The World Computer: derivative conditions of racial capitalism

Abstract

ion renders human preferences, affects, and experiences into “marketable information” (p. 154) that capital can then use to price commodities and assuage market uncertainty. Under these conditions, “any entity can be indexed as information by the exchange process and treated according to executable protocols running a cost-benefit analysis” (p. 157). The final section describes how derivative conditions shape computational racial capital and its modalities of accumulation. Beller continues arguing that platforms’ advertisement-based business models have fundamentally subsumed human expression itself into relations of valuation. He connects the recognition that internet users attract through engagement to money and argues that by capturing data about users, tech corporations are able to effectively market commodities to them in a manner that makes their respective rates of profit projectable. Monetization of data based on user engagement allows tech corporations to extract surplus value from interdependent displays of the self as a normative icon, intensifying the extent to which today’s subject qua neoliberal entrepreneur is invested in cultivating and presenting an image of themselves that extends behavior once specific to social media use to the practices that comprise everyday life. Beller then proceeds to show how the matrix of domination, oppression, and violence that information disavows both produces and is reproduced by digital media that increasingly record and surveil users given their continued adoption and growing ubiquity. Nevertheless, Beller closes his monograph by recognizing that information itself is the product of larger contestations over the financialization of speech and expression such that informatic media might retain a latent capacity to be collectively repurposed for emancipatory ends. He explores this possibility through an analysis of cryptocurrency as a new medium of finance. By prioritizing peer-to-peer transactions, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin might offer the opportunity to democratically remediate the role money plays in consolidating capital at scale and under the direction of anti-capitalist, anti-racist, antipatriarchal, non-heteronormative, and decolonial collective action. The World Computer has been published at an opportune moment, a moment that calls for further theoretical explanation of the social horrors that computational racial capital mediates and produces. Its greatest strength lies in its provocative and synthetic reading of research across fields as diverse as digital media studies, critical race and ethnic studies, gender studies, post-colonial studies, queer theory, and various critiques of political economy. Weaving these different lines of inquiry together to construct a theoretical model that contextualizes computational racial capital in historical and social process of abstraction, Beller’s book marks the beginning of a crucial intervention in communications studies and the fields with which it engages. This book may offer scholars an 194 BOOK REVIEW