Infopocalypse: Capitalism, Information Glut, and Assemblages of Struggle

More and more, the shrewdest thinkers and artists are precocious archaeologists of these ruins-in-the-making, indignant or stoical diagnosticians of defeat, enigmatic choreographers of the complex spiritual movements useful for individual survival in an era of permanent apocalypse. The time of collective visions may well be over: by now both the brightest and the gloomiest, the most foolish and the wisest, have been set down. But the need for individual spiritual counsel has never seemed more acute. Sauve qui peut.
…………– E. M.Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

Born in Romania in 1911, Cioran spent most of his life in France, where he lived out his days among the literati of the existential world, became friends of Samuel Beckett (and, in the end lost even this friendship) and others. A disquieting thinker who has haunted me since the first time I read A Short History of Decay many years ago. Sadly like other writers of the era he seems to have let that dread world of fascism touch him with its dark allure. Marta Petreu documents in her excellent An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania this sordid history.

One remembers the life and work of Paul de Man the literary scholar and critic and the posthumous 1988 discovery of an anti-Semitic wartime article he’d published that scandalized the academic world. Or Karl Löwith’s Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism and others exposes, biographies, and philosophical disquisitions on Heidegger’s troubling past. This type of expose is not new and seems to crop up from time to time depending more on the political mood of the times. One remembers that High Modernists of the era Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Luis and others were all either flirtatious and embryonic fascists, or as in the case of Pound full-blown rhetoric advocates of this ideology as if it were some dread disease of the mind.

Yet, we still read these authors even after having discovered their histories and involvements. What does that say about us? Deleuze and Guattari would document this history in their now famous Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Exposing the core liberal fascism of our own time, saying that fascism has only deepened and extended even since the early years of Hitler and Mussolini. This is the fascism of liberalism itself, the fascism of Kant, of humanism; it is a fascism of desire turned against itself, of the most basic aspects of power and authority that seemingly dominate every aspect of our lives, public and private. In fact the so-called transparency being preached as a core motif of the progressive era of PC is at heart a fascist move to obliterate the private life of individuals and bring it under the public eye of a continuous scrutiny of the vast meditainment and surveillance industry.

Cities like New York have become open hives of technological surveillance since 9/11. Companies like CCTV offer every variety of surveillance equipment to corporate and governmental organizations.  One need only read the Top Secret America expose on the Washington Post to realize we’re under Big Brother’s eye continuously. At that time The Washington Post identified 45 government organizations (for example, the FBI) engaged in top-secret work and determined that those 45 organizations could be broken down into 1,271 sub-units (for example, the Terrorist Screening Center of the FBI). One of the 45 organizations is represented as “unknown”; this category was created as a catchall for companies doing work for a government organization that could not be determined. While at the private-sector level, The Post identified 1,931 companies engaged in top-secret work for the government. Private-sector companies were grouped together and listed by a parent company’s name (for example, General Dynamics), even though one company might contain multiple sub-units (for example, General Dynamics Information Technology). Just thinking about all the individuals and technology, R&D and official and unofficial surveillance, data-gathering, analysis, and reports generated by such activity is mind-boggling.

In his Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World Tom Engelhardt lays out the criminal insanity of what we have now in the way of a secret government that has become a “lockdown state” toxic to all forms of life everywhere. Others like Michael J. Glennon in his National Security and Double Government questions the myth that U.S. security policy is still forged by Americas visible, Madisonian institutions – the President, Congress, and the courts. Their roles, he argues, have become largely illusory. Presidential control is now nominal, congressional oversight is dysfunctional, and judicial review is negligible. The book details the dramatic shift in power that has occurred from the Madisonian institutions to a concealed Trumanite network – the several hundred managers of the military, intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement agencies who are responsible for protecting the nation and who have come to operate largely immune from constitutional and electoral restraints. Reform efforts face daunting obstacles. Remedies within this new system of double government require the hollowed-out Madisonian institutions to exercise the very power that they lack. Meanwhile, reform initiatives from without confront the same pervasive political ignorance within the polity that has given rise to this duality.

The Great Suspicion: Conspiracy Theory and the Mediatainment Complex

 …as an alienation that has reached such a degree that [mankind] can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.
……– Walter Benjamin, Notebooks

It’s as if below the surface of our popular conceptions of democracy another world operated, cloaked in secrecy and subterfuge, clandestine and formed by a breakaway faction of bureaucrats, Military-Industrial insiders, and corporate conglomerates outside the normal channels of public and governmental control and observation. I used to think this was all tabloid propaganda, just a conspiracy theory of some out of joint and disgruntled group or individual like those sites you run across like Infowars, David Icke,  Tin Wiki, Above Top Secret, and others like them where one discovers an almost crackpot world of mystery religion, New Age obscurantism, Illuminati, Reptilian aliens, and every political die-hard and overdetermined system of total dominion wrapped around a theory that can never be proved or dismissed, with just enough truth in the fictional narrative to appear to appear true rather than actually based on Truth.

That’s what happens when we lose touch with the credibility of our philosophical heritage in skepticism and critical thinking.  On one level, such conspiratorial ideas might be attributed simply to the anxieties of a deeply shaken people, desperate to make sense of the shocking events. On another level, however, these and similar beliefs alert us to the existence of significant subcultures far outside the mainstream. Surfacing in times of crisis and bound up with heterodox religion, occult and esoteric beliefs, radical politics, and fringe science, they have had a long-standing and sometimes potent influence in Globalist visions and life-worlds.1 With the recent upsurge in the popular TV show “X-Files” returning with a six episode mini-series that whole great suspicion rises up again: “Trust no one!” and “The Truth is out there!” being the bi-modal themes of this world-view.

The Mediatainment industry seems to thrive on this worldview offering film after film or popular television series to feed the mania. Every major medium, from films to television shows, books, magazines, music and, the most fertile ground for the conspiracy culture, the Internet has to some extent been devoted to helping conspiracy theorists confirm what they, in their heart of hearts, have always known to be true. Here in America it seems to permeate the atmosphere like a stench. For over four decades, the American popular imagination has been captured by ever more byzantine conspiracy theories. Extensive subcultures of true believers, those unwilling to subscribe to any idea of a consensus reality, the malcontents, the suspicious and the cynics have been charging that the world is not as it appears to be. The world we live in, according to these suspicious-minded individuals, does not run the way cultural institutions like schools, the government, organized religions and scientists would like us to believe. We are being lied to, we are being duped, we have been brainwashed into a false consciousness. ness. Vast networks of power brokers, shadowy, interconnected cabals of the wealthy, the powerful, and the politically connected have been deceiving us all. Nothing is as it appears to be.2

As Barna William Donovan remarks conspiracy theories, whether on the Internet, in speculative literature, on television, in bestselling novels, or the movies are here to stay. They are a natural byproduct of an ever more complex, bureaucratic, often overwhelming modern world.3

Dataglut: Information Overload and the Posthuman Dilemma

The first theorist of dataglut was the enlightenment encyclopedist Denis Diderot:

As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.
— Denis Diderot, “Encyclopédie” (1755)

We are living in that time. My friend R. Scott Bakker terms it ‘crash space‘:

Humans are what might be called targeted shallow information consumers in otherwise unified deep information environments. We generally skim only what information we need—from our environments or ourselves—to effect reproduction, and nothing more. We neglect gamma radiation for good reason: ‘deep’ environmental information that makes no reproductive difference makes no cognitive difference. As the product of innumerable ancestral ecologies, human cognitive biology is ecological, adapted to specific, high-impact environments. As ecological, one might expect that human cognitive biology is every bit as vulnerable to ecological change as any other biological system.

In 1938 H. G. Wells predicted that “the whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual,” forming a so-called World Brain that would eventually give birth to a “widespread world intelligence conscious of itself.” Similar visions of an emerging planetary intelligence surfaced in the mid-twentieth century writings of the Catholic mystic Teilhard de Chardin, who foresaw the rise of an “extraordinary network of radio and television communication which already links us all in a sort of ‘etherised’ human consciousness” that would ultimately metamorphize into “a single, organized, unbroken membrane over the earth.” Teilhard believed that this burgeoning networked consciousness signaled a new stage in God’s evolutionary plan, in which human beings would coalesce into a new kind of social organism, complete with a nervous system and brain that would eventually spring to life of its own accord. Teilhard never published his writings—the Catholic Church forbade him from doing so—but his essays nonetheless found an enthusiastic cult following among fellow Jesuits like Marshall McLuhan, who took Teilhard’s vision as a starting point for formulating his theory of the global village.4

In one recent study in China dizziness was a common aspect of dysphoria among patients treated at the Tianjin Mental Health Hospital in China and was strongly associated with anxiety states, especially panic disorder.5

Among all patients, 33 percent presented with prominent dizziness; among patients with panic disorder it was 8o percent. The three cases just presented illustrate how dizziness may result from the experiencing of disharmony and disequilibrium, how it may escalate to panic, and how its attribution to a specific organ system implicates certain pathophysiological processes and has specific interpersonal personal meanings. Excessive conflict, progressive depletion, and chronic overload led to disequilibrium in any of various organ systems, and to organ-caused dizziness,  and as disharmony and disequilibrium increased, symptoms became greater in number and intensity, to the point of panic. The initial symptom constellation included dizziness, a sensation resulting from the experience of disequilibrium; and as disequilibrium intensified, the symptoms became more severe, and different types of symptoms resulted until distress culminated in panic. (ibid., KL 2371-2376).

I remember reading Nietzsche’s early The Birth of Tragedy where he describes the Dionsyian state, remarking that while the transport of the Dionysian state, with its suspension of all the ordinary barriers of existence, lasts, it carries with it a Lethean element in which everything that has been experienced by the individual is drowned. This chasm of oblivion separates the quotidian reality from the Dionysian. But as soon as that quotidian reality enters consciousness once more it is viewed with loathing, and the consequence is an ascetic, abulic state of mind.6 This sense of nausea was recorder by Jean Paul Sartre in his Nausea:

“What if something were to happen? What if something suddenly started throbbing? Then they would notice it was there and they’d think their hearts were going to burst. Then what good would their dykes, bulwarks, power houses, furnaces and pile drivers be to them? It can happen any time, perhaps right now: the omens are present. For example, the father of a family might go out for a walk, and, across the street, he’ll see something like a red rag, blown towards him by the wind. And when the rag has gotten close to him he’ll see that it is a side of rotten meat, grimy with dust, dragging itself along by crawling, skipping, a piece of writhing flesh rolling in the gutter, spasmodically shooting out spurts of blood. …”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

It’s as if we enter the world naked, thrown into a complex field of information that our evolutionary brains are no longer able to adapt too, there is just too much information, an overload and imbalance; and, yet, we daily interact with technologies that are becoming more and more entangled with us, merging with us, adapting us to their extrinsic dispotifs – luring us into a collective datauniverse without beginning or end, a rhizomatic realm of infinity without center of circumference, resembling what the old scholastics would have termed the Mind of God.

In a three-part article by Daniel Calder Appreciating the Intelligence of Insects on the Examiner Part I – Part II – Part III he describes the notion of collective intelligence, along with the diagrammatic thinking Deleuze & Guattari in their non-representational and productive unconscious:

William Sulis, in his essay “Collective Intelligence: Observations and Models” gives the reader a fascinating look into the relevance of non-linear dynamics for the study of ethology. Organisms possess intelligence, and this intelligence sometimes manifests itself in ways very different from that found in humans. For example, certain insects, such as ants, are capable of collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is defined by William Sulis as “collective behavior that is stably correlated with ecologically meaningful features of the environment, salient for the survival of the collective, adaptive to changes in the environment, and that transcends the capability of any single member of the collective.”

Relevant to this bias in Western metaphysics is Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between the molar and the molecular. To speak of the “molar” is to focus on that which is coarse-grained and constituted by dense aggregates of matter rather than to atomic properties.

“In a strict sense things molar relate to aggregates of matter and not to either their molecular or atomic properties, or their motion. In a geological sense, ‘molar’ is understood to be what pertains to mass, ground, continence or telluric substance. It also pertains to the general patterns of behaviour taken by an organ or an organism, and thus the term can describe a trait of personality or the character of the ego.” In general , he associates it with that which is “compact” and firm. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guttari distinguish between the molar and the molecular with reference to political organizations. The monolithic “civic world” or “state” are entities which belong to the molar. “They are well defined, often massive, and are affiliated with a governing apparatus.” On the other hand, molecular entities are “micro-entities, politics that transpire in areas where they are rarely perceived: in the perception of affectivity, where beings share ineffable sensations; in the twists and turns of conversation having nothing to do with the state of the world at large; in a manner, too, that a pedestrian in a city park sees how the leaves of al inden tree might flicker in the afternoon light.”

The molecular realm is quite important to Gilles Deleuze:

“The molecular sensibility is found in Deleuze’s appreciation of microscopic things, in the tiny perceptions or inclinations that destabilise perception as a whole. They function, he says, to ‘pulverize the world’ and, in the same blow, ‘to spiritual dust’…The microscopic perspective has a political dimension as well. All societies are rent through by molar and molecular segmentarities. They are interrelated to the degree that all action is conceivably political if politics are understood to be of both molar and molecular orders. The former, a governmental superstructure, does not disallow the presence of the latter, ‘a whole world of unconscious micropercepts, unconscious affects, rarefied divisions’ that operate differently from civic and political arenas.”

Deleuze and Guattari extend semiotics well beyond the realm of human interactions in order to take into account animals, machines, bio-chemistry, and physics. They were avid readers of cybernetics, information theory, and communication studies, which they incorporate into their semiotics. They recognise signs and signals everywhere, and understand their role in the functioning of social, organic, and even inorganic processes. Most of these signs and signals are neither linguistic nor symbolic, and involve no human perceiver. Such signs have no meaning, and need none. No signification is conveyed by the body’s endocrine and hormonal signals. No one [supposedly] wrote the genetic code. These signals and codes create, but they do not signify…For Deleuze, sens (which in French designates both sense and meaning) does not necessarily involve Saussurean signification…Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotic category of the diagrammatic likewise creates and produces real effects without recourse to meaning. Unlike the sign or symbol, the diagram does not signify or represent, but instead operates in the real to produce something new.”

Signs continually interact and combine with various material flows. They come to constitute “web-like agglomerations which are heterogeneous, fragmented, meta-stable, and open to interactions of all kinds – an apt description of the new media landscape…for example, when an ear is connected to an iPod in order to produce a sensation machine. Such biological-technological couplings necessarily result in profound changes in the constitution of the self, and its relation to its environment. personal electronic devices become integral components of a polyphonic, machinic subjectivity.”

Reading the above one realizes how our lives have become part of a vast global machinic intelligence, an information system of converging technologies that are in dialectical oscillation absorbing us into their environs as members of a collective body and intelligence. As Luciano Floridi in  The Ethics of Information remarks this simple but fundamental difference between nature/artificial distinctions have blurred in our time, and what underlies the many spatial metaphors of ‘cyberspace’, ‘virtual reality’, ‘being online’, ‘surfing the web’, ‘gateway’, and so forth. It follows that we are witnessing an epochal, unprecedented migration of humanity from its Newtonian, physical space to the infosphere itself as its Umwelt, not least because the latter is absorbing the former. As a result, humans will be inforgs (information organisms) among other (possibly artificial) inforgs and agents operating in an environment that is friendlier to informational creatures. And as digital immigrants like us are replaced by digital natives like our children, the latter will come to appreciate that there is no ontological difference between infosphere and physical world, only a difference in levels of abstraction. When the migration is complete, we shall increasingly feel deprived, excluded, handicapped, or impoverished to the point of paralysis and psychological trauma whenever we are disconnected from the infosphere, like fish out of water. One day, being an inforg will be so natural that any disruption in our normal flow of information will make us sick.7

Hyperstitional Machines: Material Signs and Assemblages of Struggle

Felix Guattari in Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities tells us that the semiotic formation of the collective power of labour, in the context of capitalist systems, doesn’t depend solely on a central power imposed by the constraint of relations of exploitation. It equally implies the existence of a multitude of intermediary operations, machines for initiation and semiotic facilitation that can capture the molecular energy of desire of human individuals and groups. These machines, of every kind and size, converge in the same semiotico-libidinal productive function that we will call the general collective equipment function.8 If we remember from above that the molecular machines function to ‘pulverize the world’ and, in the same blow, ‘to spiritual dust’ we begin to see how the microscopic perspective has a political dimension as well.

As a student and follower of Guattari’s thought, Maurizio Lazzarato in several works has clarified the difficult and at time abstruse thought of Felix Guattari. In one essay Immaterial Labor he remarks that the capitalist needs to find an unmediated way of establishing command over subjectivity itself; the prescription and definition of tasks transforms into a prescription of subjectivities. The new slogan of Western societies is that we should all “become subjects.” Participative management is a technology of power, a technology for creating and controlling the “subjective processes.” This is what is termed the subjectivation process which includes all the various technological and mediatainment industries that collude to shape the desires of the mass public bypassing their intellect and absorbing their desires in various capture systems. As Guattari would ask: “Might the collective Equipment that take possession of individuals in their most intimate point thus have as their mission that of the expropriation of desire from its ‘original’ territories, or let us say, rather, from its territories that are not yet subjected [assujetties] by capitalist flows, that of speaking in its place, fixing new aims for it, putting it to work, adapting it to hierarchies and systems of exchange, and all of that by means of a particular semiotic technology?” (LOF, KL 913-916). Guattari would maintain our struggle is not against the State per se, but rather against the vast bureaucratic collectives whether in government or corporate existence:

As such, one can legitimately consider them as Collective equipment, in the broader sense that we have given the term here. Thus today one can only conceive of a struggle against State bureaucracy and, in a more general way, against all concrete manifestations of State power, on condition that one envisage in parallel the dismantling of the bureaucratic structures that are paralysing the workers’ movement, popular and minority movements of every kind. State power is everywhere and it is worth everywhere giving oneself the specific means of flushing it out, including in the heads of the ‘masses’ and their leaders. (LOF, KL 1472).

Yet, to do this we must develop what he would term “assemblages of struggle” (LOF, KL 1470). But before starting to understand this he would in dead earnest tell us this cannot be a universalist project, or one founded on some definitive model: it must refuse “all references to a model or to a transcendent and universal system of categories!” (LOF, KL 938). So at least for Guattari all projects seeking some foundational grounding in a universal are already in error, prone to being captured by their enemy, co-opted and reformulated in the enemies clothing to better entrap the players in the struggle by way of subterfuge, cunning, and lies. In his latest work Maurizio Lazzarato in Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity offers an explication of Guattari’s rejection of universalist discourse, saying (9),

As Franco “Bifo” Berardi in Emancipation of the Sign: Poetry and Finance During the Twentieth Century remarks, social communication is submitted to techno-linguistic interfaces. Therefore, in order to exchange meaning in the sphere of connectivity, conscious organisms have to adapt to the digital environment. He goes on to say,

In order to accelerate the circulation of value, meaning is reduced to information, and techno-linguistic devices act as the communicative matrix. The matrix takes the place of the mother in the generation of language. … But language and information do not overlap, and language cannot be resolved into exchangeability. In Saussure’s parlance, we may say that the infinity of the parole exceeds the recombinant logic of the langue, such that language can escape from the matrix and reinvent a social sphere of singular vibrations intermingling and projecting a new space for sharing, producing, and living. … Poetry is language’s excess: poetry is what cannot be reduced to information in language, what is not exchangeable, what gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning—the creation of a new world.

This is the “aesthetics of enunciation” Guattari was describing, language’s excess that cannot be captured in the collective machines of capitalism. Just here in the excess that exceeds the systems of capture the assemblages of struggle must exit capitalism, invent the impossible possibility of a shared “common ground of understanding, of shared meaning – the creation of a new world”.

Michael Foucault would rehabilitate the notion of parrhesia, saying,

So you see, the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk. Of course, this risk is not always a risk of life. When, for example, you see a friend doing something wrong and you risk incurring his anger by telling him he is wrong, you are acting as a parrhesiastes. In such a case, you do not risk your life, but you may hurt him by your remarks, and your friendship may consequently suffer for it. If, in a political debate, an orator risks losing his popularity because his opinions are contrary to the majority’s opinion, or his opinions may usher in a political scandal, he uses parrhesia. Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the “game” of life or death”.10

This sense of the courage of truth even in the most dangerous of circumstances, to speak one’s mind, or sing against power as it were. He would continue:

To summarize the foregoing, parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.

Guattari, Foucault and others would return us to the challenge of the Cynic, who unlike Kant or his progeny, like Reza Negarestani as I showed in a previous post or seeking to replace our ancient forms of reason, imagination and cunning, with an autonomous functional reason of pure intellect and intelligence, extrinsic to the body, and embedded in the general artificial intelligence of a collective enterprise. So that Foucault will follow the Cynics in attacking the foundations of Greek and Western philosophy and culture which sought above all to escape its “animality”; rather, the cynic would dramatize in his own personage not only the difference between equality and inequality but also practices of the “true life” and its institutions by exhibiting a shameless life, a scandalous life, a life that manifests itself as a “challenge and exercise in the practices of animality.” (SM, p. 244). So against all those who seek to exit the human, who seek to transcend the human into an inhuman or machinic pure intelligence, a posthuman or transhuman other, or alterity, the Cynic returns us to the base materialism of pure animality.

This battle between these two modes of life, thought, and politics, etc. seem to be playing out their various struggles in the world today. Between “general artificial intelligence” and “pure animality,” intellect and sensibility, pure cold reason and affective physical emotions, we oscillate like fragments of ancient powers clashing: like the Olympian gods and the great Titans, Sky and Earth. Those who seek transcendence, intellect, spirit, immortality – posthuman, transhuman, inhuman; against those who would honor the old earth gods of cunning reason and imagination, the paganism of the ancient animistic seers and dancers, visionary and possession – the shamans and voodouns, cynics and dog-people; the nomadic tribes of earth who still hold the keys to wisdom and its dark inroads into the powers of earth. Rather than following the normative vision of Sellars, Brandom, Brassier, Negarestani into the “spaces of reason,” of give and take of reasons, etc.; Guattari building on the legacy of Foucault, Deleuze and others would return us to the “spaces of sensibility,” realigning us with the productive power of imagination and animal cunning, the power of the body and immanence, rather than intellect and transcendence. As Lazzarato will say the “reconfiguration of the sensible is a process that must be the object of “militant” work, which Guattari, expanding on Foucault’s thought, defines as “analytical” political work.(SM, p. 248):

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1. Barkun, Michael (2013-08-15). A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society) (p. 2). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.
2. Barna William Donovan. Conspiracy Films: A Tour of Dark Places in the American Conscious (Kindle Locations 40-44). Kindle Edition.
3. ibid. (Kindle Locations 5003-5005).
4. Wright, Alex (2007-06-01). Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages (Kindle Locations 134-143). National Academies Press. Kindle Edition.
5. Devon Hinton;Byron Good. Culture and Panic Disorder (Kindle Locations 2371-2376). Kindle Edition.
6. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2015-06-24). Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated) (Series Five Book 24) (Kindle Locations 3339-3350). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.
7. Luciano Floridi in  The Ethics of Information (2013-10-10). (pp. 16-17). Oxford University Press, USA. Kindle Edition.
8. Guattari, Felix (2015-12-17). Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities (Impacts) (Kindle Locations 451-454). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
9. Lazzarato, Maurizio. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Semiotext(e) (May 2, 2014)
10. Foucault, Michel. Fearless Speech, pp. 15–16Semiotext(e) (Foreign Agents) (February 19, 2001)