This essay speculates that we are in the midst of a transition from an information and knowledge-based economy to one that can be described as neural or brain-based. Just as the burgeoning industrial economy subsumed craft and agricultural economies, and the information and knowledge economies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries subsumed the industrial economy, this imminent brain-based economy will subsume those that preceded it. The essay will investigate the socio-political, economic, and cultural repercussions of this transformation upon the psyche, especially in regards to their effect upon subjectivity—most notably the mutation of the cognitariat or mental laborer to the superordinate precariat.

My use of the word “brain” differs somewhat from vernacular usages. The brain is not simply a crystallized, unchanging system of relations residing inside the skull, as many positivist cognitive neuroscientists would suggest. Rather, it is an intracranial-extracranial situated complex that is characterized by a rhizomatic structure. Rhizomes construct maps that are “always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and [have] multiple entryways and exits and [their] own lines of flight . . . [a rhizome] is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states.”¹ Yes, the brain has an intracranial component consisting of populations of neurons and their complex synaptic array, but its capacities are also situated, embodied, enacted and extended. For example, a mobile performer/actor’s eyes and their attendant physiological capacities are attuned to certain wavelengths of light, and because the axis of each eye in comparison to the other is misaligned by four degrees, humans experience depth perception. The brain-gut-microbiome axis as described by Clair R. Martin et al., for instance, sets up a bidirectional interactive flow between the gut microbiome and the brain:

Gut microbes communicate to the central nervous system through at least 3 parallel and interacting channels involving nervous, endocrine, and immune signaling mechanisms. The brain can affect the community structure and function of the gut microbiota through the autonomic nervous system, by modulating regional gut motility, intestinal transit and secretion, and gut permeability, and potentially through the luminal secretion of hormones that directly modulate microbial gene expression.²

Furthermore, this intracranial and situated brain becomes rhizomatically entangled with the socio-cultural-technological milieu that forms its extracranial counterpart. Together these systems bridge, on the one hand, a predisposed and experientially sculpted array of intracranial, vibrant neural elements such as the visual cortex, and on the other hand, massive visualizing technologies without limit that sight the heavens as well as peer into the deep history of the Earth from which animal, plant, and human consciousness evolved. Today these relations form interacting data sets that are used in a myriad of contexts, together feeding the iCloud and forming the various platforms of global cosmotechnics.³

As we will see shortly, the capacities of these technologies, the unique temporal and spatial dimensions they engage and make available, become materialized in the psychic flows that define the local and global network communication of the intracranial brain—something Bernard Stiegler refers to as exosomatic organogenesis.⁴ At the heart of this text is this concept of exosomatic organogenesis in which technical rather than genetic evolution is at the core of the liberation and perfection of organ systems, especially the brain. My proposal is that these new neural-based technological ecosystems are radically different from those that preceded them and that these differences have important consequences for the meaning of the brain and subjectivity. Important in this respect is the intimate relationship these technologies have in directly modulating the brain’s capacity for change, its so-called neuroplasticity, in ways never before thought possible. This essay concentrates on one of these technologies—the “wired brain”—and describes its potential capacity for healing, rehabilitation, and emancipation, as well as for surveillance and despotism.

Central to my argument is that we are in the midst of a transformation in cognitive capitalism, in which the brain and mind are the new factories. We are no longer proletariats working on assembly lines and making objects and things, but rather cognitariats working in front of screens, searching the web, and liking posts on Facebook and Instagram. This condition has become intensified during the pandemic in which digitality has overwhelmed our lives and the simulated world overwhelms our attentional capacities. Furthermore, immanent neural technologies like brain-computer-interface (BCI) VR headsets will advance those technologies already in use (like cinema and gaze-directed virtual platforms) to intercede between the intracranial brain and the extracranial brain, bringing about the transformation of the cognitariat to the superordinate precariat. These technologies appear on the horizon partly due to the mix of new advanced contingencies of digitality that require new speeds of mental laboring and levels of attention in order to produce increases in the surplus value of intellectual labor. As Elon Musk has said about the merger of biological and digital intelligence, “It’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output.”⁵ Facebook’s Building 8 “moon shot division” is also involved in the telepathy race with its new thought-to-text technologies, which will be at least five times as fast as typing on a mobile phone and won’t interfere with driving (or so Facebook claims). As reported in Scientific American:

As if Facebook wasn’t already pervasive enough in everyday life, the company’s newly formed Building 8 “moon shot” factory is working on a device they say would let people type out words via a brain-computer interface (BCI). If all goes according to plan—and that’s a big if—Building 8’s neural prosthetic would strap onto a person’s head, use an optical technique to decode intended speech and then type those thoughts on a computer or smartphone at up to 100 words per minute. This would be an order-of-magnitude faster than today’s state-of-the-art speech decoders.⁶

The complexity of our present condition requires an equally complex argument in order to unpack the vagaries of this prescient moment.  In that regard, I have structured this essay according in seven sections which I hope will enlighten the reader: (1) The Brain Without Organs and the Intracranial Extracranial Situated Complex, (2) From the Cognitariat to the Superordinate Precariat, (3) Neural Technics, (4) Suturing, (5) Epiphylogenesis and Multiple Superimpositional Exteriorization, (6) Neural Epiphylogenesis: Technicity and Selective Stabilization, and (7) Three Orders of Simulation: Formatting Authentic, Prosthetic, and Irreal Memory.

1. The Brain Without Organs and the Intracranial Extracranial Situated Complex

The brain without organs is a phrase based upon the idea of the body without organs originating in the writings of Antonin Artaud and paraphrased by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: “The body is the body. Alone it stands. And in no need of organs. Organism it never is. Organisms are the enemies of the body.”⁷ According to Deleuze and Guattari, the problem of the organism is to make an alternative body without organs, which is permeated and unleashes its unformed “unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities, or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles.”⁸ Like the body without organs, the brain without organs must also create an alternative brain without organs with which to free itself from the imprisoning intensities of the material arrangements created by the genetic code, on the one hand, and the politicized socio-technological milieu (today represented by the plethora of machine learning and wired brain technologies), on the other. Founded as it was to combat the dehumanizing effects of Fordist labor as well as the structures that constitute psychodynamic paradigms like the Oedipus Complex, under cognitive capitalism the radicalizing effects of the body without organs is diminished as a form of resistance and no longer up to the task. The transition of the proletariat to the cognitariat requires new techniques emanating from a radicalized theoretical framework to manage cognitive labor and the psycho-pharmaceutical regimens required to treat its psychopathologies. The brain without organs is such a structure.

In the transition from early cognitive capitalism to its later (neural) stage, the focus changes from the fixed capital of the assembly line to the circulatory capital of the brain’s assemblages of psychically infused neural networks in living action. The Canadian neuropsychologist Donald O. Hebb was the first to postulate that when two neurons fire together, their shared synapse undergoes changes. Hebbian theory, often paraphrased as “Neurons that fire together wire together,” understands that nervous activity can leave a trace that can be modified and transformed.⁹ Long-term memory storage, the result of long-term potentiation at the synapse, represents the new archive—or mnemosyne atlas—of late-stage cognitive capitalism. Neurons, neural networks, and their fiber connections participate in local and global networks, linking, for instance, the visual cortex in the posterior or caudal part of the brain to the actions of the frontal eye fields located in the frontal lobes in its rostral pole. These connections provide visual short-term memories for working memory and selective attention, thereby providing the raw material for internal narrative constructions referred to as “scenario visualizations.”¹⁰

Selective attention and working memory are the new sites of capitalist expansion and corporate power and represent the contemporary jurisdiction of the digital dominion. This is, in fact, the real meaning of endo-colonization. As such, the internal narratologies that constitute the capacity for self-reflexivity are normalized, and it is this form of governmentalization that marks the transition from biopower to neuropower, in which populations of brains (rather than bodies) become the subject of a new sovereignty’s jurisdiction. As discussed later, internal attention and working memory are subject to the whims of the wired brain. The wired brain may one day help mold the connections of the imagination and the short- and long-term memories used to concoct it.

As we will see in what follows, there is a close relationship between exosomatic organogenesis and the brain without organs. In his introduction to Bernard Stiegler’s The Neganthropocene, Daniel Ross states that from 2014 onwards Stiegler less frequently spoke about the process of exteriorization, a principle borrowed from André Leroi-Gourhan in which germinal evolution caused by alterations in the gene, or endosomatic organogenesis, is subsumed by what is referred to as exosomatic organogenesis, or the technical evolution of exterior artificial organs which become internalized through epiphylogenesis.¹¹ Exosomatic organogenesis is essential to the process of hominization of the past two million years:

Hominization is the continuation of organogenesis but in an exosomatic way. As with many organs, the brain has always organologically “augmented” and transformed itself: this self-transformation is precisely what characterizes human life inasmuch as it is also and immediately technical life, that is, a form of life that realizes its dreams.¹²

Organogenesis is dependent upon repetition, patterning, synchronization of input, omnipresence, excess accumulation, and negentropy. The brain without organs, rather, is dependent on variation, entropy, chance, alterity, otherness, contingency, and emergence.

2. From the Cognitariat to the Superordinate Precariat

The core focus of this essay is an investigation of an assortment of neural technologies in various stages of development that have (and will have) important political, economic, and social consequences for our mental and intellectual livelihoods. These are part of an assortment of technics focused on privatizing the neural commons of the cognitariat or the mental digital worker.¹³ They join Big Pharma, artificial intelligence and machine learning, neural consumerism and economics, parametric architecture, and Big Data to produce what I am calling neoliberal neural capitalism. Together, they form an ensemble of technologies that may have the capacity to cause mutations in subjectivity itself as the cognitiariat of early cognitive or semio-capitalism is transformed into the superordinate precariat of late cognitive or neural capitalism.

The term “precariat” was originally used to describe a subset of the general working class that emerged during the Thatcher-Reagan years and consisted of people who engaged in unstable labor; for example, itinerant, short-term workers with zero-hour contracts whose safety was at best perilous because they relied on wages without non-wage benefits. The term “precarious” was adopted by post-operaismo Italian scholars to describe one of the characteristics of digital laborers or the cognitariat. The term “superordinate precariat,” a compound phrase used here to distinguish it from earlier forms, describes a subjectivity in which the exaggerated conditions of isolation and 24/7 digitality (exemplified during the Covid-19 pandemic) accentuate already ongoing trends within digital interaction. As a result of this intense interaction with digitality, this subcategory first used to describe an aspect of the cognitariat hypertrophies to become a subject designation of its very own. It describes a form of subjectivity yet to come, in which we are all linked in a network command system called the “wired brain,” as described by Slavoj Žižek in his book Hegel in a Wired Brain: “‘Wired brain’ refers to a direct link between our mental processes and a digital machine, a link which, while it enables me to directly trigger events in reality with a mere thought . . . also enables the digital machine to control my thoughts.”¹⁴ The wired brain is the latest technic, which in the future will overwhelm and subsume all other technics and, through its accumulation, will instigate a novel exosomatic organogenesis with implications for the expanded intracranial-extracranial situated complex.¹⁵

I am speculating that beyond the precarity normally experienced by the cognitariat—such as extreme insecurity in employment caused by short-term contracts, working alone, experiencing dis-solidarity from other workers and disassociation from care networks—an assortment of new distinguishing characteristics will emerge. Among these are neural subsumption and irreal memory. These will induce new forms of insecurity, uncertainty, and self-doubt, and with it contemporary psychopathological conditions linked to alienation. As Georges Canguilhem states in his book The Normal and the Pathological, “humankind is characterized by the fact that it produces its own milieu, its own living environment, and this self-production constantly confronts an infidelity to itself that it structurally secretes throughout the exosomatic organogenesis in which the irresistible concretization of its technicity consists.”¹⁶ Each epoch creates its own socio-cultural technological pattern which confronts the inadequacies of its former self-realization and the exosomatic organogenesis it was sculpted by must be deterritorialized.

Neural Subsumption

Neural subsumption, also what Antonio Negri calls “total subsumption,” designates the new imminent form of subsumption that is an inflation of the term “real subsumption,” in which the entirety of life itself becomes work. Echoing Mario Tronti’s idea of the social factory, Negri argues that labor is no longer restricted to the location of the factory, but that capital reaches down into the molecular structures of our bodies to extract surplus value. In late-stage cognitive capitalism, that molecular entity is the neural synaptic junction—the site of long-term potentiation or long-term memory.¹⁷ Long-term memories are crucial for the practice of scenario visualization, in which working memory constructs future narratives in the mind’s eye. In late-stage cognitive capitalism, the mind’s eye has replaced the distribution of the sensible or le partage du sensible, as first described by Jacques Rancière in The Politics of Aesthetics as the site of subjectivation.¹⁸ Instead of the laws governing the sensible order and the attention networks it constitutes thus establishing modes of perception and forms of participation in a common world, a shift has occurred towards an endocolonization of the image of thought(s) that constitutes cognition and the vernacular of the theater of the mind’s eye. As we will see shortly, power is now primarily directed at normalizing the brain’s neural diversity as well as policing the mind’s eye in the process of producing a homogenized population of people who are easy to govern. The new technologies of neural capitalism, especially those of the wired brain, constitute the conditions for neural subsumption in which our thoughts, both conscious and unconscious, are made legible and digitally alive. As such, the transparent workings of the mind will become opaque and subject to the sovereignty of Big Data and what Shoshana Zuboff calls the Big Other. New software similar to that of Pegasus spyware, which covertly takes over a mobile phone, will be developed to surreptitiously take over virtual brain-computer interface systems embedded in the Internet of Everything. This, then, will become the new organologic milieu:

It is a ubiquitous networked institutional regime that records, modifies, and commodifies everyday experience from toasters to bodies, communication to thought, all with a view to establishing new pathways to monetization and profit . . . Each one of us may follow a distinct path, but that path is already shaped by the financial and, or, ideological interests that imbue Big Other and invade every aspect of “one’s own” life. False consciousness is no longer produced by the hidden facts of class and their relation to production, but rather by the hidden facts of commoditized behavior modification.¹⁹

What happens when experience is replaced by mere thought and work is performed at the speed of thought? If brain waves generated by a subject can be used to manipulate a cursor on a computer screen in order to direct a robotic arm or move a wheelchair, it is not such a radical jump to consider the possibility of the opposite happening. Using convolutional neural networks, Haiguang Wen and his team were already able to reliably decode and interpret electrical signals recorded from the visual cortex and related areas of subjects watching movies.²⁰ Artificial neural networks driven by machinic intelligence may soon generate patterns of electrical potential that can enter the intracranial brain and directly modulate its local and global activity.

Irreal Memory

Irreal memory joins neural subsumption as the second key component producing the superordinate precariat class in the twenty-first century. As described later, it is produced by an entity that is “not unreal, but a simulacrum never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference . . . it is a short-circuit of reality and a reduplication by signs.”²¹ Irreal memory is a state of absolute manipulation! It is the product of technological acceleration upon the situated intra-extracranial complex brain of the cognitariat, whose attention, captured inside a hall of mirrors, can no longer differentiate between the real, the imaginary, and the virtual, and whose nervous system, consisting of long-term memories and their neural substrate, is pruned as a result of the entangled, ideologically contested mediarchal and natural milieu.

As I will describe later in more detail, there are three orders of the simulacrum, each linked to a different form of memory. The first order is based on the counterfeit of an original. Painting and drawing made with the hand constitute this first level of simulation. The second order liquifies reality and absorbs appearance. It is based on the commercial law of mechanical reproduction in the age of industrialization. There are two stages of this form of simulacrum. Although made with a mechanical device like a film or movie camera, the early stage is still linked to an authentic element. When we watch a movie or look at a photograph, we are viewing a de-auratized object, yet one that is still linked to something genuine and original—like human actors speaking in a living room or watching surfers ride the waves on a beach. In the later stage of this second-order simulacrum the authentic element has been substituted with a mass-marketed image generated from advertising or film—for instance, in the works of the Pictures Generation or Richard Prince’s Marlboro Man. The memory they produce is referred to as prosthetic memory.

The third order of simulation is one in which all the elements share relational significance only between themselves as functioning inside the framework of the model. Fake news and the post-truth society are responses to this third order of simulation. Importantly, the disciplinary society characterizes the first- and second-order simulations while the society of control characterizes the third order, formed through a process of codification and modulation. The wired brain is a new form of mediated experience and the source of irreal memory.

I want to suggest that the main differences between these new neural technical systems, like brain-computer interfaces linked to the Internet of Everything and the systems that preceded it, are their dependency or lack of dependency upon sensual experience. That is to say that telemetric and telepathic media will be delinked from direct sensory experiences that normally conjure episodic memory—those long-term memories that are constituted as a result of personal direct experience. As such, the memories registered and retrievable in the context of a wired brain will be unearthly, preternatural, and superphysical. My speculation is that telemetric and telepathic technological systems will directly connect to the material brain via implanted electrodes or wearable headsets, leapfrogging sensuality. They will function as the central node in a complex relay system or assemblage of relations that consists of the Internet of Everything, virtual reality, and the World Wide Web. In time, this assemblage will become ever-more abundant as the sophistication and usability of brain-machine interfaces expands, eventually overwhelming all other natural and media systems for access to the material brain and, in the process, making them redundant. I am speculating that telemetric systems will form memories very different in character from those generated by sensibility and make it possible to experience and remember multiple fictive pasts and simultaneous existences. Subjectivity will no longer be formed by individual experience in a variable world, but rather by the effects of machinic automaticity tethered to a brain-computer interface. Completing a trend that was initiated with photography, cinema, and virtual reality, the mnemotechnic repository—the complete repository of memory stored consciously or unconsciously in the networks of the neural connectome—will be lorded over by an externalized and remote machinic memory of a synthetic connectome.²²

Speculating upon the political implications of such a technological becoming, I want to suggest that these varied technics represent an intersectional assemblage in the sense that they constitute a new relay station between world and brain. They are neither intracranial nor extracranial, but compose an intermediate form of situatedness with very different modulating effects. In fact, they will play a role in sculpting the brain’s neural plasticity—much like a computer directs a computer numerical controlled (CNC) router or how a 3D printer creates a physical object from a digital model, typically laying down many thin layers of material in succession—except that the template used will be beyond human comprehension and be directed by codes and mediated memories alien to humanity. An example of this condition of sublime intelligence became apparent in Google’s AI machine AlphaGo, which was able to beat master Go champion Lee Sedol:

The Google machine repeatedly made rather unorthodox moves that the commentators could quite understand . . . AlphaGo continues its education by playing game after game after game against itself. It learns from a vast trove of moves that it generates on its own—not just from human moves. That means it sometimes makes moves no human would. This is what allows it to beat a top human like Lee Sedol. But over the course of an individual game, it can also leave humans scratching their heads.²³

What are the implications of the above statement for the production of subjectivity and superintelligence? I believe with neural technologies a new type of memory based on the hyperreal will emerge—a form of memory that has no direct link to the real and does not follow its rules or regulations; a mediated memory and ostensibly irrational machine mnemotechny alien to human thought and therefore incomprehensible. As we have all witnessed in the last US presidential term, a dependence on the hyperreal, whether it manifests itself as conspiracy theories or fake news, can be devastating for the health of a nation.

3. Neural Technics

According to market research reported by the website Grand View Research, the global BCI market will increase in value from 806.8 million dollars in 2015 to 1.72 billion in 2022, and it is speculated to grow to 3.7 billion by 2027. This increase is the result of applications in the neuroprosthetic market especially important in facilitating communication and movement in paralytic patients as well as recent applications in virtual gaming, home control systems, and military equipment operations markets.²⁴ By enlarging the category of the wired brain beyond its telepathic capacities to include a whole bevy of technoceuticals like brain-computer interfaces, cortical implants, neural lace, and neural dust, I speculate that this assemblage of technologies constitutes a situated machinic interface that oversees the organic cerebral cortex, acting as a relay station interceding with our relation to sensuality. I want to suggest that there is a potential for abuse when information streaming in from an exterior machine intelligence overwhelms the information streaming in through one’s normal sensory channels, leading to a competitive parallel long-term memory archive. While technoceuticals are a category of technological devices that interact directly with the body, neuro-technoceuticals interact directly with the brain’s gray matter tissue or the complex communicative system of relays called white matter. For the sake of this essay, I want to concentrate on those new categories of devices that have telepathic possibilities.

Telepathy is defined in the Cambridge Dictionary as the ability to know what is in someone else’s mind or to communicate with someone mentally, without using words or other physical signals. It is related to such words and concepts as precognition, psychokinetic, sixth sense, premonition, augury, precognition, telekinesis, and telesthesia—and usually there is a receiver and a transmitter of information. An assortment of new technologies that have telepathic potential are already in use, including BCIs—also known as synthetic telepathy interfaces  (STIs)—cortical implants, bio-neuro-headsets, and the telepathic smart dust of networked sensor motes. In 2017, Elon Musk announced his latest venture called Neuralink. According to the article “Brain-computer interfaces are coming: ‘Consensual telepathy,’ anyone?” in the Washington Post, Musk has stated that the main obstacle to optimum human-machine interaction is communication bandwidth.²⁵ In other words, touchscreens and keyboards are a slow and inefficient means to interact with a computer, but a faster way would require a higher bandwidth. Using neural lace and neural dust, Musk hopes to make consensual telepathy possible for everyone and to move the technology of brain-computer interfaces from their sole use as a medical prosthesis for paraplegics to a technology accessible by everyone. Ultimately, this will be the result of a long list of technological nudges to make the cognitariat and, later, the superordinate precariat more efficient laborers in the hope of increasing cognitive surplus value. The dominant form of communication for the superordinate precariat dependent on telepathic devices will be non-linguistic.

Facebook is also involved in the telepathy race with its new thought-to-text technologies, which will be at least five times as fast as typing on a cell phone and won’t interfere with driving. Emotiv is a company producing software that allows users to visualize brain-wave activity in 3D as well as control drones, robots, and video games. Recently, BCIs have entered the realm of ubiquitous computing and are making an appearance in military operations in the field. As early as 2010, in an article entitled “Brain-Computer Interfaces: Military, Neurosurgical and Ethical Perspective,” Ivan S. Kotchetkov waxed poetically about the applications of brain-computer interfaces on the battlefield:

The DARPA division is currently involved in a program called “Silent Talk” that aims to develop user-to-user communication on the battlefield through EEG signals of “intended speech,” thereby eliminating the need for any vocalizations or body gestures. Such capabilities will be of particular benefit in reconnaissance and special operation settings, and successful applications of silent speech interfaces have already been reported.²⁶

Also of interest for this essay is the recently proposed Smart Living Environmental Auto-Adjustment Control System suggested by Chin-Teng Lin et al. in their article “Brain Computer Interface-Based Smart Living Environmental Auto-Adjustment Control System in UPnP Home Networking.”²⁷ Using a modified system akin to brain-computer interfaces, they were able to make environmental adjustments in a controlled environment demo room by controlled changes in a user’s cognitive state.

Brain-computer interface technologies are sprouting up everywhere and as they become omnipresent and necessary, their power to transform the material brain will become realized. I have argued elsewhere that this accumulation of telepathic and telemetric devices and their increased uses may follow in the footsteps of reading and writing five thousand years ago to first colonize and activate designated neural cognit for telepathy.²⁸ Stanislas Deheane refers to this as the Neuronal Recycling Hypothesis to describe the way cultural initiatives can alter and inhabit cortical maps.²⁹ Of interest here is the part the brain’s neural plasticity and the process of epigenesis play in this evolution of the material brain, and their close association to concepts propagated by Bernard Stiegler (like epiphylogenesis, exteriorization, and organogenesis), to be discussed shortly.

4. Suturing

This representational memory . . . disappears with simulation whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept. No more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models—and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational.

—Jean Baudrillard, Simulations³⁰

I wish to posit that the effect of third-order simulation (as described by Jean Baudrillard)  produced by this alienated condition of the wired-brain memory bank, which is no longer rational in the human sense and can be reproduced infinitely, produces a very different form of mediation than mediums that predated it, like cinema and virtual reality. Ontogenetically speaking, the evolution of technology is one of a “progressive” paratactic, a suturing and tuning of the subject to a medium—where each new medium constitutes a stage in an ontogenetic reckoning of an ever-more seamless immersion. Successive suturings (according to the logics of the ontogeny of media) create ever-more perfectly registered systems of maieutics or mirroring, which I have called cognitive ergonomics.³¹

Building on Jean-Pierre Oudart, Stephen Heath describes, in his essay “Notes on Suture,” the importance of the subject as a site of absence that passively articulates the relations of the signifying chain of images that comprise the cinematic event. This subjective lack constitutes the ideological significance of the sequence of images and its discursive agency (in a system of relations that join together and constitute the multiplicity of filmic sensibilities) that exist not only in what is obviously available, but also in its optical unconscious, especially its imaginary.  “Cinema as discourse is the production of the subject and the subject is the point of that production.”³² As such, cinema follows photography and continues its legacy in augmented and virtual reality. The advent of neural-linked media represents the most current form of this mediated immersive suturing, except that the image archive it adjudicates and the image stream it concocts is not something that is witnessed. It is totally transparent and its production is silent. The subject is unaware that it is even happening: almost imperceptibly it leaves traces of another machinic countenance.

5. Epiphylogenesis and Multiple Superimpositional Exteriorization

The formation of the superordinate precariat’s subjectivity is a consequence of an internalized mnemotechny constructed through a process of epiphylogenesis, as Bernard Stiegler has described it, in accordance with a third-order simulacrum fabricated in the machine-brain entanglement constituted by BCIs. In Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Stiegler defines epiphylogenesis as “conservation, accumulation, and sedimentation of successive epigeneses, mutually articulated.”³³ Epiphylogenesis is the process through which the phylogeny of the technical species—or the evolution of technical apparatuses in time—is transmissible. Through a process of multiple exteriorizations, human matter becomes entangled with technics or organized inorganic matter.

In his essay on Stiegler and the “Industrialization of Memory,” Ben Roberts describes this “new process of exteriorization whereby the interior of the living being becomes inextricably bound up with an exterior realm of tools.”³⁴ The history of the human is therefore no longer in the realm of genetic evolution but that of technical evolution (or the evolution of “organized inorganic beings”) in which it is impossible to separate the living being from its external prosthetic technical support. Stiegler distinguishes this technical evolution from biological evolution (phylogenesis) by calling it epiphylogenesis. In recent texts like Nanjing Lectures, Stiegler uses the term exosomatic organogenesis to distinguish from endosomatic organogenesis, the result of natural selection on the genome.³⁵

6. Neural Epiphylogenesis: Technicity and Selective Stabilization

There is no better place to understand the effects of this process of epiphylogenesis than in the brain. I want to digress somewhat to explain how the multiplicity of synaptic events occurring throughout the variable nervous system can open a doorway to understand the ways and means by which technics participate in changing the architecture of the brain. Epigenesis is a term that leaps from its original understanding in the realm of genetics to describe the unveiling of latent chunks of DNA through demethylation and histone displacement as a response to environmental conditions. The sequence of events that constitute the process of carcinogenesis is an example and occurs when a carcinogenic agent or radiation induces a change in the DNA of a single cell, leading to an enhanced reproductive cascade of mutated cells and tumor formation. Important for us here is its other definition emanating from the field of neurobiology, where it becomes linked to what Jean-Francois Changeux refers to as epigenetic synaptogenesis—a process through which labile or unstable synapses are pruned.³⁶

According to Peter Huttenlocher in “Morphometric Study of Human Cerebral Cortex Development,” the process of synapse formation or synaptogenesis flourishes in the embryo beginning at around twenty-three weeks of gestation and reaching its peak in the early postnatal period.³⁷ Although this continues throughout life there are critical periods characterized by massive overproduction or transient exuberance throughout the cerebral cortex. However, the production is asymmetric, appearing early in the sensory cortices like the visual cortex, where it occurs between four to eight months, and peaking in the frontal gyrus around twelve to fifteen months. The infant cortex contains 40 percent more synapses than the adult brain as a result of the pruning of those synapses that are under-stimulated by the environment. Many of these synapses are labile, their function unspecified, and they are electrically silent as they have yet to be incorporated into networks or cognits. According to Changeux, regularly occurring, pervasive, and powerfully stimulating inputs from the environment transform these synapses into functioning units. He states that “the epigenetic selection of synapses represents learning in the network as the organism is shaped to fit its environment. In this sense, learning can be considered as a Darwinian process, because it depends on elimination of the unfit synapses.”³⁸ Furthermore, according to Marc Jeannerod, “If a synapse belongs to a circuit in frequent use, it tends to grow in volume, its permeability increases and its efficacy increases. Inversely, little used synapses tend to become less efficacious”³⁹ and are pruned or die off. Thus, synapses that are stimulated are selected for while those that are not are eliminated. The result over time is a finely tuned neural architecture in sync with the socio-cultural-technologically induced environment.

Populations of neural synaptic junctions are molded as a result of the pressure imposed by the conditions of technicity, especially their formatting of the distributions of sensibility—which includes the power of new kinds of images and the way these images affect the gaze and gather attention. Riffing off André Leroi-Gourhan, Bernard Stiegler considers this connection between tool and brain development in his discussion of exteriorization in Technics and Time 1, The Fault of Epimetheus.⁴⁰ Stiegler introduces the link between the material culture of tool evolution and the material evolution of the brain’s grey matter when speaking about the evolution of Zinjanthropus to Neanderthal:

We submit that between these two ruptures, cortex and equipment are differentiated together, in one and the same movement. The issue is that of a singular process of structural coupling in exteriorization that we are calling an instrumental maieutics, a “mirror proto-stage” in the course of which the differentiation of the cortex is determined by the tool just as much as that of the tool by the cortex: a mirror effect whereby one, looking at itself in the other, is both deformed and formed in the process [l’un se regardant dans l’autre qui le déforme s’y forme].⁴¹

My point is that this process continues today with the acceleration of digitality, especially the coming saturation of the digital field with telemetric devices that constitute the wired brain. Will these new technics constitute the future cortical architecture of the brain and lead to its further evolution and expansion as did technological advances in the past? Are these technologies inducing changes between internet natives and immigrants or between the cognitariat and the superordinate precariat that we qualitatively recognize? Recent research in neurobiology has pointed to the effects of brain-computer interfaces in stimulating neural plasticity. In their article “Immediate Brain Plasticity After One Hour of Brain-Computer Interface,” Nierhaus et al. found “rapid and spatially specific signs of brain plasticity measured with functional and structural MRI after only 1 h of purely mental BCI training in BCI naive subjects.”⁴² Could this be the beginning of other alternative uses of BCIs beyond telepathy, of sculpting the neural architecture through its neural plasticity? Imagine, then, the scenario of an AI-directed algorithmic entity in charge of this process.

7. Three Orders of Simulation: Formatting Authentic, Prosthetic, and Irreal Memory

I now want to sketch out three forms of media-induced memory based on Jean Baudrillard’s schema of the simulacrum.⁴³ I am proposing that the mutation of the cognitariat to the superordinate precariat is based on their relationship to technics generating simulacra and the character of memory thus induced. These categories are (1) Authentic, (2) Prosthetic: Cinematic-Virtual, and (3) Simulated.

In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard identifies three orders of simulacra. The first-order simulacrum is clearly a copy of the original or a forgery. The representation is clearly a handcrafted placeholder for a real item. The resulting memory is therefore referred to as authentic. There is no difficulty in distinguishing the two. Both can be easily and separately called up by working memory in the mind’s eye, where they remain discernable in what Gilles Deleuze calls the image of thought.⁴⁴ The second order is associated with the Industrial Revolution and marks the first moment when the relation between reality and representation begins to break down due to mass production of copies and their subsequent commodification. This process of commodification threatens the authority of the original as the image/copy becomes an equal or even better placeholder for the real. While the first-order simulacrum focuses on “real” counterfeits, the second order is associated with production and prosthetic memory that is not derived from the person’s real experience. The third order is a production of late capitalism or postmodernism, as the distinction between reality and representation disappears. The sign pretends to be an adequate copy, but in actuality refers to no original.

I am speculating that each order of simulation is delineated with a specific form of memory. The degree of simulation expands as we move from its initiation in the Renaissance through its further enunciation in industrial capitalism to its expression in early and late-stage cognitive capitalism; it mirrors its degree of immersion mentioned previously. In late-stage cognitive capitalism, the material brain becomes the site of commodification and privatization. That is, the “real” of authentic memory constituted by the image of nature transferred to paper or canvas is substituted by the dynamic images in movement and time of cinema and virtual reality—images that lack an aura. These are characteristic of industrial capitalism and produce prosthetic memories. According to Alison Landberg in her book Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, prosthetic memories “are not strictly derived from a person’s lived experience . . . but are derived from engagement with a mediated representation.” Furthermore, they “circulate publicly, and although they are not organically based, they are nevertheless experiences with a person’s body as a result of an engagement with a wide range of cultural technologies all vying for limited memory space.”⁴⁵ Prosthetic memories are phatic, generated from the word “emphatic.” As Paul Virilio states, “the phatic image—a targeted image which forces you to look and holds your attention—is not only a pure product of photographic and cinematic focusing. More importantly it is the result of an ever-brighter illumination, of the intensity of its definition, singling out only specific areas, the context mostly disappearing into a blur.”⁴⁶ As such, these artificially contrived images compete more effectively for neural space than their natural or organic counterparts and build sets of neural relationships or neural networks that are, in a sense, artificial. According to a recent article in MIT News entitled “Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories,”

“We found that falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude,” says Sinan Aral, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a new paper detailing the findings. “These findings shed new light on fundamental aspects of our online communication ecosystem.”⁴⁷

That is, the second-order simulacrum and the kind of memory it enlists through cinema and VR generate short- and long-term memories in the brain, which become essential to the production of the image of thought in the mind’s eye and working memory. There are qualitative differences between the prosthetic memory created by cinema and that created by VR. Since cinema is normally watched from a theater chair, the memories created are more related to receptive perception and are gestalt heavy, whereas those of VR are more haptic and therefore more affordance heavy. They are both very engaging and therefore easily remembered, but they are only captured during the apportioned time of the passive cinematic experience or the interactive time immersed in the virtual environment. As such, they only make up a small fraction of the long-term memory store. They share the internal memory landscape with authentic memories. In scenario visualization, in which working memory calls up memories from the brain’s memory archive to generate a story or pre-visualize a scene, both authentic memories and prosthetic memories are intertwined and vying for inner attention or salience.

In late-stage cognitive capitalism, it is the working memory that has become the focus of new forms of political power and mentalité. The alienation of the Fordist subject is the result of the bricolage of these different concoctions of hybrid memory, and their schisis, their incapacity to be clearly superimposed, results in the psychotic breakdown of the photographer Thomas (played by David Hemmings) at the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up. His mental disintegration is a result of the irresolution of two competing memory systems, one real and the other photographically produced, that simultaneously vie for attention and consciousness, neither of which can win the day.

Third-order simulacra are a product of postmodernism and late capitalism and are identifiable by their capacity to precede the original, blurring the distinction between reality and representation. The third-order simulacrum is composed of a network of signifiers divorced from reality. The sign pretends to be an adequate copy, but in actuality refers to no original. Here the simulacrum precedes the real in an act of pretension. Baudrillard states in Simulacra and Simulation that

Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory.⁴⁸

We live in an environment of counterfeit production of both static and dynamic images generated by mass media in the form of advertisements appearing in designed space and the World Wide Web. In cognitive capitalism, this hyperreality primarily operates upon the performative imagination and the artificial signs that compose it owe their allegiance only to each other, released as they are from the truth and circulating together in an atmosphere of the irrational. Irreal memory is constituted by this third-order simulation and, like prosthetic memory, colonizes the memory archive with non-experiential fabricated memories. However, in this case, there are no authentic memories with which to compete and the phatic memories of virtual memory subsume all other forms of memory in the neurobiological archive. Even though the hybrid memories of the Fordist and post-Fordist subject can cause a schisis and rupture of the psyche, there is still a connection to the real signified. This disappears in irreal memory. There is a direct link between the mediated memory of the computational power of the BCI and the intracranial brain’s archive. The two are hyperlinked.

Conclusion

In late cognitive capitalism, another eruption will occur that does not require the sensuous body at all and, in fact, bypasses sensibility altogether. It will depend on the new technologies of neural capitalism, especially advanced versions, such as telepathic and telemetric devices like brain-computer interfaces. The media of the BCI will create a third-order simulacrum of the whatever-whenever in the material brain. The screen will disappear, and instead of clicks and typing, interacting atmospheres of collective and synchronous neural oscillations will register the precariat’s mental choices as data with an embedded systemic machinic processor existing as a platform on the World Wide Web. Conversely, a battery of codes based upon patterns thus registered and collated will be fed back, modulating streams of consciousness. A new kind of Google bubble will be created, leading to neural subsumption. This condition represents a crisis of the imagination, which is described (following Nelson Goodman)⁴⁹ by the idea of irreality. The irreal is a digital and fractalized imagination operating as a pure simulation of the transcendental and empirical. It is the whatever and whenever of advanced simulation technologies and creates immersive irreal memories. The political consequence of the irreal is the full-blown collapse of the freedom of choice for an already debilitated and proletarianized superordinate precariat.

1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 21.
2. Clair R. Martin et al., “The Brain-Gut-Microbiome Axis,” Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology 6, no. 2 (April 2018): 133–48.
3. Yuk Hui, “Writing and Cosmotechnics,” Derrida Today 13, no. 1 (2020): 17–32.
4. Bernard Stiegler, Nanjing Lectures 2016–2019, trans. Daniel Ross (London: Open Humanities Press, 2020).
5. Arjun Kharpal, “Elon Musk: Humans must merge with machines or become irrelevant in the AI age,” CNBC, February 13, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/13/elon-musk-humans-merge-machines-cyborg-artificial-intelligence-robots.html.
6. Larry Greenemeier, “Facebook Launches ‘Moon Shot’ Effort to Decode Speech Direct from the Brain,” Scientific American, April 27, 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/facebook-launches-moon-shot-effort-to-decode-speech-direct-from-the-brain/.
7. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 158.
8. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 40.
9. Donald O. Hebb, The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory (New York and London: Wiley and Sons, 1949).
10. Shani Offen et al., “Differential roles for frontal eye fields (FEFs) and intraparietal sulcus (IPS) in visual working memory and visual attention,” Journal of Vision 10, no. 11 (September 2010): 28, doi: https://doi.org/10.1167/10.11.28.
11. Daniel Ross, introduction to The Neganthropocene, by Bernard Stiegler, trans. and ed. Daniel Ross (London: Open Humanities Press, 2018), 26.
12. Stiegler, Nanjing Lectures, 242.
13. By neural commons I mean the commonwealth of the material brain, its material variable components like neurons, dendrites, and synapses, as well as processes like binding, in which individual features of objects are tethered together or segregated through synchronized and desynchronized activity of different neurons in the cortex of the brain. Synchronization is important for neural diversity and plasticity. See Wolfe Singer, “The Role of Synchrony in Neocortical Processing and Synaptic Plasticity,” in Models of Neural Networks: Temporal Aspects of Coding and Information Processing in Biological Systems, ed. Eytan Domany et al. (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1994), 141–73.
14. Slavoj Žižek, Hegel in a Wired Brain (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 19.
15. Stiegler, The Neganthropocene.
16. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 64.
17. Antonio Negri, “Twenty Theses on Marx, Interpretation of the Class Situation Today,” in Marxism Beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca Karl (London: Routledge, 1996).
18. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 85.
19. Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology 30 (2015): 75–89, https://doi.org/10.1057.
20. Haiguang Wen et al., “Neural Encoding and Decoding with Deep Learning for Dynamic Natural Vision,” Cerebral Cortex 28, no. 12 (December 2018): 4136–60.
21. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983),  4.
22. The connectome is the data set describing the connection matrix of the nervous system. It represents the network of anatomical connections linking neural elements across the brain. The synthetic connectome is an artificial construction of the brain’s connections used for study.
23. Cade Metz, “Google’s AI Wins Fifth And Final Game Against Go Genius Lee Sedol,” Wired, March 15, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/03/googles-ai-wins-fifth-final-game-go-genius-lee-sedol/.
24. “Brain Computer Interface Market Size Worth $3.7 Billion By 2027,” Grand View Research, February 2020, https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-brain-computers-interface-market.
25. Edd Gent, “Brain-computer interfaces are coming: ‘Consensual telepathy,’ anyone?,” Washington Post, June 11, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/brain-computer-interfaces-are-coming-consensual-telepathy-anyone/2017/06/09/9345c682-46ef-11e7-98cd-af64b4fe2dfc_story.html.
26. Ivan S. Kotchetkov et al., “Brain-computer Interfaces: Military, Neurosurgical and Ethical Perspective,” Neurosurgical Focus 28, no. 5 (2010): E25.
27. Chin-Teng Lin et al., “Brain Computer Interface-Based Smart Living Environmental Auto-Adjustment Control System in UPnP Home Networking,” IEEE Systems Journal 8, no. 2 (June 2014): 363–70.
28. Warren Neidich, “Epilogue: Telepathic Exaptation in Late Cognitive Capitalism: A Speculative Approach to the Effects of Digitality,” in Big Data: A New Medium, ed. Natasha Lushetich (London: Routledge, 2021), 206–21.
29. See Stanislas Dehaene, “Cultural Recycling of Cortical Maps,” Neuron 56 (October 25, 2007): 384–98; Stanislas Dehaene, “Evolution of Cortical Circuits for Reading and Arithmetic, The Neuronal Recycling Hypothesis,” in From Monkey Brain to Human Brain, ed. Stanislas Dehaene et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 134.
30. Baudrillard, Simulations, 9.
31. Warren Neidich, Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2003).
32. Stephen Heath, “Dossier Suture: Notes on Suture” Screen 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 48–47.
33. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 140
34. Ben Roberts, “Cinema as Mnemotechnics: Bernard Stiegler and the ‘Industrialization of Memory’,” Angelaki 11, no. 1 (2006): 55–63.
35. Stiegler, Nanjing Lectures.
36. Jean-François Changeux, “Selective Stabilization of Developing Synapses as a Mechanism for the Specification of Neuronal Networks,” Nature 264 (December 1976): 705–12.
37. Peter Huttenlocher, “Morphometric Study of Human Cerebral Development,” Neuropsychologia 28, no. 6 (1990): 517–27.
38. Jean-Pierre Changeux, “Synaptic Epigenesis and the Evolution of Higher Brain Functions,” in Epigenetics, Brain and Behavior: Research and Perspectives in Neurosciences, ed. Paolo Sassone-Corsi and Yves Christen (Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2012), 12.
39. Marc Jeannerod, foreword to What Should We Do with Our Brain?, by Catherine Malabou (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), xii.
40. Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, 142.
41. Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, 158.
42. Till Nierhaus et al., “Immediate Brain Plasticity After One Hour of Brain-Computer Interface,” Journal of Physiology 599, no. 9 (May 2021): 2435–51.
43. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
44. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
45. Alison Landberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 33.
46. Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 14.
47. Peter Dizikes, “Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories,” MIT News, March 8, 2018, https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-faster-true-stories-0308.
48. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1.
49. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978).