This chapter locates two neurological turns: one against networked media in recent critiques of the internet by, for example, Nicholas Carr; the other in networked media R&D departments such as Google and Facebook using machine learning...
moreThis chapter locates two neurological turns: one against networked media in recent critiques of the internet by, for example, Nicholas Carr; the other in networked media R&D departments such as Google and Facebook using machine learning and data mining and deploying techniques of 'neuro-perception'. What is at stake in these turns and why do they radically miss yet implicitly complement the culture and politics of each other? I trace the different neuropolitics at work here via the materialities of fMRIs and their strategic deployment by all networked corporations and their critics. I also ask how we might unfold images of the brain differently, shifting them from their indexical status of revealing 'neural correlates' toward a more diagrammatic rendering of a dynamic, machinic brain. Despite having celebrated 'the decade of the brain' from 1990–1999, Catherine Malabou reminds us that we still do not know what we should do with our brains (2008). Yet philosophy is perhaps confronting such risks too late, as an entire technics of search, query, databasing, pattern matching and machine learning is already attempting to determine what our brains must do. Such a technics seeks out that share of mind that is nonconscious, staking a claim on what we should be thinking and feeling, how we should be behaving, before we register that this entanglement is something we might desire. Take, for example, Google's aspirations beyond its constitution as the 'ultimate' search engine. Its construction of and investment in 'the future' rests on its capacity to
