Book part: Instrumental Reason, Algorithmic Capitalism, and the Incomputable
Author(s):
Abstract
Algorithmic cognition is central to today’s capitalism.
From the rationalization of labor and social relations
to the financial sector, algorithms are grounding a
new mode of thought and control. Within the context
of this all-machine phase transition of digital capitalism,
it is no longer sufficient to side with the critical
theory that accuses computation to be reducing
human thought to mere mechanical operations. As
information theorist Gregory Chaitin has demonstrated,
incomputability and randomness are to be
conceived as very condition of computation. If technocapitalism
is infected by computational randomness
and chaos, the traditional critique of instrumental
rationality therefore also has to be put into question:
the incomputable cannot be simply understood as
being opposed to reason.
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