The New Flesh is a heady tour of the emotional destruction that digital life has wrought on its residents. In the book, philosopher and podcaster Adam C. Jones argues that increasing our time online has remade us. The digital economy has produced new kinds of work and consumption and, therefore, new kinds of workers and consumers, remaking the relations of production. Both workers’ and consumers’ subjective lives and political potential are defined by these relations and we won’t know how to organize data workers and consumers alike until we have a full understanding of these relations. His lessons, however, are hard to parse. While his critiques are mostly confined to consumption on digital platforms, The New Flesh offers insight for socialists who need to understand the political economy in its entirety. 

The New Flesh is the second title to grow out of the pandemic-lockdown podcast, Acid Horizon. Its psychological style and theory match these origins. Jones’ title plays on David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, a body-horror movie that explores the disturbing subjectivities produced by television and ends with an ambiguous provocation, “Long live the New Flesh!” For his purposes, Jones defines “the new flesh” as “the intensified fusion of mankind and media” produced by digital platforms. To explore this concept, he first discusses how our definition of humanity has to expand to accommodate selves that spend so much time with computational machinery and where our social lives are produced via an endless array of personal data, creating a facsimile in the form of our “data doubles.” These digital selves are reshaped by loops of cybernetic feedback as we receive positive and negative reinforcement from algorithmic recommendation systems for media consumption. 

Cybernetic feedback, however, produces a sloppy system as it communicates back and forth between its biological (us, tapping, scrolling, staring) and silicate components (them, computing, processing, serving). It’s a process that gets even more confused if you consider the intense personal identification people have developed with their phones and their digital profiles. To grasp this complexity, Jones introduces language drawn from Marxist psychoanalysis and the psychedelic body horror of William Burroughs and David Cronenberg. Building on these ideas, he believes hope lies in undercurrents of viral communication that could break the hegemony of capitalist media production: “There is no freshly discovered digital continent upon which we may find our new, true selves. There is only transmission and mutation, against the confinement of control.” In the endless, lossy feedback of the digital realm, Jones proposes, the accumulation of transmission and mutation will eventually break the social reproduction of capitalism. 

I’m glad for the rejection of further digital colonial metaphors, but what this means and what Jones thinks we should do as a result, is not clear to me. I read The New Flesh best as a generative primer and a polemic — one that helpfully asks us to consider how political selfhood is shaped by the digital economy. However, I think something is lost in the obsession with analyzing capitalism’s control over infrastructure through a focus on signs, symbols, and transmission in communicative capitalism. With his attention directed at the life-consuming amalgam that the feed produces, Jones doesn’t fully consider the variety of online life (the forum, the Discord server, the group chat) that are still available to those who leave the large platforms and the privatized material infrastructure that keeps them afloat. 

An entire labor and media ecosystem undergirds the tech industry’s profits off of our addicted attention. Jones describes this as: “There is no actualization of the schematic of a technical machine without relations of production that actualize it. Further, any such schema itself is a product of certain coordinates of political imagination, axioms that define the range of ends and problems to which the machine serves as a solution, and social forces of desire that produce the connection between the two.” That is, the Internet is material. Social media platforms are corporate walled gardens that slot us into smaller and smaller demographic boxes for targeting in digital ad auctions. But the exploitation goes deeper than that. 

Jones has personally performed some of the labor at the foundation of these technologies. He briefly recounts his experience as an AI microtask labeler: “My job, like that of any other microworker, was functionally to provide feedback to these machines. The cognition of the microworker is the motor that, when plugged into the microwork platform, produces data-feedback and feedback-data for the refinement of algorithmic processes. As this stuff is less appetizing or fun than the infinite scroll, what little cash there is exists as an incentive.” There’s an implicit question here that I wish Jones had spent more time answering, as a former temp AI trainer myself: What is the labor power of the workers producing the infinite scroll and AI slop? 

The U.S. state sold off huge parts of its Internet backbone in the 1990s, and only a small number of community-run networks are now under public ownership. Private companies run data centers, content delivery networks. Content moderation centers in the Global South keep our vision of online life clean, relatively un-traumatic. I recently attended a series of talks on data worker inquiries where content moderators described their working conditions. One worker spoke about being forced to watch and moderate suicide videos, every thirty seconds, for an entire day.  And while I don’t begrudge Jones his choice of theories, social scientists have been documenting the cultural and psychological effects of digital capitalism for a long time now. Engaging with this research would have deepened his inquiry. 

For example, in Addiction by Design, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll studied Las Vegas gambling and addicts for ten years to describe “the machine zone” that slot addicts experience. This “zone” is the affective self-negation produced by addictive technology. This addiction is so effective at commanding attention that the particular array of programming and design labor smooths away every possible objection that interferes with focusing on the machine and compels slot gamblers to sit in casino seats until they piss themselves. Similarly, in Computing Taste, Nicholas Seaver tracks how software engineers develop algorithmic music recommender systems that capture our attention much like human hunters design traps to catch the attention of their prey. There are separations between different kinds of academic and experiential knowledge produced about new relations of exploitation. Not bridging these gaps has made synthesizing insights across works and, as a consequence, strategic organizing against the tech industry difficult. 

As consumers of digital media ourselves, we can consider the possibilities for action through these platforms. In Jones’ discussion of virality, I kept thinking of the strategies of obfuscation and feed “cleansing” images that organizers for Palestine have used to communicate through algorithmic censorship for more than a year. Jones talks about labor, and content moderation, but the unrelenting psychedelia he fixates on actually impedes the depth of his analysis. How do we connect the struggles of content workers, microtask workers on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, and deskilled programmers? We do not have to merely theorize the new flesh in breathless horror anymore. We can chart it and apply pressure to force it (us) to grow into new, vibrant forms.