ABSTRACT
This chapter will consider the question of alternatives to the neoliberal world picture. This cannot take the form of a ‘post-technological’ economy; it is rather an attempt to think through the ideas of ‘industrial art,’ ‘aesthetic transformation,’ and ‘economy of contribution’ presented by Morton and Stiegler. The project involves reimagining the value of work as creative activity, re-evaluating the role of art as a mode of social recognition, and reorienting politics towards the question of what makes human life worth living. How this world picture might become hegemonic is a question that can never be definitively answered – for the evolutionary trajectory of global-technoscientific society is, in a radical sense, unforeseeable. Yet it is possible to give an account of how the experiences of globalization and hyper-industrialization have created the chance of a new relationship between nature, human beings, and technology. In order to theorize this relationship, it is necessary to move beyond conventional debates about the effects of automation on employment and productivity (the idea of fully automated luxury communism, for example), and outline the contours of a techno-human society in which the question of humanity would remain a political concern within the systems of hyper-industrial production.
