ABSTRACT
This essay asks us what art can do in the time of digital capitalism and the Anthropocene. When consumer tracking allows a market research company to know that a teenager is pregnant before her parents do, all on the basis of her shopping basket, something fundamental has changed. As the essay explains: social life in divided into units; these units are separated from their original contexts of meaning; the abstracted units are then recombined using algorithmic machines to produce something new, which is then fed back into the social process. Here, as with the advent of human created climate change, the distinctions that we have taken for granted for centuries are coming undone. Nature and culture are no longer distinct, and human activity is no longer the source of commodities or the means by which they are consumed, but has itself been transformed into a commodity. Drawing upon a wider Anthropocene Project, with which the author has been closely (and deeply) involved, the author offers suggestive examples of what art can and cannot do in the era of the techno-sphere and of the Anthropocene.
