Machinic agency and datafication: Labour and value after anthropocentrism

Abstract

In this article, we reassess Marxist notions of labour and value for our datafied societies, where data is allegedly becoming one of the dominant sources of economic value. Our contention is that the existing accounts of value, which assume that value is produced exclusively by human labour, are unable to fully account for the processes of exploitation that take place in our digital platform dominated economy. We begin addressing these shortcomings by critiquing the anthropocentric notion of agency that informs the Marxist account of labour. This notion of agency locates productive activity exclusively in human intentionality. After offering an overview of anthropocentric concepts of labour that still dominate (post-)Marxist theories today, we draw on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to develop a post-anthropocentric account of agency that we term machinic agency. Machinic agency sees activity as a matter of connectivity between different human and nonhuman actors (technologies, organisms, minerals etc.), which productively combine and amplify their capacities to act. These affective connections precede and shape, but often also completely bypass, human consciousness. We make a case for the concept of machinic agency by comparing it with Actor-Network Theory (ANT), an established theory that conceptualises agency as arising from compositions of both human and nonhuman elements. Our contention is that, unlike ANT, machinic agency is able to collapse both, the distinction between human and nonhuman, and that between mechanism and vitalism. We conclude by suggesting that machinic agency allows us to demonstrate that data capitalism exploits and appropriates not only the surplus value produced by conscious human effort, but also the co-production of affective, technological, and ecological aspects of our existence.