After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common

After the Internet explores the transformation of the Internet in the early 21st century as an intersection of social, cultural, technological and economic processes. Drawing on French Italian Autonomist Marxist's concepts of cognitive capitalism, social cooperation, and the Common it foregrounds the relation between digital networks and the capitalist mode of production from the point of view of the production of subjectivity. The book includes chapters on the important role played by processes of financialization of the Internet as well as the digital networking of finance and artistic responses to it; the emergence of the notion of the attention economy and its attendant forms of normal and/or pathological subjectivity such as embodied by the users' brain; the infrastructural possibilities entailed by algorithms, blockchain technologies and social media from the point of view of Capitalism and the Common; social media's move away from a simple model of networks towards a neo-Leibnizian digital architecture and its implications for notions of social production and social cooperation, The book concludes with an exercise in speculative fabulation inspired by feminist methodology of Donna Haraway through the figuration of a fugitive A.I. speaking to users during the Covid-19 epidemics.