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Cancellation, the highest stage of capitalism

This title plays on E.P. Thompson’s description of ‘Exterminism, the Highest Stage of Civilization’, and describes how although the cancellations characterising the late 2010s and early 2020s seemed to come from a progressive left, they needed a precarious middle class co-opted into reducing difference to value extraction. ‘Cancellation’ describes an algorithmic elite asset-stripping of populations, but is concrete in another two ways. Firstly, as cancellation kicks in and the political narrows, longterm thinking is virtuously shadow-banned; a massive nuclear rearming around 2020 had little cultural registration, and was effectively normalised. This is Thompson’s exterminism, a deterrent condition for which populations themselves have become extraneous, and the population itself ‘cancelled’ (Elaine Scarry). Aerospace and infotech concerns increasingly cross-invest and conglomerate; public shaming is used to enforce a history-killing algorithmic siloing. Secondly, cancellation might mark a ‘highest’ stage in that classical capitalism has partially collapsed into a solid-state or neofeudal condition (Varoufakis, Wark, Durant, Dean), breaking the promised bind of profit and progress. The paper touches on theorists including McKenzie Wark, François Bonnet, Byung-Chul Han, Thomas Moynihan, Drew Milne, Nishitani Keiji, and Benoît Pelopidas.