Biopolitics of post-biological bodies on the web:Performance of the internet self as an agent of surveillance capitalism

Abstract

The post-biological body exists in both URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and IRL (in real life), performing everyday labor. Separating the body from the context of biopower and capitalism risks hiding or masking the principles of extraction that are fundamental to internet infrastructures. We all leave digital traces of who we are in our encounters, purchases, and web history through search engines, misspellings, and geo-locations. Private companies use these traces to justify that such extensive data collection improves their products and services. However, the model for improvement relies on data extraction that predicts our behavioral actions. Shoshana Zuboff calls the extraction of this behavior “Behavioral surplus”: data that was not meant to be collected has become the next frontier in the business model of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019).

This thesis examines the post-biological body’s entanglement with surveillance capitalism through a central research question: how does the internet’s infrastructure transform the nature of bodies in relation to biopower? To address this question, I examine the transformative turn of using bodies as tools of material and immaterial labor into the extraction of bodies into a commodity of labor through the theorization of Foucault, Tung-Hui Hu, Katherine N. Hayles, Lisa Blackman, and Ivan Illich. Critical phenomenology provides a method for understanding how models of surveillance function, specifically concerning bodies that go beyond – or do not fit neatly within the normative categories and universalizing assumptions that internet systems are predicated on. D. Fox Harell, Safiya Noble, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s principles and practices come into play. Feminist and queer thinking and imaginative computation practice can be seen as models to reshape this infrastructure. I investigate why algorithmic systems are designed to erase and render a particular set of identities invisible and question whether it is possible for the labor of artists/activists working on the internet to move beyond the binaries of these algorithmic classifications. My case studies of online performances and my own practice offer insights into the change of the internet throughout the past twenty-five years, with an overview of how little the context of surveillance capitalism has shifted when it comes to transparency. Specifically, I critically investigate the performativity of consent on the internet regarding bodies and their behavioral actions. This research was foundational to creating a net-performance titled Economy of my body, as I looked into the meaning of the post-biological body on the internet to provide a lived account of the experience of the economy and labor attached with being online. Auto-ethnography is part of the critically reflexive practice that allows one to know and experience more deeply the body as it is perceived, understood, and optimized, essentialized, and co-opted by neoliberal forms of power.

Keywords: Post-Biological, Biopower, Surveillance Capitalism, Internet Performance, Performativity

An edited chapter of the thesis was published on January 2023 as part of CICA Museum’s publication Brave New World: New Media Art 2023