postmodern cultural theory are yielding to new ‘hypermodern’ and ‘recombinant’ cultural theories of technology?”^[30] Armitage sees hyper-modernism not only in prevailing developments in technology, culture, and society, but he also writes of a “hyper-modernization” of cultural theory. Hyper-modernism, for Armitage, is a refusal neither of the epistemological optimism/teleological narratives of modernity nor of the diagnosis by post-modern philosophers of the decline of those narratives and epistemology. He theorizes hyper-modernism as the recognition of “double moments” of cultural affirmation and negation understood as the persistence of modernity or its “continuation by other means.”^[31] Hypermodern cultural theory refutes the hostile debate or binary opposition between thinkers associated with modernity versus post-modernism. It seeks a Hegelian Aufhebung or deconstructionist synthesis of the two. The de-re-construction of hypermodern theory and techno-politics proceeds from “scavenging among the remnants” of the two previous paradigms. Armitage argues for the importance of theorizing digital media technologies for new cultural and political practices.

Albert Borgmann on Hyper-Modernism

In his book Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992), referring to Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and John Locke, the philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann defines modernity in the context of the Enlightenment as a fusion of the domination of nature, the primacy of method over content in intellectual work, and the sovereignty of possessive individualism.^[32] In his genealogy of successive cultural history paradigms, post-modernism is a “divide” or transitional phase between two eras – modernity and what is to come later. Post-modernism, for Borgmann, is characterized, among other things, by the prevalence of media technologies, information processing, and the power of multinational corporations. Now we are at a crossroads. The future cultural paradigm will be either hyper-modernism (if we continue the current course) or the more utopian vision of what he calls “postmodern realism.”          

Hyper-modernism is defined by Borgmann as the giving to technology of a “hyper-fine and hyper-complex design.”^[33] Yet hyper-modernism cries out for a genuine alternative. “Postmodern realism” is the outgrowing of pure technological fetishism or determinism towards the agenda of designing technology for what might be called a “new real.” This would be technology as support for the design of salutary life rather than technology for its own sake. Borgmann also discusses hyperreality as an aspect of hyper-modernism. He references Baudrillard and Umberto Eco. Television and video games are precursors of a full-fledged hyperreality that would engage all the senses, as in Virtual Reality flight simulators. Borgmann offers examples of hyperreality in consumer culture. Cool Whip is hyperreal whipped cream. It is cheaper, longer lasting, and has less calories than the “real thing.”

Gilles Lipovetsky on Hyper-Modernism

In 2005, the French sociologist and philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky published landmark theses about hyper-modernism in his book Hypermodern Times.^[34] For Lipovetsky, the concept of post-modernism to designate the cultural paradigm of the times in which we are living is obsolete and needs to be superseded. “The owl of Minerva [reference to Hegel] was announcing the birth of the postmodern just as the hyper-modernization of the world was already coming into being.”^[35] Like Borgmann, Lipovetsky sees post-modernism as a short-lived and transitional phase. Hypermodernity is the consummation of all the earlier tendencies of modernity, such as bureaucratic rationalization and the compression of space and time. With information and communications technologies, speeded up financial transactions, neo-liberal economics, and global markets and culture, we are thoroughly immersed in hyper-modern intensity. There is limitless consumerism, commercialization, and a cult of excess in almost every area of life.

Above all, there is a dramatic change in the experience of time. We live in a perpetual hyper-present. Time has become over-stressed and highly individualized. Most people are overworked. The individual seeks pleasure as a priority but is burdened with tension and anxiety. Hyper-modern life places excessive demands on the person: extreme mobility, flexibility, always the fastest, the newest, and the most. There is a ubiquitous desire for recognition, or the seeking of hyper-attention from others. We invent our emotions in the immediate moment. The hyper-modern crisis of time also provides an explanation for the rise of neo-fascist-populist movements. Given the disappearance of historical meaning, there is widespread nostalgia for its reappearance, albeit in the guise of a simulacrum of itself.                                        

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^[1] Henning Diedrich, Lexon: Digital Contracts (Wildfire Publications, 2019).
^[2] Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright, Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code (Harvard University Press, 2018).
^[3] Ibid.; p.5.
^[4] Ibid.; p.81.
^[5] Ibid.; p.209.
^[6] Meir Dan-Cohen, Rights, Persons, and Organizations: A Legal Theory for Bureaucratic Society (Quid Pro LLC, 2016).
^[7] Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (trans. Mark Poster) (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1973).
^[8] Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, et. al. Socialisme ou Barbarie: An Anthology (ERIS, 2019).
^[9] Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (trans. Kathleen Blamey) (Polity, 1987).
^[10] Ibid.; pp.146-147.
^[11] Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Retreat from Autonomy: Post-Modernism as Generalized Conformism,” in Democracy and Nature, 2001 (trans. David Ames Curtis); pp.17-26.
^[12] Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society; Op. cit.; p.132.
^[13] Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.”
^[14] Donna J. Haraway, Manifestly Haraway; Op. cit.; pp.28-30.
^[15] Ibid.; p.36.
^[16] Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of Care for the Self as the Practice of Freedom,” in The Final Foucault trans. Robert Hurley) (The MIT Press, 1988); p.12.
^[17]  MichelFoucault,Folieetdéraison:Histoiredelafolieàl’âgeClassique(Plon,1961);The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith) (Routledge, 2003); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge; The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure; The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self ; The History of Sexuality, vol. 4, Confessions of the Flesh (trans. Robert Hurley) (Penguin, 2020).
^[18] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (trans. John Mepham) (New York: Pantheon, 1980); p.30.
^[19] Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (trans. Robert Hurley) (The New Press, 1994); p.136.
^[20] Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault.
^[21]  Ibid.; p.11.
^[22] Roland Barthes, L’Empire des signes (Geneva, 1970); p.43.
^[23] Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault; Op. cit.; p.45.
^[24] Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” in October, 1992; pp.3-7.
^[25] Ibid.; p.4.
^[26] Colin Koopman, How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
^[27] Katja Sabisch, Der Mensch als wissenschaftliche Tatsache: Wissenssoziologische Studien mit Ludwig Fleck (Kulturverlag Kasmos, 2016); Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Harvard University Press, 1987).
^[28] Donna J. Haraway, Manifestly Haraway; Op. cit.; p.34.
^[29] William Bogard, The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies.
^[30]  John Armitage, Machinic Modulations: New Cultural Theory and Technopolitics; Op. cit.; p.1.
^[31] Ibid.; p.3.
^[32] Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide.
^[33] Ibid.; p.82.
^[34] Gilles Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times.
^[35] Gilles Lipovetsky, “Hypermodernism,” in David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris, eds., Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the Early 21st Century (trans. Andrew Brown) (Bloomsbury, 2015); p.157.