Abstract

In contemporary society where conditions of platform culture prevail, life is presented as images of the self, distributed across networks. Guy Debord’s description of the Spectacle as capitalism’s instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses seems more prescient than ever. Debord’s Society of the Spectacle was one of commodity and consumption, spectacle, and spectator. Today, by curating our lives via social media we contribute to a spectatorial presence endlessly remediated without a sense of purpose, simultaneously producers and consumers of the commodified self and the monetisation of experience. Interaction and content are capital. The sociotechnological datafication of existence represents the condition of late capitalism, which I have called augmented capitalism.
 
What then are the defining features of augmented capitalism? What are the critiques of augmented capitalism? With my creative practice I aim to answer the second question by exploring the application of artificial intelligence (AI), the latest component of augmented capitalism, in reconsidering present-day notions of consumerism and the spectacle. By implementing Marxist machine learning models to produce an AI-curated, computer (re)mediated and algorithmically edited détourned work as a critical commentary on augmented capitalism. The ultimate Marxist hack: capitalism will critique itself, the ghost in machine intelligence.