by Matteo Pasquinell
Abstract
Gilbert Simondon once noticed that industrial machines were
already an information relay, as they were bifurcating for the first time
the source of energy (nature) from the source of information (the
worker). In 1963, in order to describe the new condition of industrial
labour, Romano Alquati introduced the notion of valorising
information as a link between the Marxist concept of value and the
cybernetic definition of information. In 1972, Deleuze and Guattari
initiated their machinic ontology as soon as cybernetics started to exit
the factory and expand to the whole society.
In this text I focus again on the Turing machine as the most
empirical model available to study the guts of cognitive capitalism.
Consistent with the Marxian definition of machinery as a device for
the “augmentation of surplus value”, the algorithm of the Turing
machine is proposed as engine of the new forms of valorisation,
measure of network surplus value and new ‘crystal’ of social conflict.
Information machines are not just ‘linguistic machines’ but indeed a
relay between information and metadata: in this way they open to a
further technological bifurcation and also to new forms of
biopolitical control: a society of metadata is outlined as the current
evolution of that ‘society of control’ pictured by Deleuze in 1990.