Alienation, Newer Forms of Agency. Insights from Luhmann.

Technological development has both advanced and diminished the possibilities of direct human agency. Alienation is seized here as the logical subproduct of the expansion of technology as an independent social system, emerging in coevolution from the economy and antagonist politics. My research deals with the development of forms of technological arrangements that first advise and then replace outdated forms of agency. Using the case of platform defence and attack systems featuring distinct forms of autonomous, intelligent behaviour, agency is deciphered as a case of performative communication that has kinetic effects on the physical world. Alienation is the historic effect of the flow of profit and payments and the development of money as a media of communication; (Marx[1], Lukács) alienation sets the conditions for the development of current algorithmic communications and autonomous agents; and renews with every technological mediation that separates the level of human consciousness to reality. Alienation is profoundly enmeshed with technology. Technology as a system of communication is a continual process dealings with the code “functioning simplification/not functioning simplification”[2]. Emerging technological arrangements are finely attuned with the requirements of pre-existing social systems. Then, newer modalities of technological development work in conjunction with the already narrow cognition of the economy and politics, amongst other systems, heightening the present condition of alienation experienced at the level of humanity.

[1] Marx, K. Economic and philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Riazanov, D. Editor, 1959.

[2] Luhmann, Social Systems.