As we have watched the early days of return to the rightwing presidency of Trump, I cannot help but think about McKenzie Wark’s 2019 Capital is Dead. Is This Something Worse (Verso). I have found the arguments in her book compelling for a while now, but it seems to me we are starting to see even more clearly—and in real time—the necessity of such analyses.
The Trump administration is seeking more power for the executive branch along two interrelated trajectories. First in the more normal or normalized process of ruling by decree (or executive order) which many have been critiquing, rightly in my view, along the lines of pointing out that with a super slim majority in congress, this is both the safest route for Trump to try to set policy (as he knows that many of the agenda items in the executive orders would split that slim majority and make it hard to set such policy through congressional legislation) and also arguing that it this trajectory is a sign of weakness because of that. The second trajectory is through the use of the unelected techbro billionaire Elon Musk and the apparatus of technological control of government information systems.
It is the second trajectory that both seems new and the thing I want to think with Wark about here.
Trump has, as we know well now, given Elon Musk presidential-like power to set and enact policy in a different way. He has given him unfettered access to governmental data and digital information systems that do everything from initiate payments to people and organizations, organizing financial priorities of various government offices (set largely by congress and outside of the political control of the executive branch) to holding the personal and financial information of all Americans. Musk and his young techbro cronies have barged into multiple federal agencies over the last number of weeks and stolen information by installing hard drives in these offices and by some accounts, they have begun feeding that data to AI systems. This is where Wark’s analysis is important.
In Capital is Dead, she argues that with the emergence of information technology, we are seeing, or have seen, a new mode of production come on the scene as a new site of power and social relation. Information, she argues in the introduction to that book is a “pervasive organizing force” and that information technologies “instrumentalize information” in ways that reorient power and control (5). Such technologies are, as Wark points out here, “specific kinds of apparatus that gather, sort, manage, and process information so that it can then be used to control other things in the world” (ibid). And further, the rise of these kinds of technologies have both made information inexpensive and widely available which in turn, has given:
“…rise to a strange kind of political economy, one based not only on the scarcity of things but also on the excess of information. This has generated a quite novel kinds of problems for those who had (or aspire to) power: how to maintain forms of class inequality, oppression, domination, and exploitation, based on something that in principle is now ridiculously abundant” (ibid.).
It is this analysis that leads Wark to argue that, as she puts it, “the dominant ruling class of our time owns and controls information.” This ruling class is termed the “vectoralist class” as it aims to control the vectors along which information travels along with the information itself.
This is the part that seems most salient right now- with Musk and his fake office that has been made real by the power given to it by the more traditional power of the office of the president and its administration, we are witnessing an acceleration and a broadening of the power of the vectoral class (which he represents along with other billionaire techbros like Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman). The vectoral class has now been given even more access to information and its manipulation for the vectoralists’ own ends and to maintain and extend their class domination.
I have some doubts that even the trump administration knows what they’ve done here by allowing those folks this kind of access. And it is difficult to see a way out. Even if the recent court wins against this information takeover hold up- we’ve now seen vectoral power move into new places and attempt to capture new parts of the political and economic apparatus of our times.
As Wark says early in the book, “to the vector the spoils” indeed (11).
Geoff Pfeifer 