From the Panopticon to the Pankinetic. Big Happy Brother and Technofascism in the Algoricene. From Biopower to Ontopower, and why AI has no Future

Abstract

The current mutations of power require a new conceptual framework, summarized here in several shifts. On the one hand, we move from the panopticon model theorized by Foucault, associated with visual surveillance, to a panchoreographic model that organizes the movements of bodies in every mode and scale. On the other, we move from a biopower that optimizes the performance of bodies in
the industrial extractivist system to an ontopower that capitalizes on the future and an affect-capital and hypercapital that capitalizes every behavior, where we are the product—a new form of allencompassing extractivism. All of this is associated with a docilization of populations where “Big Brother” allies with “Brave New World,” creating a dystopia that dwarfs all known science fiction, where we are at the mercy of unknowable algorithms that shape our very perception and the domain of the thinkable, at the service of toxic disinformation. However, all of this occurs as the final phase of an era of exploitation that has no future, since these same extractive technologies are causing breakdown and ecosocial collapse. The age of algorithms, or the Algoricene, is also the age of extinctions, as it goes against the symbiotic and diversifying logic of life. We therefore urgently need to reinvent ourselves beyond these techniques of extinction with a return to the moving body, for the dismantling of exploitative societies, toward a rewilding of the Earth. The future is not AI but BI (Body Intelligence).