Inventing a novel social brain: Moving beyond capital,towards the commons

Abstract

The virtue of After the Internet: Digital networks between capital and the commons lies in its presaging not only the complexity of the contemporary digital network but also, and more significantly, in its argument for our potent potential to invent difference and genuine novelty. This, Terranova suggests, ought to be constituted by human collectivity and radical politics, which she emphatically terms the ‘common’ as the antagonistic counterpart to capital within the current digital environment. As Terranova rightly points out, this dual entanglement is illuminated when we ‘escap(e) the double bind of either’ (p. 30): be it liberal or socialist, private or public, and perhaps capital or the common. Instead, it would be prudent to adopt a bifurcating perspective in our critical understanding of this massive and contradictory assemblage of psychoneurotics, technosociality, political economy, and the excessive flight from this impasse. Thus, the complexity and potentiality, when viewed through a bifurcating lens of ambivalence and openness, may be delineated under three themes: the transformation of the digital network; collectivity within or without digital capitalism; and immanence as politics.