ABSTRACT
Digital-era technological advance promises efficiencies of automated governance while digitalizing uneven power relations, neglecting contextual issues, and seducing digital subjects into technological dependence to relegate thought to the machine. Resistances endeavor to subvert algorithmic affordances to serve communitarian purposes. Postcapitalist projects in which the boundary between postcapitalism and capitalism is porous especially are encumbered by the tension between techno-economic goals and those of inclusion and wellbeing. Lack of synergy between apparently oppositional strategies produces problems. It is helpful to reframe the overarching dilemma of antagonistic processes that paradoxically require agonism in terms of a dynamic process of continual change in mode of governance whereby the field of power relations shifts back and forth between indirect governance and the finality of direct, absolute sovereign power that precludes negotiation. This approach recasts precarity from an objectified condition to a process of continual slippage between fields of power. This understanding cannot itself produce change; the value lies in the prompt for continual reflection to open processes to revision by developing proactive strategies that respond to problems productively and inclusively. Otherwise, relinquishing thought to the conveniences of automated governance threatens prospects for resisting normalization, which numbs the mind to reflexive critique.
