Capitalist Telepathics, Psychic Debt and the Search for Collective Intelligence

Abstract

The current state of capitalist digital telepathics, or what I will call telepathy 3.0, presents a serious threat to the prospects of human freedom (Žižek 2020) . Notably, the capitalist race to develop telepathics by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook/Meta, Elon Musk’s Neuralink and others represents an intensification of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019 : 206). Through an examination of tech-sector marketing literature and industry critics this article examines contemporary development of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs), Neural Interfaces (NIs) and intensified social networks, revealing the expansion of surveillance capitalism and its shift into neurocapitalist telepathics. Is there an alternative to the corporate dystopia promised by telepathy 3.0? This article argues for a more soulful and speculative form of telepathics in fields including art, philosophy, design, architecture, engineering, cybernetics and even psychology. This tradition of prophetic art and human compassion must be nurtured in the face of massive corporate-led investments in predictive technologies.