161
Filozofski vestnik
issn 0353-4510 | Volume 44 | Number 2 | 2023 | 161–80
cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.44.2.07
Keywords
body, race, algorithmic governmentality, computational unconscious, Eurocentric 
matrix of power, Nope, Jordan Peele
Abstract
The article aims to map the contemporary techno-social networks, together with delin-
eation of the algorithmic governmentality, computational unconscious, the epistemic 
structure of the Eurocentric matrix of power haunted by its own repetition of the con-
stant abyss of horrors, only to search for gestures of resistance. Gestures of resistance, 
contrary to the false conviction of capitalist realism, can be found everywhere, including 
in Jordan Peele's Nope (2022). Through a variety of motifs, themes, and cultural and cin-
ematic references, Peele creates a resistance image, i.e., an image that resists the histor-
ical trajectory of the violence of the digital colonial matrix of knowledge. In particular 
with Nope, in which the history of racial violence is disentangled by evoking the rela-
tion between the entanglement of capital and epistemic violence embodied in an all-de-
vouring predator UFO. But Nope is also about visualizing silenced histories. Indeed, to 
strive to capture UFO with the camera is to break away from modernity as a totalizing 
onto-epistemology and in this register generating a false universal subject of a Man.
Emancipiranje od (kolonialnih) genealogij tehnodružbenih 
omrežij ali preobrat razmerij s spreminjanjem plenilca v 
plen v filmu Nak režiserja Jordana Peela
Ključne besede
telo, rasa, algoritmična vladnost, računalniško nezavedno, evropocentrična matrica 
moči, Nak, Jordan Peele
*  Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia | Laboratory of 
Multmedia, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
 nina.cvar@ff.uni-lj.si | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7404-2778
Nina Cvar*
Emancipating from (Colonial) Genealogies of 
the Techno-social Networks or Reversing Power 
Relations by Turning the Predator into Prey in 
Jordan Peele’s Nope

162
nina cvar
Povzetek 
Namen članka je kartirati sodobna tehnodružbena omrežja skupaj z razmejitvijo algo-
ritmične vladnosti, računalniškega nezavednega in epistemične strukture evrocentrič-
ne matrice moči (ki jo preganja lastno ponavljanje nenehnega brezna grozot) ter poiska-
ti geste upora. V nasprotju z napačnim prepričanjem kapitalističnega realizma, lahko 
te geste odpora najdemo povsod, tudi v filmu Nak Jordana Peeleja (2022). Peele z raz-
ličnimi motivi, temami ter kulturnimi in filmskimi referencami ustvari podobo odpo-
ra, tj. podobo, ki se upira zgodovinski poti nasilja digitalne kolonialne matrice znanja. 
Zlasti v filmu Nak je zgodovina rasnega nasilja razgrnjena z osvetlitvijo razmerja med 
prepletenostjo kapitala in epistemičnim nasiljem, ki pa je utelešeno v vse požirajočem 
plenilskem neznancu iz vesolja (NLP). Toda Nak govori tudi o vizualiziranju utišanih 
zgodovin. S kamero ujeti NLP namreč pomeni pretrgati z modernostjo kot totalizirajočo 
onto-epistemologijo in v takšnem registru generirati lažni univerzalni subjekt Človeka.
∞
Introduction
As argued by Tiziana Terranova and Ravi Sudaram, the techno-social hypoth-
esis is based on the idea that the social is never about the possession of an in-
trinsic or pre-existing reality, but is, to speak with Michel Foucault, historical, 
“transactional.”
1
 In this way, the articulation of the social in light of the emer-
gence of the digital as the dominant contemporary mode of production is about 
the interplay of power relations as well as everything that eludes them—in par-
ticular, the question of the status of bodies in this new condition of prescriptive 
humanity generated by the programmability of algorithmic instructions. 
How can we think about the body, which is, in Marina Vishmidt’s words, “a 
site where all politics has to begin but which itself manages to avoid scrutiny 
as a political problem or a contradictory enunciation,”
2
 in this realm of tech-
1 
Tiziana Terranova and Ravi Sundaram, “Colonial Infrastructures and Techno-Social 
N e t wo r k s , ” E-flux Journal 123 (December 2021), http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/arti -
cle_437385.pdf.
2 
Marina Vishmidt, “Bodies in Space: On the Ends of Vulnerability ,” Radical Philosophy 2, no. 
8 (Autumn 2020): 35, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/
rp208_vishmidt.pdf.

163
emancipating from (colonial) genealogies of the techno-social networks . . .
no-social networks for which Ravi Sudaram argues that one cannot think with-
out considering the importance of the colonial techne and the colonial social?
3
 
Or to go back to the late 2000s: if, according to Marie-Luise Angerer, the central 
question was whose body, affirming the need to understand the body and the 
subject,
4
 then the pressing question today is how to emancipate bodies from the 
pervasive postcolonial infrastructure, characterized by the loss of the distinc-
tion between the social (government, welfare) and the medial (entertainment, 
cinema, TV) in the postcolonial environment of the intertwining of sovereignty, 
government with the multiplicity of circulations (media forms, beliefs, desires, 
commodities, money)?
5
 
This text therefore aims to map the contemporary techno-social networks, to-
gether with delineation of the algorithmic governmentality, computational un-
conscious, the epistemic structure of the Eurocentric matrix of power haunted 
by its own repetition of the constant abyss of horrors, only to search for gestures 
of emancipation. Gestures of resistance, contrary to the false conviction of capi-
talist realism, can be found everywhere, including in Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022).
The Contemporary Regime of Techno-Social Networks and Its 
Structural Omnipresence
To map the contemporary regime of techno-social networks, I will redefine 
Jacques Rancière’s notion of regime. If, according to Rancière, a regime is a kind 
of link between the production of works (or artistic practice) and the forms of 
visibility that these forms take,
6
 I will define techno-social networks as a re-
gime that operates by creating a link between technology and the social. Con-
temporary techno-social networks are characterized by the combination of digi-
talization, global outsourcing, off-shoring, environmental catastrophe,
7
 surplus 
3 
Terranova and Sundaram, “Colonial Infrastructures.”
4 
Marie-Luise Angerer, “The Body Bytes Back,” in “The Body/Le corps/Der Körper,” ed. 
Marina Gržinić Mauhler, special issue, Filozofski vestnik 23, no. 2 (2002): 221–32.
5 
Terranova and Sundaram, “Colonial Infrastructures.”
6 
Jean-Phillipe Deranty, “Regimes of the Arts,” in Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts, ed. Jean-
Philippe Deranty (Durham: Acumen, 2010), 116–30. 
7 
Achille Mbembe, “Ignorance Too, Is a Form of Power,” interview by Malka Gouzer, Chilperic, 
November 9, 2020, https://www.chilperic.ch/interview/achille-mbembe-15.html. 

164
nina cvar
population forced to take precarious jobs with stagnant wages,
8
 leading to an 
extreme concentration of wealth.
9
 This enmeshing of technology and society is 
by no means new. Technology is thus revealing not only how we interact with 
nature, but more importantly, how social relationships are formed and the men-
tal categories that accompany them.
10
 
With digitalization impacting all social spheres,
11
 the categories of modernity, 
i.e., class, gender, and race, are being redefined,
12
 resulting in unique forms of 
the exercise of power. In this regard, the techno-social is not just about delegat-
ing social interaction, but also about processing the content generated by social 
interaction.
13
 
Following Tiziana Terranova and Ravi Sundram, technology attains a kind of 
double position: it acts as a precondition and as an affordance of post-human 
performative assemblages
14
 that lead to the construction of contemporary social 
formations whose predominant mode of production is the digital mode of pro-
duction. According to Marina Gržinić, this mode of production exemplifies the 
techno-capitalist division of labor, a form of social programming that leads to an 
increased commodification and computerization.
15
 
8 
Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 139.
9 
Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (New York: 
Basic Books, 2015).
10 
Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie; Erster Band, Buch I, Der 
Produktionsprocess des Kapitals (Hamburg: Otto Meissner, 1867), 352, https://oll.liberty-
fund.org/page/marx-k1-1867. 
11 
Christoph Musik and Alexander Bogner, eds., Digitalization and Society: A Sociology 
of Technology Perspective on Current Trends in Data, Digital Security and the Internet 
(Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019), 1–14, 44.
12 
Ezekiel Dixon-Román, “Algo-Ritmo: More-Than-Human Performative Acts and the Racia-
lizing Assemblages of Algorithmic Architectures,” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 
16, no. 5 (October 2016): 482–90, https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616655769 . 
13 
Thomas Erickson, “Social Computing,” in The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer 
Interaction, ed. Mads  Soegaard and Rikke  Friis  Dam, 2nd ed. (Aarhus, Denmark: Interaction 
Design Foundation, 2014), chap. 4, https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/
the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/social-computing.
14 
Terranova and Sundaram, “Colonial Infrastructures.” 
15 
Marina Gržinić, “Racialized Bodies and the Digital (Financial) Mode of Production,” in 
Regimes of Invisibility in Contemporary Art, Theory and Culture, ed. Marina Gržinić, Aneta 
Stojnić, and Miško Šuvaković (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 13–28.

165
emancipating from (colonial) genealogies of the techno-social networks . . .
In order for this contemporary regime to operate, the body is subjected to a com-
bination of capital pressures. Technologies are equally important, however, 
as they constitute bodies as technical means to achieve certain ends, where-
in these ends are socially embedded and the embodiment is a conglomerate 
of different sets of agencies.
16
 Achille Mbembe claims, for example, that under 
neoliberal conditions we witness a “convergence, and at times fusion, between 
the human being and the objects, artefacts or technologies that supplement or 
augment us.”
17
 
This force of capital to which bodies are subjected is perhaps best defined as 
brutalism.
18
 Moreover, Mbembe’s writings assume racialized bodies
19
 for which, 
as Joseph Confavreux argues, neoliberalism has constituted a “gigantic pump-
ing and carbonization mechanism.”
20
 The genealogy of contemporary tech-
no-social networks thus requires a delineation of the relation between technol-
ogy, capital, and racialization. However, Mbembe’s thesis of “becoming Black of 
the world,”
21
 according to which the term “Black” has been generalized and thus 
has become a new norm of existence that extends to the entire planet, refers to 
a generalized, vulnerable and precarious mode of existence, which is further 
transformed into coded digital data in the digital mode of production.
22
Ubiquity of Algorithms: Algorithmic Governmentality
Each historical era develops its own privileged ways of imagining or making 
sense of the world.
23
 Ours is characterized by codes and algorithms. In this re-
16 
See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 
17 
Achille Mbembe, “The Digital Age Erases the Divide between Humans and Objects,” Mail 
and Guardian, January 6, 2017, https://mg.co.za/article/2017-01-06-00-the-digital-age-
erases-the-divide-between-humans-and-objects/.
18 
Mbembe, “Ignorance.” 
19 
Achille Mbembe, “Decolonial Anxieties in a Postcolonial World: An Interview with Achille 
Mbembe,” interview by Joseph Confavreux, Postcolonial Studies 25, no. 1 (2022): 128–35, 
https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2022.2050587.
20 
Mbembe, “Decolonial Anxieties,” 128 
21 
Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham: Duke University 
Press, 2017). 
22 
Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 5.
23 
Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth 
and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

166
nina cvar
spect, we are confronted with the need to situate the analysis of the algorithm 
within the analysis of knowledge/power/subject, which in the case of the analy-
sis of algorithms means considering their intersection with the world in the way 
they relate to current models of political rationality and governmentality. When 
we ask how algorithmic governmentality fits within the framework of contem-
porary capitalism, we cannot baypass racialization as a differentiating social 
process. In this regard, it makes sense to analyze both liberal governmentality 
and algorithmic governmentality together.
If the so-called liberal governmentality is characterized by an emphasis on sta-
tistical knowledge—whereby not only statistics but also quantitative techniques, 
together with numerical understanding, provide a discursive guarantee for the 
calculation of probabilities, with the aim of ensuring an “informed decision”—
in algorithmic governmentality we can observe the development of the idea that 
the so-called technical aspect of the algorithm guarantees impartiality.
24
 Or, as 
David Beer points out, the algorithm becomes an integral part of the discourse 
of “efficiency” and thus of the “normalization” of the actual reality of global 
capitalism.
25
 Following Antoinette Rouvroy and Bernard Stiegler, however, algo-
rithmic governmentality erases the distance between raw data and databases, 
thereby circumventing the site of production of critical thought.
26
 Consequently, 
algorithmic governmentality, even if its discursive premise is “apolitical imple-
mentation,” successfully coexists with neoliberal forms of governmentality. The 
latter raises the question of the political and the “use of bodies” in particular. 
In her analysis, Shoshana Zuboff points out that a mixture of state and capi-
tal has formed a unique relation with digital technologies that manifests itself 
in two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the 
watched.
27
 But who are the watched?
24 
Tarleton Gillespie, “The Relevance of Algorithms,” in Media Technologies: Essays on 
Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and 
Kirsten A. Foot (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 167–93.
25 
David Beer, “The Social Power of Algorithms,” Information, Communication and Society 
20, no. 1 (2017): 9, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1216147.
26 
Antoinette Rouvroy and Bernard Stiegler, “The Digital Regime of Truth: From the 
Algorithmic Governmentality to a New Rule of Law,” trans. Anaïs Nony and Benoît Dillet, 
La Deleuziana 3 (2016): 6–29, http://www.ladeleuziana.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/
Rouvroy-Stiegler_eng.pdf. 
27 
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the 
New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).

167
emancipating from (colonial) genealogies of the techno-social networks . . .
The watched are all the “damned,” the racialized, abandoned migrant bodies 
left to die in the dominance of the fake vitalism of necropolitics, which feeds 
its vitalism from automated computational techniques that increasingly operate 
through prescriptive and mechanical mediation of virtually eliminating the hu-
man on the one hand, and by discursively covering precisely this kind of elim-
ination on the other. But what is the status of subjectivity within algorithmic 
governmentality?
Programming (Of Any Kind) Subjectivities
Contemporary subjectivity is emerging within the so-called logic of program-
mability by which Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is emphasizing convergence between 
“user-friendly” computer interfaces, neoliberal governmentality and human 
capital, adding that that computer interfaces operate as intermediaries between 
the visible and the invisible, performing as navigational aids which are key in 
shaping the “informed” individuals who, by mapping their relation to the to-
tality of global capitalism, transcend the chaos of global capitalism.
28
 This “in-
formed individual” is based on computer programs. Given this result, Chun pro-
poses to relate computer programs to Laplacean determinism, which is about 
an all-knowing intelligence that can comprehend the future by apprehending 
the past and present.
29
 Computers must therefore be understood as dispositive 
elements 
individuating us and also integrating us into a totality, their interfaces offer us 
a form of mapping, of storing files central to our seemingly sovereign—empow-
ered—subjectivity. By interacting with these interfaces, we are also mapped: da-
ta-driven machine learning algorithms process our collective data traces in order 
to discover underlying patterns (this process reveals that our computers are now 
more profound programmers than their human counterparts).
30
 
28 
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge: MIT 
Press, 2011), 8.
29 
Chun, 9. 
30 
Chun, 9.

168
nina cvar
Chun’s contribution demonstrates structural convergence between technologi-
cal innovation and capitalism, characterized by specific inclination of individu-
al to social formation, quoting Marx: 
Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of produc-
tion whereby he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of forma-
tion of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.
31
Marx’s underpinning of a unique aggregate between technology, nature, society 
and subjectivity confirms Chun’s analysis of Laplacean determinism. In particu-
lar, due to recent developments of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Chat 
GPT as sophisticated statistical models, it can be argued that Laplacean deter-
minism has become even more present as a standardized mental conception. 
By creating a human-like dialog to answer queries, AI chatbots evoke a kind 
of Baudrillardian vision of simulation at the level of language, subjecting the 
unconscious to epistemological and semiotic alterations of digital (algorithmic) 
governmentality.
Computational Unconscious
In order to understand the digital unconscious, we must first define the psycho-
analytic unconscious, because the psychoanalytic unconscious 
refers to the existence of ideas which are not just not being thought about (hence 
not just “not in consciousness”) but which are also radically unavailable to 
thought—they cannot be brought to awareness even if the person tries really hard, 
or at least it is more of a struggle than one person can manage on her or his own. 
These hidden ideas, however, have a profound influence on psychological life.
32
The political evocation of the psychoanalytic unconscious is well known: from 
Freud’s analysis of group psychology, where types of ties between the subject 
31 
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy; Volume 1, The Process of Capitalist 
Production, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: 
International Publishers, 1967), 352. 
32 
Stephen Frosh, Key Concepts in Psychoanalysis (London: British Library, 2002), 12–13.

169
emancipating from (colonial) genealogies of the techno-social networks . . .
and other people via so-called identification mechanisms are addressed,
33
 to Al-
thusser, who valorizes Marx’s position on ideology as a “camera obscura” or 
false consciousness, providing a scientific project of ideology through the fa-
mous formula of interpellation,
34
 to end with Rancière’s unique conceptualiza-
tion of emancipation as politics, which operates as an enactment of equality.
35
 
But what happens with the rise of universalizing digital culture?
In the late 20th century, the unconscious was reintroduced by Felix Guattari. 
Combining theoretical research from fields as diverse as cybernetics, semiotics, 
ethnology, and ethology, Guattari introduced the concept of machinic uncon-
scious in 1979. With the concept of the machinic unconscious, Guattari succeed-
ed not only in renewing debates about the relation between capitalism, social 
order, power, and subjectivity, but also in rethinking the concept of the uncon-
scious itself, particularly how it 
affects all kinds of perceptions and actions, affecting the possible itself and all 
forms of communication, not just linguistic ones. [Guattari] uses the term ma-
chinic unconscious to stress that it is full of “machinisms that lead it to produce 
and reproduce these images and words.”
36
According to Franco Berardi and Geert Lovink, however, Guattari’s most impor-
tant contribution is the way he thought about the relation between the uncon-
scious and technology.
37
 Guattari argued that, unlike the psychoanalytic uncon-
33 
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey 
(Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1922).
34 
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an 
Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: 
Monthly Review Press, 1971), 142–47, 166–76.
35 
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
36 
Dave Harris, “Notes On: Guattari, F. (2011) The Machinic Unconscious. Essays in Schizo anal-
ysis, Translated by Taylor Adkins. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents,” Dave Harris 
and Colleagues, accessed August 1, 2023, https://www.arasite.org/machincunconsc.html.
37 
Franco Berardi, “Mental Long Covid and the Techno-Social Unconscious: A Conversation 
with Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi,” interview by Geert Lovink, E-flux Notes, May 12, 2022, https://
www.e-flux.com/notes/468343/mental-long-covid-and-the-techno-social-unconscious-a-
conversation-with-franco-bifo-berardi. 

170
nina cvar
scious, which is representational unconscious crystallized in codified complex-
es and repartirioned on a genetic axis, unconscious is actually built like a map.
38
 
Recently, Jonathan Beller has presented his work on the de-fetishization of com-
putation. Via the means of production, proposing computation unconscious, 
Beller argues that the computational process, like the capitalist process, has a 
corrosive effect on the whole senses system, along with ontological assumptions 
and traditions. To quote Beller: 
Computation has fully colonized the knowable cosmos [. . .], it allows us to pro-
pose that seeing the universe as computation, as, in short, simulable, if not itself 
a simulation (the computational effect of an informatic universe) [. . .]. The uni-
verse as it appears to us is figured by—that is, it is a figuration of—computation. 
That’s what our computers tell us.
39
One of the most pressing political questions of our time is what comes out of this 
computational unconscious, because of the automated decisions and biases as-
sociated with algorithms.
40
 It is not only knowledge that is subjected to automa-
tization. Existing power relations are also part of the datafication through which 
all of life becomes susceptible to being processed through forms of analysis that 
are automated on a large scale.
41
 This autonomous status of automation facili-
tates the homogenization, standardization, and objectification already predict-
ed by Horkheimer and Adorno within the so-called cultural industries,
42
 even 
if they manifest themselves a bit differently in digital society, through unique 
forms of individualization, decentralization, labor distribution, and specific 
mode of (digital) mediatization.
38 
Felix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. Taylor Adkins 
(Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).
39 
Jonathan Beller, “The Computational Unconscious,” B2o, August 1, 2018, https://www.
boundary2.org/2018/08/beller/. 
40 
See Sašo Dolenc, “Etične dileme umetne intelligence: Predlog moratorija na nadgradnjo 
sistemov jezikovne umetne intelligence,” Kvarkadabra, March 30, 2023, https://kvarka-
dabra.net/2023/03/eticne-dileme-umetne-inteligence/.
41 
See Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry, “Datafication,” Internet Policy Review 8, no. 4 
(2019), https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1428. 
42 
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektika razsvetljenstva: Filozofski fragmenti, 
trans. Seta Knop, Mojca Kranjc, and Rado Riha (Ljubljana: Studia humanitatis, 2006).

171
emancipating from (colonial) genealogies of the techno-social networks . . .
Continuation of (Colonial) Genealogies or Digital Geopolitics of 
Knowledge
Graham et al. argue that codified knowledge follows a pattern of inequality in 
terms of geographic representation, with some parts of the world being at the 
center of global voice and representation while others remaining invisible or 
unheard.
43
 The visualization (below) created by the Internet Health Report in 
2022 clearly shows the continuation of the Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge.
43 
Mark Graham, Bernie Hogan, Ralph K. Straumann, and Ahmed Medhat, “Uneven Geo-
graphies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty,” 
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104, no. 4 (2014): 746–64, https://doi.or
g/10.1080/00045608.2014.910087.
Fig. 1: Image of the map taken from 
“Who Has Power Over AI?, ” Internet Health 
Report 2022, accessed August 2, 2023,  
https://2022.internethealthreport.org/facts/. 
Visualisation based on data from Bernard 
Koch, Emily Denton, Alex Hanna, and Jacob 
G. Foster, “Reduced, Reused and Recycled: 
The Life of a Dataset in Machine Learning 
Research” ArXiv, December 3, 2021, 
 https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.01716. 

172
nina cvar
Michael Kwet shows, for example, the intertwinement between multination-
al corporations and U.S. imperialism, which is—and this is probably the most 
important implication—dissemination of a distinct vision of digitalization.
44
 
Therefore, social conditions of digitalization are embedded in the colonial ma-
trix of power. This matrix is intertwined with racial, sexual, ideological, aesthet-
ic, religious, military and patriarchal dimensions.
45
 
Thus, unless digitalization is delinked from the colonial matrix of power, it fur-
ther exacerbates the reality of global capitalism with digital technologies puting 
our unconscious under the sword of empty epistemic Western circularity. But 
what is the mechanism behind this epistemic cage?
Vectors of Hauntology: The Repeating Catastrophe of Epistemic West-
ern Circularity, Self-Referentiality, Empty Formalism, and Tautology
Recent images of the abrupt collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and the de-
parture of Swiss bank Credit Suisse brought back memories of the global finan-
cial crisis of 2007–2008. Yet, as was the case 15 years ago, many words were spo -
ken but very few addressed the structural contours of the lurking manifestation 
of the latest chapter of global capitalism. As if we were dealing with a kind of 
blockage that perhaps has less to do with the inability to think than with what 
Mark Fisher calls “reflexive impotence,” which, according to Fisher, is not so 
much the result of apathy and cynicism, but springs from a certain kind of re-
flection.
46
 This reflection is not about passively observing the situation that al-
ready exists, but rather springs from a unique understanding of the future itself, 
resulting in a grim realization that “things are bad.” A much more important 
condition for the reflexive powerlessness described, however, is not the recogni-
tion of the conditions of reality, but the state of prolonged non-action.
Although Fisher focused primarily on British youth, his analyzes can be applied 
elsewhere, particularly with regard to the normalization of capitalist realism, 
which Fisher defines as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the 
44 
Michael K wet, “Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South,” 
Race and Class 60, no. 4 (April–June 2019): 3–26, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818823172.
45 
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Empire and Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity (New 
York: Berghahn Books, 2015).
46 
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Hampshire: Zero Books, 2009), 21.

173
emancipating from (colonial) genealogies of the techno-social networks . . .
only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible 
even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”
47
 
The reactions to the recent turmoil in the “financial paradise” were therefore not 
really reactions of shock—rather tired sighs of “not again” that in some ways un-
derscored the idea of capitalist realism and capitalism’s inclination for a series 
of crises and paradoxical events in particular. 
Following Santiago López Petit,
48
 Marina Gržinić brought his work into focus, 
exposing precisely repetition that can be identified by the so-called unrestrain-
ment of capital, which manifests itself as a reversible and conflictual event.
49
 
This unrestrainment of capital generates a paradoxical spatialization that re-
quires two repetitions at the same time: a founding repetition, by which a sys-
tem of hierarchy is re-established, leading to the constant reconstruction of a 
center and a periphery; and, on the other hand, a de-foundational repetition, 
which acts as an erosion of hierarchies, generating dispersion, multiplicity and 
multi-reality.
50
 
López Petit and Gržinić’s analyses thus demonstrate the structural conditions 
of capitalism, but their argument also reveals characteristics of the social bond 
of contemporary global capitalism, particularly in relation to the categories of 
global space and time. This research dates back to 2009, the argument of the 
unrestrainment of capital has been far-reaching, due to repetition of the un-
restrainment of capital vertically and horizontally, resulting in circularity of 
self-referentiality and empty formalism on the one hand and a tautology that 
produces obviousness on the other. What else is the appearance of another fi-
nancial crisis if not the circularity of self-referentiality with its exclamations of 
structural obviousness?
It seems that the circularity of self-referentiality haunts contemporary reality. 
But how does this mechanism of haunting operate? 
47 
Fisher, 6.
48 
Santiago López Petit, La movilización global: Breve tratado para atacar la realidad (Madrid: 
Traficantes de Sueños, 2009).
49 
Marina Gržinić, “Capital, Repetition,” Reartikulacija 8 (2009): 3. 
50 
Gržinić, 3. 

174
nina cvar
The concept of hauntology was introduced by Jacques Derrida in Specters of 
Marx. Unlike traditional “ontology,” which is about the self-identical present, 
hauntology is not about the present.
51
 For example, in his interpretation of Der-
rida, Martin Hägglund claims that we can distinguish between two directions 
in hauntology: the first is no longer but still effective as virtuality, operating as 
a traumatic compulsion to repeat, while the second is about inactuality, some-
thing that has not yet happened but is already effective in the virtual, anticipat-
ing behavioral content.
52
In terms of the circularity of self-referentiality, both directions can be identified, 
whether as different modulations of the capitalist mode of production, e.g., the 
recurring specter of neoliberalism, or, in the epistemic context, Eurocentrism.
But what is the circularity of self-referentiality in relation to the future? It is liter-
ary about the failure of the future, resulting in stripping off all potentialities. As 
if the future is haunting the present, but not as much as virtuality of openness, 
but more as a token of a capital speculation, which, it seems, haunts the social. 
If the first decade of the twenty-first century was marked by mourning for the 
lost futures that the twentieth century had wished for, the following decade led 
to the decay of a whole kind of social imagination, with financial speculation 
becoming the sole arbiter of reality, ending in a changed status of the register of 
real, which has become somehow displaced, due to the omitted criterion for dis-
tinguishing between real and imaginary value.
53
 However, this does not mean 
that the role of the real is diminished, on the contrary. Since extractivism is cru-
cial to contemporary global capitalist accumulation—according to UNCTAD, 
more than 100 countries specialize in extracting and exporting raw materials
54
—
the so-called real is integral, since extractivism shapes the economy and marks 
politics.
55
 John Belamy Foster, for example, shows the link between the accelera-
51 
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2006). 
52 
Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford 
University Press, 2008).
53 
Joseph Vogl, The Specter of Capital, trans. Joachim Redner and Robert Savage (Stanford: 
Stanford University Press, 2014), 67.
54 
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, State of Commodity Dependence 2021 
(New York: United Nations Publications, 2021), https://doi.org/10.18356/9789210057790.
55 
Hannes Warnecke-Berger, Hans-Jürgen Burchardt, and Rachid Ouaissa, “Natural Resources, 
Raw Materials, and Extractivism: The Dark Side of Sustainability,” Extractivism Policy Brief 
1 (2022), https://doi.org/10.17170/kobra-202305168028.

175
emancipating from (colonial) genealogies of the techno-social networks . . .
tion of extractivism and financialization, with international finance based in the 
Global North commodifying and managing ecosystem services primarily in the 
Global South.
56
 But extractive infrastructure is not confined to the periphery of 
the capitalist world economy, underscoring Martin Arboleda’s claim that global 
extractivism is identified with “generalized monopoly capital” and the condi-
tions of late imperialism.
57
 In relation to extractivism, Eduardo Gudynas points 
to renewed imperial dependency in the Global South,
58
 and similarly, James Pe-
tras and Henry Veltmeyer describe new extractivism as a new imperialist model 
emerging after the collapse of the neoliberal model, subjecting countries into 
new forms of dependency.
59
 
Contemporary reality is therefore marked by the structural logic that López Petit 
and Gržinić refer to as the unrestrainment of capital, which manifests itself as 
a reversible and conflictual event, i.e., the capitalist expropriation of nature, 
specifically extractivism, which is also accompanied by other necropolitical ac-
cumulative systems, in particular with new computational media and digital 
technologies. These are, to speak with Achille Mbembe, not only extracting sur-
plus value through the annexation and commodification of the human attention 
span, but also promote the disappearance of transcendence and its re-institu-
tionalization in the guise of the commodity.
60
 In this context, the central ques-
tion is how to delink from this globalized mode of production.
Turning the Cards Around: Nope or When Used Bodies Resist by 
Turning the Predator into Prey
According to Vishmidt, the body is inherently connected to politics, but it is 
politically overlooked.
61
 With digitalization, most recently through the rise of 
56 
John Belamy Foster, “Extractivism in the Anthropocene: Late Imperialism and the 
Expropriation of the Earth,” Science for the People 25, no. 2 (Autumn 2022), https://maga-
zine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol25-2-bleeding-earth/extractivism-in-the-anthropocene/. 
57 
Martin Arboleda, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism (London: 
Verso, 2020).
58 
Eduardo Gudynas, Extractivisms: Politics, Economy and Ecology (Blackpoint: Fernwood, 
2020).
59 
James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, Extractive Imperialism in the Americas: Capitalism’s 
New Frontier (Boston: Brill, 2014).
60 
Mbembe, “Digital Age.”
61 
Vishmidt, “Bodies in Space.”

176
nina cvar
AI, the power relations of the colonial matrix did not go away. On the contrary, 
analysis shows that discourses about AI underpin power structures that already 
have immense power over the internet (and the world).
62
 The colonial matrix 
should therefore become a digital colonial matrix, where the visual and the so-
matic are interwoven through the enormous power of datafication—creating a 
whole objectivized (human) bioplatform with computational unconscious. 
But can the cards be flipped? 
Jordan Peele says they can. In his films, Get Out  (2017), Us (2019) and Nope 
(2022), with the hauntology of four figures, listed by Rizvana Bradley and Den-
ise Ferreira da Silva as “the Savage (the conquered), the Negro (the commodity), 
the Primitive (the other), and the Traditional (the underdeveloped),” for whom 
Bradley and Ferreira da Silva argue that they are operating “as the bearers of an 
ontological dissonance, an immanent declension, we might call blackness.”
63
 
Twisting them through a variety of motifs, themes, and cultural and cinemat-
ic references, Peele creates a resistance image, i.e., an image that resists the 
historical trajectory of the violence of the digital colonial matrix of knowledge. 
In particular with Nope, in which the history of racial violence is disentangled 
by evoking the relation between the entanglement of capital and epistemic vio-
lence embodied in an all-devouring predator UFO. But Nope is also about visu-
alizing silenced histories. Indeed, to strive to capture UFO with the camera is to 
break away from modernity as a totalizing onto-epistemology and in this regis-
ter generating a false universal subject of a Man. 
But to capture UFO with the camera is also to appropriate the society of the spec-
tacle and thus to delink racialized bodies from the regime of a deranged digital 
colonial matrix.
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