Abstract

In this essay, digital hibridity stands for the perpetual availability of life as both labour and debt for capital, both in real life and online. At the heart of these reflections is the realization that the digital is a regime in which finance capital believes it is finally free from any dependency on social reproduction. With the move from value to price, from labor to debt, from revolution to disruption, and from avant-garde to speculation, the digital evolved as the material of capital and the totality of the social has been replaced by the tidal liquidity of finance; immaterial labor, touching images on the screen, the rhizomatic panopticon of the Internet, shock-work on social media, and cryptocurrencies are all examples of the ways in which the digital and financial shadow each other. This new regime entails a series of conversions that change the ways in which meaning is organized—from the point of production to the point of realization, from strikes to riots, from working class to surplus populations, from solidarity to conspiracy, and from organization to petty sovereignty.