Here’s a pointedly stark and palpably fierce excerpt from art critic and essayist Jonathan Crary’s Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, which was published just this month:
If there is to be a livable and shared future on our planet, it will be a future offline, uncoupled from the world-destroying systems and operations of 24/7 capitalism. In whatever endures of the world, the grid, as we live within it today, will have become a fractured and peripheral part of the ruins on which new communities and interhuman projects may possibly arise. . . .
[A]mid intensifying social and environmental breakdown, there is a growing realization that daily life overshadowed on every level by the internet complex has crossed a threshold of irreparability and toxicity. More and more people know or sense this, as they silently experience its damaging consequences.
The digital tools and services used by people everywhere are subordinated to the power of transnational corporations, intelligence agencies, criminal cartels, and a sociopathic billionaire elite. For the majority of the earth’s population on whom it has been imposed, the internet complex is the implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration. All of its touted benefits are rendered irrelevant or secondary by its injurious and sociocidal impacts.
The internet complex has become inseparable from the immense, incalculable scope of 24/7 capitalism and its frenzy of accumulation, extraction, circulation, production, transport, and construction, on a global scale. . . .
Ever since the late 1990s we’ve heard repeatedly that the dominant digital technologies are “here to stay.” The master narrative that world civilization has entered “the digital age” promotes the illusion of a historical epoch whose material determinations are beyond any possible intervention or alteration. One result has been the apparent naturalization of the internet which many now assume to be something immutably installed onto the planet. The numerous mystifications of information technologies all conceal their inseparability from the flailing stratagems of a global system in terminal crisis. Little is ever said about how the internet’s financialization is intrinsically reliant on a house-of-cards world economy already tottering and threatened further by the plural impacts of planetary warming and infrastructure collapse. . . .
Countless spheres of the social, with their distinctive autonomies and local textures, have disappeared or been standardized into online simulations. The internet complex is now the comprehensive global apparatus for the dissolution of society.
MORE: “The Digital Age Is Destroying Us“