Neurocapitalism: Technological Mediation and Vanishing Lines
Summary
A genealogy of the ICT shift around the turn of the 21st century. Griziotti argues that digital technologies came not only from corporate and Cold War labs but also from the cooperative energy of the 1960s–70s movements: the original internet, free software. Capital then gradually captured and expropriated those foundations. “Neurocapitalism” names the result: emotions, cognition, relationships, and desires become both the raw material of value and the adjustable variables of social control. Key turning points are the internet, billions of smartphones, and global platforms acting as “megamachines.” The “vanishing lines” of the subtitle point to lines of flight, ways of escaping that capture.
Why it’s useful here
- The prequel to How to Survive AI. It supplies the core concepts (neurocapitalism, biohypermedia, platform megamachines) that the 2026 essay extends to AI.
- The capture of the commons, told as a technology history. It explains how free software and the early internet, built in a commons spirit, were enclosed. Read it alongside Federici and Linebaugh on enclosure, and Doctorow on platform decay.
- Supports the recommoning argument. If the digital commons were captured, they can be recovered. That is the premise of the blog’s name.
Key ideas
- Neurocapitalism: cognition and affect as both value source and control variable
- Biohypermedia: the environment where bodies, nervous systems, devices, and networks co-constitute one another
- Platforms as megamachines (after Mumford)
- Capture of the common / subsumption of collective intelligence
- Vanishing lines: escape routes from neurocapitalist capture
Related
- griziotti-2026-how-to-survive-artificial-intelligence.md
- federici-2004-caliban-and-the-witch.md
- linebaugh-2008-magna-carta-manifesto.md
- doctorow-2025-enshittification.md
- Related article (local):
~/data-commons/reference/Griziotti-Neurocapitalism-Archaic-God-EN.pdf