Abstract

Negrestani describes an augmented rationality which inhabits ‘the “area of maximum risk”—not risk to humanity per se, but to commitments which have not yet been updated, because they conform to a portrait of human that has not been revised’. The obvious question we are left with is whether the division between the human and the non-human is sustainable, and in asking this question, do we naturalise an ontology which always foregrounds humanism, even if it is filtered through an anti-humanist lens? For Reza Negaretsani, inhumanism is a constructivist strategy to counter the infinite regress of the humanism-anti-humanism binary, in 2014, he wrote: ‘Inhumanism is exactly the activation of the revisionary program of reason against the self-portrait of humanity.’ But it is imperative to remember that who gets to count as human has always been ideological, likewise the form of logic invoked by rational discourse is also always political, implicated with a colonial continuum and a totalizing vision which masks 'the nature of data science as both metaphysical and machinic'. As its title implies, this paper has been revised in light of the author’s reading of Zuboff and McQuillan, with a deeper consideration of both Surveillance Capitalism and the Neoplatonist ideal of behavioural surplus accumulation, in which we all ‘pay for our own domination’.