1

Capitalism is a process of positive production, accumulation, and affirmation.

Techno-connectivity is the manifestation of that process, and the drive to
homogeneity is a process of world building which necessitates a war machine of
transparency. They reduce students to data trash to be consumed or controlled.
Culp 16 (Andrew, hater, Dark Deleuze, 2016)//ML
Michel Foucault half-jokingly suggested in 1970 that perhaps one day, this century will be known
as Deleuzian (Theatrum Philosophicum, 885). It is easy to see how boosters have used this phrase to raise the profile of
Deleuze, who was far less popular than Foucault or Derrida during the initial reception of poststructuralism in America. But what if it
is a subtle jab? Foucault makes the remark in the same breath as a reference to Pierre Klossowski, a crucial member of the secret
society Acphale, which helped revive Nietzsche in France when others too easily dismissed the thinker as fascist. Historically
fitting would be an insult to Nietzsche, who proudly proclaims the untimeliness of thought
acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a
time to come at the beginning of his essay on the uses and abuses of history for life (Untimely Meditations, 60). As a major
French interlocutor of Nietzsche, Deleuze uses this exact same phrase on untimeliness in the opening pages of Difference and
Repetitionthe very book that Foucault was reviewing when he made the comment. Bearing out the implication by mincing another
Nietzschean phrase, then perhaps Foucault was accusing him of being timely, all too timely.

What would make Deleuzes thought especially timely? Critics such as Slavoj iek accuse him of being a poster
child for the cultural excesses of postmodern capitalism (Ongoing Soft Revolution). A recent round of
denunciations underwritten by a mix of wonderment and red-baiting exclaim, The founder of BuzzFeed wrote his
senior thesis on the Marxism of Deleuze and Guattari!, adding to a long list of guilty
associationsthe Israeli Defense Force reads A Thousand Plateaus!, Deleuze spouts the
fashionable nonsense of pseudoscience! Deleuzes defenders are correct to dismiss such
criticisms as either incomplete or outright spurious. Yet there is a kernel of truth that goes back to an old jokea
communist is someone who reads Das Kapital; a capitalist is someone who reads Das Kapital and understands it. Saying the same
about Deleuze: there is something absolutely essential about his work, but it would not be best to
take it at face value. The necessity of taking another step beyond Deleuze avant la lettre is
especially true when both capitalists and their opponents simultaneously cite him as a major
influence . The exact rapport between Deleuzes thought and our time thus remains a puzzle for us to solve. Does the problem
arise because certain readers act like doctors who participate in death penalty executions, who follow protocol to make a perfectly
clinical diagnosis, only to help administer a set of drugs condemned by their field? Or is there something about his prescription that
only exacerbates our current condition?

Ours is the age of angels, says French philosopher Michel Serres (Angels, a Modern Myth). Armies of invisible
messengers now crisscross the skies, tasked with communication, connection, transmission, and
translation. As inspiring as they may seem, they also compel us to embody their messages in word and
act. Click, poke, like. We feel the nervous prick of incoming missives that set us in a feverish state
until we address the incoming text message, reply to the overdue e-mail, or respond to the
pending friend request. These everyday behaviors show that the seemingly modern world of
commodities has not stolen our sense of wonderwe are as divinely moved by media as we
once were by angels. Marx, who, in Artauds phrase, has done away with the judgment of
God, shows that this mystical character of the commodity is capitalism and also its most
popular trick. Let us then follow Marxs old mole in the search of history, moving from the heavens to the
underground. Refusing to sing the hymns of the age, Deleuze and Guattari made a crucial declaration in 1991 as the Iron
Curtain crumbled and the first commercial Internet service providers came online: We
do not lack communication.
On the contrary, we have too much of it. . . . We lack resistance to the present (WP, 108).

Dark Deleuzes immediate target is connectivity, the name given to the growing integration of
people and things through digital technology. Acolyte of connection and Google chairman Eric Schmidt recently
declared at the World Economic Forum that soon the internet will disappear as it becomes inseparable from
our very being (it will be part of your presence all the time) (Business Insider). This should raise suspicion. No one
should ever take futurologists at their wordtechnology progresses with the same combined and uneven
gait as all other types development. Yet the numbers behind Schmidts claim are hardly a matter of dispute. Five
billion new people are slated to join the Internet in the next decade, and the Internet of things
has motivated individual users to integrate a vast array of online-enabled devices into their
everyday lives. Even if they do not fully realize his dreams, they still make up the substance of
Googles government of things and the living.

Many traditional concerns have been raised about connectivity. Almost all use the conservative voice of moral caution. A band of
Net Critics warn that technology is developing more quickly than our understanding of its
effects. Popular media, the great screen of the collective unconscious, materialize fears about runaway technology. There is a
whole string of Asian horror films that depict cursed media objects ruining our lives (Ringu, Pulse, Phone, One Missed Call, White:
The Melody of the Curse). The
usual cottage industry of romanticizing life without technology now
suggests that cell phones make us lazy, while circulating ideas on how to get on a social
media diet. Some philosophers, such as Bernard Stiegler, even say that technology is stealing
our precious insides. Behind these suggestions lurks a drive to get back to our roots.

The mad scientist criticism of technology misses the mark. The trouble is not that myopic technicians have
relentlessly pursued technical breakthroughs without considering the consequences (forgive them, for they know not what they
do; iek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 28). The antidote for such ignorance would just be a small dose of ideology critique.
Alternatively, technology has not exceeded humanitys capacity to manage itif anything, Foucaults insights
(the analytic of finitude, biopower) suggest that humanity influences its own future more than ever before (DI,
9093). The problem is, they know perfectly well what they are doing, but they continue doing it
anyway !

Philosophically, connectivity
is about world-building. The goal of connectivity is to make everyone
and everything part of a single world. The cases made for such a world are virtuous enough
Kantian cosmopolitanism wants perpetual peace, Marxist universalism demands the unity of theory and practice, and Habermas
would have us all be part of one great conversation. Yet connectivity
today is determined far more by people
like Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, who demonstrates the significance of Deleuzes
argument that technology is social before it is technical (F, 17). Trained as a counterterrorism expert, Google
poached Cohen from a position at the Department of State, where he convinced Condoleezza Rice to integrate social media into the
Bush administrations diplomatic tool kit (Rice, No Higher Honor, 305). In a geopolitical manifesto cowritten with then Google CEO
Eric Schmidt, The New Digital Age, Cohen
reveals Googles deep aspiration to extend U.S. government
interests at home and abroad. Their central tool? Connectivity.

When connectivity is taken as a mantra, you can see its effects everywhere. Jobseekers are told to hop
on to the web (While your resume can help you get the interview for a new job, a fully optimized LinkedIn profile can bring you
more business, more connections, and can increase your professional reputation!). Flat hierarchies are touted as good for business
management (Power is vertical; potential is horizontal!). And
the deluge of digital content is treated as the
worlds greatest resource, held back only by unequal access (Information wants to be free!).
As perverse as it sounds, many Deleuzians still promote concepts that equally motivate these
slogans: transversal lines, rhizomatic connections, compositionist networks, complex
assemblages, affective experiences, and enchanted objects. No wonder Deleuze has been derided as the lava
lamp saint of California Buddhismso many have reduced his rigorous philosophy to the mutual
appreciation of difference, openness to encounters in an entangled world, or increased capacity
through synergy.

Instead of drawing out the romance, Dark Deleuze demands that we kill our idols. The
first task is negative, as in
Deleuze and Guattaris schizoanalysis, a complete currettageoverthrow their altars, and
break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images
of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place (AO, 311). Put more modestly, the first
step is to acknowledge that the unbridled optimism for connection has failed. Temporary
autonomous zones have become special economic zones. The material consequences of connectivism are
clear: the terror of exposure, the diffusion of power, and the oversaturation of information. A
tempting next move would be to criticize Deleuzian connectivists as falling behind the times,
having not recognized their own moment of recuperation. Yet such an accusation would only
prepare the ground for a more timely intervention. Dark Deleuze does not take up the mantle of
prophetic guruism or punctual agitprop. As a project, it instead follows Deleuzes advice to
create untimely vacuoles of non-communication that break circuits rather than extend them
(D, 175). The point is not to get out of this place but to cannibalize itwe may be of this world,
but we are certainly not for it. Such out-of-jointedness is a distance. And distance is what begins the dark
plunge into the many worlds eclipsed by the old.

Their form of computational capitalism causes fascist control and a politics of

disposability which results in violence.
Featherstone 10 (Mark, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Keele University, Death-Drive America:
On Scott Wilsons Vision of the Cultural Politics of American Nihilism in the Age
of Supercapitalism, Fast Capitalism 7.1, 2010)//ML **edited for gendered language

Despite the dire warnings of the prophets of technological dystopia such as Heidegger we remain unable to really
conceive of the value of organic life vis--vis the vitality of technology because we are infused by
the spirit of the machine that has no purpose beyond the endless reproduction of its most
basic function to work. As Kroker (2003) illustrates in his The Will to Technology, the prophets of the technological future,
such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, understood that the machine, which is transformed
into Deleuze and Guattaris war machine in Wilsons work, has no thought, philosophy, or
reason. It simply works for the sake of working and ensuring that it continues to works in the
future. In Krokers view this image of what Deleuze and Guattari call the mecanosphere was predicted by
Marx, who advanced the notion of circulation, Nietzsche, who made the idea of the will central to this
thought, and Heidegger, who linked Marx to Nietzsche in his theory of completed technological nihilism
that simply wills the will that wills itself and so on. However, we know that this is not the end of the story. Akin
to Kroker (2006), who shows that the closed circle of completed nihilism produces a mythical
resurrection effect that pushes a primitive God who hires and fires and sort winners from
losers centre stage, Wilson explains that the total expansion of the supercapitalist war machine through the
various scalings of global space-time produces a utopian moment of convulsive pleasure comparable to the mystical union with an
omniscient tech-no God for a post-Nietzschean nihilistic universe.
This is a truly apocalyptic event in Wilsons view
because the sensation of anorganic mechanistic joy is the product of the realization of
a ghoulish utopia-dystopia of total control or over-determination which
sees the supercapitalist machine start to threaten the elimination of organic life itself in favor
of a new brand of post-organic cybernetic life that does not suffer from any of the imperfections or
malfunctions of its organic predecessor. In this situation the war function and the state function
of supercapitalism are merged in the form of a violent control mechanism set on over-
determining organic life by transforming it into code that can easily flow through the imaginary
body of the globalized communications network in quantums that are equivalent to both basic
financial and telecommunications data. Under these conditions, where organic life itself is under threat from the spirit
of technology, we have entered the realm of Agambens (1998) state of exception where there is no
rule of law, but that made by those in executive power who manage the endless unfolding of
the supercapitalist machine. For Wilson (2008a), we are currently living in the
Americanized supercapitalist state of technological second nature where we are totally exposed
to the coding mechanisms of state power. In Agambens work this means that the liberal individual is
completely open to construction through discourse and that they can, therefore, easily be reduced
to a state of bare life by stripping away their legal identity. However, Wilsons postmodern, surrealistic, take on
the significance of the new coding technologies of the supercapitalist state takes this Foucauldian theory a
step further. In his view, the contemporary supercapitalist empire, which is in the process of
reducing everything and everybody to the status of code, deconstructs and reconstructs the individual as
either normal or pathological on the basis of their sociological and biological identity that flows
through the globalized communication network as streamed data. At this point the individual,
who has already been reduced to the status of a quantum of economic power by the Hobbesian
/ Lockean logic of the supercapitalist system, is totally surveilled by the normalizing power
structures implicit in the Americanized global communication network. In many respects this vision
of a total system that covers every conceivable scaling on the planet, reaching from the global level
of networked communications to the micro-biological level of individual genetic code,
represents Foucauldian (2008) biopower in its ultimate form. What the contemporary
American supercapitalist war machine achieves through the reduction of the individual to digital data is the complete
immersion of humanity into a technological coding system that simply works by endlessly circulating
information. The difference between this Americanized biopolitical machine and what Roberto Esposito
(2008) calls the archetypal biocracy of modernity, Nazism, is that the Nazi machine was never able to
globalize its model of normality and pathology because its central mechanism for reducing
humanity to the status of bare life, the camp, remained at an experimental level that required the
relatively primitive industrial production of corpses, rather than the system we live with today which creates postindustrial
postmodern Muslims or muselmnner through the reduction of humanity to the status of code. In
this respect Nazismwas nowhere near as effective in achieving the normalization of humanity as
the contemporary American supercapitalist machine because its mechanism for creating robotic [humans]
relied on brutal violence and the systematic humiliation of the embodied human. We know that the
American system sometimes slips back into the same logic, because we have all seen the images from Abu
Ghraib, but these kind of events represent a primitive or, in Wilsons Lacanian language, real form of punishment
that the supercapitalist war machine would prefer to avoid where possible, simply because it
understands that surveillance and normalization through data is a far more effective means of
ensuring that humanity is perfectly streamed through the channels of technological mecanosphere than ritual
humiliation ever could. However, the supercapitalist machine is not a static system that simply turns over
endlessly because the effect of the closure of mechanical circuit is the production of a new
mythological subject that functions to make the process of total robotization bearable. What this
means is that somewhere in the realization of the total technological system, where the global scale is the micro scale of data that
streams across the smooth spaces of the world communication network, we
encounter the real end of history in
the emergence of a kind of metaphysical temporal loop, which connects the
contemporary supercapitalist machine to ancient cosmological notions of the micro-macrocosm that showed how man was
intimately related to the universe, and, as a consequence, the
violent closure of the circuit of history running
from ancient Greece to postmodern America, with the result that humanity is thrown back into
prehistory and mythology.

While creativity was once revolutionary, capital has appropriated the forces of
creation to the point that advertisers are the most creative creatures in the
world and conceptualization of truly new ideas has been rendered impossible.
Productivity, or the ability to produce, is thus the metric by which capital places
bodies on a hierarchy.
Culp 16 (Andrew, Media Theorist in Aesthetics and Politics, Teaching at CalArts, Dark
Deleuze, 2016)//ML

We need reasons to believe in this world, Deleuze demands (C2, 172). We are so distracted by
the cynicism of ideological critique that we too easily dismiss the real world as an illusion. The
problem is exaggerated even more now that we mistake knowledge for belief, a confusion fed
by growing databases of readily available information. He asks us to relink with the world as a
matter of faith, to believe in something even as transient as the fleeting sensations of cinema
(C2, 169173). Although his suggestion is not wrong, it is incomplete. In his haste, Deleuze
forgets to pose the problem with the ambivalence found in all his other accounts of power
how affects are ruled by tyrants, molecular revolutions made fascist, and nomad war machines
enrolled to fight for the state. Without it, he becomes Nietzsches braying ass, which says yes
only because it is incapable of saying no (NP, 17886). We must then make up for Deleuzes
error and seek the dark underside of belief. The key to identifying what lies beneath begins with
the path of belief, but only to pursue a different orientation. So start with a similar becoming-
active that links up with the forces that autoproduce the real. But instead of simply appreciating
the forces that produce the World, Dark Deleuze intervenes in them to destroy it. At one time,
such an intervention would have been called the Death of God, or more recently, the Death of
Man. What is called for today is the Death of this World, and to do so requires cultivating a
hatred for it.

Deleuze refutes the image of Nietzsche as a dour pessimist. Flipping that image on its head,
Deleuze argues that Nietzsche is an unparalleled thinker of affirmation. But in doing so, even
Deleuzes masterful pen cannot erase the many moments of negativity that impregnate
Nietzsches work. Deleuze thus turns his eye to Nietzsches moments of creation, as exemplified
in a passage from the fifty-eighth aphorism of The Gay Science:

How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out the origin and this misty
shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts as real, so- called reality. We can
destroy only as creators.But let us not forget: it is enough to create new names and
estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new things.
Dissatisfied with Nietzsches implied goal of destruction, Deleuze inverts the phrase into
destroy in order to create (DI, 130). This formulation appears over and again in his work. To
name a few places: in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari say that capitalism destroys what
came before to create its own earthly existence, a process of three tasks whereby the first is
negative (destroy!) and the second two are positive (create! create!). Deleuze later argues that
the painter must first destroy prior clichs before creating a new image (FB, 7190). And in their
final collaboration, Deleuze and Guattari scold those who criticize without creating as the
plague of philosophy (WP, 28).

There is something disarming about the sincerity of Deleuze and Guattaris definition of
philosophy as the art of constructing concepts (WP, 2). Yet it feels odd in an era full of trite
invitations to being constructive: if you dont have anything nice to say, dont say anything at
all, if constructive thoughts are planted, positive outcomes will be the result, or, simply,
be constructive, not destructive. The simple ifthen structure of these self-help maxims is
more than logical; it discloses a transitive theory of justice. Just as the meek will inherit the
earth, it promises the just deserts of construction. Good things come to those who are
constructive! How far this is from Marxs ruthless criticism of all that exists (Letter to
Arnold Ruge). Now that advertisers claim to be the most creative of all creatures on earth, it is
time to replace creativity as the central mechanism of liberation.

Deleuze would have hated todays images of creativitythere is a great violence in comparing
the fabrication of concepts to any happy means of construction; concepts are friends only to
thought, as they break consensus (WP, 46, 99). Concepts are not discovered but the result of a
catastrophe, Deleuze and Guattari say, from turning away, tiredness, distress, and distrust (67).
True thought is rare, painful, and usually forced on us by the brutality of an event so terrible
that it cannot be resolved without the difficulty of thought. As such, we must quit treating
concepts as some wonderful dowry from some wonderland to understand the hard, rigorous
work that goes into their creation (5).

Productivism is Dark Deleuzes second object of criticism (connectivism being the first). It may
be possible to distinguish concept creation from productivism, for the latter is commercial
professional training that aspires for thought only beneficial from the viewpoint of universal
capitalism (WP, 14). Maintaining such a distinction is difficultin an age of compulsory
happiness, it is easy for construction to be conflated with capitalist value, the empty promises
of democracy, or just plain helpfulness (1068). To that end, productivism distinguishes itself
with two formal principles: accumulation and reproduction. First, productivism manages
political conflicts through a logic of accumulation, as seen in the full mobilizations of World
War II as well as in Stalins and Maos dreary attempts to outproduce the capitalist world
system. Second, productivism limits production to reproduction, as capitalism attempts to do,
by initiating only those circuits of production that operate on an expanding basis (what Lenin
called imperialism). The significance of the critique of productivism is that it expands the
grammar of power beyond what is beholden to accumulation or reproduction.
The normalization of violence is the pinnacle of capitalism we are moving
toward a post-modern feudalism by which the only rule is producing capital.
The impact is a global civil war this root causes their terrorism arguments
Bifo 16 (Franco Bifo Berardi, founder of the famous Radio Alice in Bologna and an
important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, they teach Social History of the Media at
the Accademia di Brera, Milan, The Coming Global Civil War: Is There Any Way Out?
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/69/60582/the-coming-global-civil-war-is-there-any-way-
out/)//ML **Edited for gendered language

Are we heading into the Third World War? Yes and no: war has been with us for the past fifteen years, it
promises to be with us for a long time, and it threatens to destroy the last remnants of modern
civilization. The exacerbation of xenophobia across the West and the rise of nationalism in
countries like France are causes and effects of a looming war whose sources lie in the past two
hundred years of colonial impoverishment and humiliation of the majority of the world
population , not to mention neoliberal competition and the privatization of everythingincluding
war itself. Pacifism is becoming irrelevant as the conditions of war become irreversible. How can we oppose war
when killers shoot at a peaceful crowd at a concert? War is becoming normal: the stock exchange no longer
reacts to massacres, as its main concern is the looming stagnation of the world economy . After
every armed attack, whether by Islamists or white supremacists, by random murderers or by well-trained fundamentalist
killers, Americans run to buy more weapons. So weapons are not only increasing in the arsenals of
nations, but also in the kitchens and bedrooms of everyday families. A Republican assemblywoman from
Nevada named Michele Fiore recently posted a Christmas family portrait on Facebook. At first glance, its like any other holiday card,
with three generations of a family in red shirts and jeans in front of a Christmas tree. Upon closer inspection, you see that Mrs. Fiore,
her adult daughters, their husbands, and even one of her grandchildren are all holding firearms. The
privatization of war is
an obvious feature of neoliberal deregulation, and the same paradigm has generated Halliburton and the Sinaloa
Cartel, Blackwater and Daesh. The business of violence is one of the main branches of the global
economy and financial abstraction does not discriminate criminal money from any other kind.
The process of externalization and privatization is now provoking a worldwide civil war that is
feeding itself. According to Nicholas Kristof, in the last four years more people have died in the United
States from guns (including suicides and accidents) than Americans died in the wars in Korea, Vietnam,
Afghanistan and Iraq combined. Like neoliberal corporations investing money in the ultimate
business, the Iraqi-Syrian caliphate and the Mexican narco army pay salaries to their soldiers,
who are necro-proletarians. The narco business recruits unemployed young men from
Monterrey, Sinaloa, and Veracruz. The caliphate recruits young men from the suburbs of
London, Cairo, Tunis, and Paris, then trains them to kidnap and slaughter people at random.
Daesh salaries have been estimated to be as much as one thousand US dollars a month. The group acquires this money
from ransom, oil, and taxes imposed on millions of Sunni people. They deliver a postmodern
medievalism, but one that is not at all backwards. On the contrary, it is an anticipation of the
future. In a video released by Dubiq, the advertising agency of the Islamic State, the rhetoric is
the same as any other type of advertising: buy this product and youll be happy. Multiple camera
angles, slick graphics, slow motion, and even artificial wind give the whole thing a more
dramatic mood: join the cause and youll find friends, warmth, and well-being. Jihad is the best therapy for
depression. A message for feeble-minded people, for suffering people craving warmth, virile friendship, belonging. Not so
different from the ads that we see every day in our city streets, only more sincere when it
comes to the subject of suicide. Suicide is crucial in this video: 6,500 current or former US
military soldiers commit suicide each year, according to Dubiq. While Americans die alone in anger
and despair, Gods soldiers die eager to meet some seventy virgins waiting in Paradise to fuck
the warriors. Do you remember Yugoslavia? For some time, it was a rather healthy federation of twenty-
five million people. Different ethnic and religious communities coexisted, factories were managed by workers, everybody
had a privately owned house, and nobody suffered from hunger. Then came the International
Monetary Fund, the Polish pope pushing Croatians into religious war against the Orthodox Serbs,
and Germany delivering weapons to the fascist Ustaa. In 1990, the United States cut off all forms
of credit to Yugoslavia unless separate elections were held in each state of the federation
within six months. As a consequence, Yugoslaviano longer able to conduct foreign tradewas condemned to
commercial bankruptcy, which reinforced the divisive tendencies of its states. The US then
funded the individual states to dissolve the federation, also supporting parties and
movements that promoted this process . Meanwhile, Germany shipped arms to Slovenia, Croatia,
Bosnia, and Herzegovina. In March of 1991, fascist organizations in Croatia called for the overthrow
of the Socialist government and the expulsion of all Serbs from Croatia. On March 5, 1991, they
attacked the federal army base at Gospi, and civil war began. The extreme right-wing Croatian
party Democratic Union, which used the flag, emblems, and slogans of the pro-Nazi Ustaa
party, seized power. Citizenship, property rights, employment, retirement benefits, and
passports were granted only to Croats and to no other ethnic group. Thus, 300,000 Serbs armed
themselves and entered the fray with unspeakable brutality. The destruction of Yugoslavia can
be seen as a return of Hitlers ghost to the world scene. Ethnic-religious wars caused around
170,000 casualties, as ethnic cleansing was practiced in every area of the federation. After seven
years of violence, a new state order emerged based on a paradigm of ethnic-religious identification, a principle thought to have been
extinct after the end of the Second World War and the defeat of Nazism. Twenty
years after the Nazi-neoliberal
wars of Yugoslavia, in all those small nation-states (except perhaps Slovenia) unemployment is
rampant, people are impoverished, schools are privatized, and public infrastructure is in
disrepair. Today, the Yugoslavia of the Nineties may well be a blueprint for the European future:
German Ordoliberalism has impoverished social life, depleted public services all over the
continent, and inflicted humiliation on Syriza which has jeopardized the core of European
solidarity . The failure to deal with the new wave of migrants from the East has exposed the
political fragility of the European Union, and now fuels a new outburst of fear, racism, shame, and bad conscience.
From the Balkans to Greece, from Libya to Morocco, are the ten million people amassing at these borders going to be the
perpetrators of the next terrorist wave? Or will they be the victims of the next Holocaust? After the attacks in the center of Paris on
Friday, November 13, a nervous French President declared: The security pact takes precedence
over the stability pact. France is at war. Bin Ladens dream has been fulfilled. A small group of
fanatics has provoked fragmentary global civil war. Can it be stopped? In the present
condition of perpetual economic stagnation, emerging markets are crumbling, the
European Union is paralyzed, the promised economic recovery is elusive, and it is hard to
foresee an awakening from this nightmare. The only imaginable way out of this hell is to end financial
capitalism, but this does not seem to be at hand. Nevertheless, this is the only prospect we
can pursue in such an obscurantist time: to create solidarity among the bodies of
cognitive workers worldwide, and to build a techno-poetic platform for the
collaboration of cognitive workers for the liberation of knowledge from both religious
and economic dogma. A fragmented front of nationalist parties is gaining the upper
hand: they oppose the euro currency and globalization, and they call for the restoration
of national sovereignty. This front has assembled in the governing coalition of Hungary
(which includes Nazis and authoritarian nationalists), in the Italian right-wing of Matteo
Salvini, in the Polish government, in the anti-European British party UKIP, and in the
rightist majority of the Bavarian CSU. This anti-euro front of European forces is
converging with Russian nationalism under the authoritarian leadership of Putin and
the banner of national populism and unrelenting Islamophobia. After the humiliation of
Syriza, the future of Europe is held captive by the opposition between financial violence
and national violence. In order to grasp the dynamic that drives the global civil war, we
first have to see the relation between the icy wind of financial abstraction and the
reaction of the aggressive body of society separated from its brain. The icy wind of
financial abstraction is instilling in the European soul a sense of desolation that Michel
Houellebecq has described in his books. La soumission (Submission) is a novel about the sadness that
emerges from the vanishing of collective desire. Submission to the Supreme Entity (be it God or the market)
is the source of the present gloom, and the source of the present war. Globalization has brought about the
obliteration of modern universalism: capital flows freely everywhere and the labor
market is globally unified, but this has not led to the free circulation of [people], nor to the
affirmation of universal reason in the world. Rather, the opposite is happening: as the intellectual energies of
society are captured by the network of financial abstraction, as cognitive labor is
subjugated to the abstract law of valorization, and as human communication is
transformed into abstract interaction among disembodied digital agents, the social body
is detached from the general intellect. The subsumption of the general intellect into the
corporate kingdom of abstraction is depriving the living community of intelligence,
understanding, and emotion.

Their approach to education is a means of integrating students into a

hyperfunctional nucleus of value that reifies their perpetual slavery to
corporate standards of Productivism this also provides more uniqueness for
the alternative because the state is moving to subsume internalized negativity.
Carlin and Wallin 2014 (Matthew and Jason, Matthew is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Critical
and Visual Studies program at Pratt Institute, USA, Jason is an Assistant Professor of Media and Youth Culture Studies
in Curriculum at the University of Alberta, Canada, Deleuze and Guattari, Politics and Education)//ML

Capitalism has become informalized, making its way into all aspects of everyday life and
disengaging itself from its previous reliance on governmental institutions to orchestrate the
accumulation of surplus value. What this indicates for Deleuze and Guattari is that the State is no longer solely
oriented toward capturing those territories existing externally to the socius in the form of what Marx
famously called primitive accumulation but it is now oriented toward the capture of internal territories
(where primitive accumulation is also now directed inward ). As capital has become social
capital, the extraction of surplus value no longer pertains to the work place, but to the entire
interior of the socius, including the capture of affects, desires, and emotional energies. In other words, instead of conceiving
of these changes as an indication that the State has become superfluous, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the new
expansive properties of capitalist accumulation simply make the State indistinguishable from society. In the face of the construction
of new pathways to extract profit from previously unforeseen internal territories, the
State has not been abolished,
but merely internalized. As the State has been internalized in contemporary capitalism, and
forms of potential accumulation have expanded, social control for Deleuze and Guattari has
taken on new importance. As a result both schooling and education have also assumed new
roles. No longer does the institution of schooling serve as the specific sites from which one goes
to complete the necessary training to be a productive citizen, but an institution that has
completely adopted the corporate model. Under these circumstances, students are no longer
confined to fulfill their necessary training, but set free to actively and continuously
participate in consumption, the production of surplus value, and never ending forms of training
and education necessary for both...Power, then, must inscribe indebtedness on its subjects and, through life-long
learning, match him or her with how to service it through what Graeber calls the paying of 'tribute' (2OM, p.363). Moreover, the
breeding of the debtors is most effective when it begins when the debtors are young and at school, both contextualizing and
accompanying them throughout their lives. defining their options and conditioning their potential: 'Far from being an appearance
assumed by exchange, debt is the immediate effect or the direct means of the territorial and corporal inscription process' (Deleme
and Gummi, 1983, p. 190). The conditioning must also breed social and economic competitiveness so that the aggression and
resentment that might build up in individual debtors is expressed and distributed horizontally rather than vertically- so that the
targets for annihilation are friend and neighbor rather than creditor and modulator. Indeed, when one
of FinLies
legitimating rationale is that today, students must be prepared for an increasingly competitive
world - one where globally and technologically interconnected debtors face off against one
another in a race to the lowswaged bottom - this only serves to objectify the
ideological/financial oligarchy today, education system is being designed to serve. By
pitting the employees of tomorrow against one another in a Darwinian pursuit of merit. based
gains (whatever that might mean) the system is able to re-legitimize itself, dig in its heels and
sow the seeds of its own perpetuation. Indeed, Deleuze presciently observed that the 'modulating principle
of 'salary according to merit. has not failed to tempt national education itself', and that 'just as the corporation
replaces the factory, so too todays 'perpetual training tends to replace the school which, in
turn, is The surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation 1992, p. 5). So let us make no
bones about it, with the imposition of Fit into elementary- and high-school education systems to corporations - particularly financial
corporations that live off of the debt-peonage of their clients - the political process has paved the way for private financial interests
to take over education (not to mention other jurisdictions). The embedding of financial literacy training into all school curricula after
the enduring economic crisis of 2007-8 also demonstrates that the financial industry is most interested kin 'helping' the public after
the fact* - after the bailouts, after the removal of mortgage risks from their books by the taxpayer (both in Canada and the United
States), after the explosion of student debt - and prior to the next (perhaps final or decisive) financial meltdown. Indeed, now that so
many sections of society have maned out their metaphorical credit-card from national and provincial governments to families,
individuals, and students, - = the financial system has its own set of existentially-driven reasons to get serious about, aching the rules
of being an obedient and profitable (for them) debtor in order to assure that their collective and interconnected balance sheets will
not be the next ones to implode. We are then, at a point of ubiquitous debt saturation across vast (if not all) levels of society, and
responsibility for tomorrow's cascading aims is ready to be placed on the shoulders of individuals apparently educated in the dark
arts of financial literacy. It is, as Deleuze presciently observed, 'the beginning of something': in the case of the school system, this
new beginning necessitates that the school system adopt 'continuous forms of control' and
'perpetual training'; he also suggests that this new finance-driven beginning requires the
abandonment of all research' that is not pave the way for 'the introduction of the 'corporation.
at all levels of schooling' *(Detail, 1992, p. 7). In light of this new beginning - *this society of
control - premised on the financial industry setting the education agenda by embedding their
logic across all financial disciplines and by constructing and reenacting a culture of competition
for credit. Deleuze observes that today's and tomorrow students are liable to embrace the new financialized terms being thrust
upon them with open arms, believing that if they only play the modulated game on offer by the plutocrats correctly (ie. according to
the rules) they stand to win what is being framed as a sort of merit-based life-lottery. Deleme observes, for example, that todays
young people 'strangely boast of being motivated that they request and re-request apprenticeships and permanent training' as a
good faith and exuberant expression of trust in a system bent on providing for their well-being though education. But, Deleuze,
warns, its up to them to discover what theyre being made to serve.
The alternative is to reject the affirmative in favor of a radical exodus from
neoliberal capital. Only through a collective refusal to invest psychic and
physical energy into capitalisms restructuring of public education can
alternative modes of organizing and social life emerge in the excess of wage
relations.
Slater 2015. Graham B Slater is Marriner S. Eccles Fellow in Political Economy at the University
of Utah, where he is completing a PhD in the Department of Education, Culture and Society. His
research examines the relationship between market-based school reforms, neoliberalism, and
the social welfare of communities historically denied (particularly along the lines of race and
class) quality forms of education. Prior to studying at the University of Utah, he earned an M.A.
in Educational Foundations, Policy, and Practice at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a
B.A. in History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he was trained as a
secondary social studies teacher. Education as recovery: neoliberalism, school reform, and the
politics of crisis. Journal of Education Policy Volume 30, 2015 - Issue 1]

The collective assertion of refusal might be productively considered in the terms of exodus, in
which resistant communities cease to rethink education from inside globalization and
commodification (Lewis 2012, 846). If we understand crisis recoverycrisis as a purgatorial
loop, the conceptual apparatus of exodus, which invokes a Deleuzian lexicon of exit and lines
of flight, might contribute to more imaginative renderings of refusal politics. Hardt and Negri
(2009) invoke this concept to elaborate their theorization of class struggle within the current
neoliberal mode of immaterial production in a way that also has relevance to the discussion of
recovery. For Hardt and Negri, exodus is a process of subtraction from the relationship with
capital by means of actualizing the potential autonomy of labor-power (152). In the context of
crisis and recovery, refusing to invest in or capitulate to recovery would constitute a
debilitating withdrawal of productive energies and capacities that are absolutely necessary to
the continued dominance of neoliberal capital. The autonomous and affirmative refusal to play
the role of recovering subjects and communities is an expression of the productive capacities
that exceed the relationship with capital achieved by stepping through the opening in the social
relation of capital and across the threshold (Hardt and Negri 2009, 152; emphasis added).
Exodus has also played an important conceptual role in the black radical tradition (Kelley 2002;
Robinson 1983; for an example from a progressive educational perspective, see Ladson-Billings
2001). As Kelley (2002) explains, Exodus provided black people with a language to critique
Americas racist state and build a new nation, for its central theme wasnt simply escape but a
new beginning (1617). Central goals in the black radical visions of exodus were to build
autonomous black institutions, improving community life, and in some cases establishing a
homeland that will enable African Americans to develop a political economy geared more
toward collective needs than toward accumulation (114). Thus, while the post-Marxist
theories of exodus offered by Hardt and Negri are important, thinking of exodus in the context
of US social and educational politics without attending to the historical legacies of black
resistance to political, economic, and subjective assault by power would be an incomplete
analysis. As Brown and De Lissovoy (2011) explain, the theorizations of Black radical scholars
offer conceptualizations a complexity to class and capital that are indispensable to radical
theory and practice, and which, while sometimes echoed even in theory that does not take
account of race, also give these complex conceptualizations a concrete (and strategic) content
(606). Lipman (2011) asserts that [t]he conjunction of capitalist crisis and emergent alternatives
represents an historic opportunity to uproot the fundamental causes of so much misery that has
lasted for so long, and to work toward a new day (147). Furthermore, in denouncing recovery,
we should not assume that communities have not already begun to resist the pittances
offered by neoliberal reforms. Many communities have regularly asserted their autonomy for
decades by refusing the offensive cycle of crisisrecoverycrisis. Means (2011), for example,
cites the case of the Little Village hunger strike in Chicago in 2001 as an example of the
collective production of a semi-autonomous zone outside the empty consensual orders of the
market (1099). Against two decades of neoliberalization and educational disinvestment in
communities of color, thirteen Little Village community members engaged in an affective and
corporeal politics of refusal, in which they fasted for nineteen days and staged a series of
events such as theater performances, rallies, and prayer vigils to maximize their message,
voice, and political visibility (Means 2011, 1094). This movement provides a compelling
glimpse of how refusal politics might be capable of breaking the cycle of recovery. In the face
of neoliberal disinvestment resulting in increased educational inequality, community
segregation and gentrification, and food deserts, the Little Village hunger strike can be read as
a refusal of neoliberal recovery through a performative theatricalization of those very
dispossessive assaults (Butler and Athanasiou 2013), flaunting their ability to use
neoliberalisms best attempts at subjugation as a means to autonomously rearticulate what
counts as education policy (Anyon 2005) and reform in the neoliberal wasteland
Case
 Data Mining
Disease extinction impossible and ahistorical
Posner 5 (Richard A., Judge U.S. Court of Appeals 7th Circuit, Professor Chicago School of Law, January 1, 2005,
Skeptic, Altadena, CA, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-4150331/Catastrophe-
the-dozen-most-significant.html#abstract)

Yet the fact that Homo sapiens has managed to survive every disease to assail it in the 200,000
years or so of its existence is a source of genuine comfort, at least if the focus
is on extinction events. There have been enormously destructive plagues, such as the Black
Death, smallpox, and now AIDS, but none has come close to destroying the entire human race. There is a
biological reason. Natural selection favors germs of limited lethality; they are fitter in an
evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to be spread if the germs do not kill their
hosts too quickly. The AIDS virus is an example of a lethal virus, wholly natural, that by lying dormant yet infectious
in its host for years maximizes its spread. Yet there is no danger that AIDS will destroy theentire
human race. The likelihood of a natural pandemic that would cause the extinction of the human
race is probably even less today than in the past (except in prehistoric times, when people lived in small,
scattered bands, which would have limited the spread of disease), despite wider human contacts that make it
more difficult to localize an infectious disease. The reason is improvements in medical science. But the comfort is a small
one. Pandemics can still impose enormous losses and resist prevention and cure: the lesson of the AIDS pandemic. And
there is always a lust time. That the human race has not yet been destroyed by germs created or made more lethal by
modern science, as distinct from completely natural disease agents such as the flu and AIDS viruses, is even less
reassuring. We haven't had these products long enough to be able to infer survivability from our experience with them. A
recent study suggests that as immunity to smallpox declines because people am no longer being vaccinated against it,
monkeypox may evolve into "a successful human pathogen," (9) yet one that vaccination against smallpox would provide
at least some protection against; and even before the discovery of the smallpox vaccine, smallpox did not wipe out the
human race. What is new is the possibility that science, bypassing evolution, will enable monkeypox to be "juiced up"
through gene splicing into a far more lethal pathogen than smallpox ever was.

Intervening actors check

Zakaria 9Editor of Newsweek, BA from Yale, PhD in pol sci, Harvard. He serves on the board of Yale University, The Council on Foreign Relations,
The Trilateral Commission, and Shakespeare and Company. Named "one of the 21 most important people of the 21st Century" (Fareed, The Capitalist
Manifesto: Greed Is Good, 13 June 2009, http://www.newsweek.com/id/201935)

NoteLaurie Garrett=science and health writer, winner of the Pulitzer, Polk, and Peabody Prize

It certainly looks like another example of crying wolf. After bracing ourselves for a global pandemic, we've suffered something more like the
usual seasonal influenza. Three weeks ago the World Health Organization declared a health emergency, warning countries to "prepare for a pandemic" and said
that the only question was the extent of worldwide damage. Senior officials prophesied that millions could be infected by the disease. But
as of last week, the WHO had confirmed only 4,800 cases of swine flu, with 61 people having died of it. Obviously, these low numbers are a
pleasant surprise, but it does make one wonder, what did we get wrong? Why did the predictions of a pandemic turn out to be
so exaggerated? Some people blame an overheated media, but it would have been difficult to ignore major international health organizations and governments when
they were warning of catastrophe. I think there is a broader mistake in the way we look at the world. Once we see a problem, we can describe it in
great detail, extrapolating all its possible consequences. But we can rarely anticipate the human response to that crisis.
Take swine flu. The virus had crucial characteristics that led researchers to worry that it could spread far and fast.
They describedand the media reportedwhat would happen if it went unchecked. But it did not go unchecked . In fact, swine flu was met
by an extremely vigorous response at its epicenter, Mexico. The Mexican government reacted quickly and massively,
quarantining the infected population, testing others, providing medication to those who needed it. The noted expert on this subject, Laurie Garrett, says,
"We should all stand up and scream, 'Gracias, Mexico!' because the Mexican people and the Mexican government have sacrificed on a level that I'm not sure as
Americans we would be prepared to do in the exact same circumstances. They shut down their schools. They shut down businesses, restaurants, churches, sporting
events. They basically paralyzed their own economy. They've suffered billions of dollars in financial losses still being tallied up, and thereby really
brought
transmission to a halt." Every time one of these viruses is detected, writers and officials bring up the Spanish
influenza epidemic of 1918 in which millions of people died. Indeed, during the last pandemic scare, in 2005, President George W. Bush claimed that he had been
reading a history of the Spanish flu to help him understand how to respond. But the world we live in today looks nothing like 1918.
Public health-care systems are far better and more widespread than anything that existed during the First World War. Even Mexico, a
developing country, has a first-rate public-health systemfar better than anything Britain or France had in the early 20th century.
Your impacts are media exaggeration.
Michael Lind (policy director of the New America Foundation's Economic Growth Program)
February 2011 So Long, Chicken Little; published in Foreign Policy, March/April
2011; http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/22/so_long_chicken_little?page=0,8; Jay]

There's nothing like a good plague to get journalists and pundits in a frenzy. Although the threat of global
pandemics is real, it's all too often exaggerated. In the last few years, the world has experienced two such
pandemics, the avian flu (H5N1) and swine flu (H1N1). Both fell far short of the apocalyptic vision of a new
Black Death cutting huge swaths of mortality with its remorseless scythe . Out of a global population of more
than 6 billion people, 8,768 are estimated to have died from swine flu, 306 from avian flu. And yet it was not just the BBC
ominously informing us that "the deadly swine flu cannot be contained." Like warnings about the proliferation of nuclear
weapons, the good done by mobilizing people to address the problem must be weighed against the danger of
apocalypse fatigue on the part of a public subjected to endless Chicken Little scares.
 Cyber
War in the modern era exists more in the image of it being fought than in
reality; wars are conducted via the media with military action just as an
afterthought. To avoid war, we must oppose its simulation to give it authority
through images is to make it real.
Baudrillard, 94 (Jean, The Illusion of the End, 1994, CP)
When the prospect of an atomic clash disappeared once and for all, when it got lost in space with Star Wars, it
had to be tested in simulated form, in a miniature war-game where the possibility of annihilating the enemy could be
checked out. But, symptomatically, care was taken not to go that far: Saddam, who will, in the end, have been nothing but that
fairground dummy you shoot at from point-blank range, had to be saved. It was just a second-hand scenario. So this
military
orgy wasnt an orgy at all. It was an orgy of simulation, the simulation of an orgy. A German word sums all this up very
well: Schwindel, which means both giddiness and swindle, loss of consciousness and mystification. The Americans fought the
same war in respect of world opinion via the media, censorship, CNN, etc. as they fought on the
battlefield. They used the same fuel air explosives in the media, where they draw all the oxygen
out of public opinion. The amnesia about it is, in itself, a confirmation of the unreality of this war.
Overexposed to the media, underexposed to memory. Built-in obsolescence, as with any consumer article. . .
Forgetting is built into the event itself in the profusion of information and details, just as obsolescence is built into the object in the
profusion of useless accessories. If
you take one-thousandth of what you see on the TV news to heart,
youre done for. But television protects us from this. Its immunizing, prophylactic use protects us from an
unbearable responsibility. Its effect and its images self-destruct in the mind. So is this the zero degree of
communication? Certainly, it is: people fear communication like the plague. There was no exulting after the Gulf War
either (and yet, it was a victory, wasnt it?). There was, rather, a flight into amnesia and hypocrisy. A botched operation, even in
surgical terms: its labours produced nothing, even the two hundred thousand dead produced nothing, apart from that 16ccessory
miscarriage, the New World Order. It was a war without results, but not without an aftermath. Once
past the dilemma of
the reality/unreality of the war, we are back in the pure and simple reality of political ignominy,
in the most odious Realpolitik: the Shiites, the Kurds, the calculated survival of Saddam Here, the most fervent
defenders of the wars reality end up conceding that perhaps nothing has in fact happened. But
they prejudge this from the absence of an outcome; they do not judge the event itself. Which shows them to be just as much
engaged in Realpolitik as anyone else. The question is not whether one is for or against war, but whether
one is for or against the reality of war. Analysis must not be sacrificed to the expression of anger. It has to be
directed in its entirety against reality, against manifestness here against the manifest reality of this war.
The Stoics contest the very self-evidence of pain, when the bodys confusion is at its height. Here, we must contest the very
self-evidence of war, when the confusion of the real is at its height. We must hit out at the weak
point of reality. Its too late afterwards: youre stuck with the acts of violence, stuck in realist abjection. In a little time, as we
get some distance from it, or even now, with a little imagination, it will be possible to read La guerre du Golfe na pas eu lieu * as a
science-fiction novel, as the anticipation, right in the thick of things, of the event as a fictional scenario something into which it will
surely be turned later. Like Borges chronicling of cultures which never existed. By
making transparent the non-event
of the war, you give it force in the imagination somewhere other than in the real time of news
where it simply peters out. You give force to the illusion of war, rather than become an
16ccessory to its false reality. Anyhow, the book has fallen quite logically into the same black hole as the war. It has
faded as quickly as the event whose absence it denounced. It was a successful non-event, like the Agency, like
appearing on television. All this is as it should have been since it dealt with something which did
not take place. It was the simulacrum of Helen that was at the heart of the Trojan War. The Egyptian priests had held on to the
original (we do not know what became of it) when she set out again with Paris for Troy. But, even without the magic of the priests,
Helen was in any case merely a simulacrum, since the universal form of beauty is as unreal as gold, the universal form of all
commodities. Every universal form is a simulacrum, since it is the simultaneous equivalent of all the
others something it is impossible for any real being to be. There are many analogies between the Trojan and Gulf wars. Before
the expedition, Menelaus called all the warriors of the Greek world to arms, just as Bush did with all the nations of the free world.
The incubation period of the war was very long (seven years in the case of Troy, seven months for the Gulf War) and the final phase
was very rapid in both cases. The Greek victory was won at great cost to the victors, whom the gods punished relentlessly (the
murder of Agamemnon, Clytaemnestra, Orestes, etc.). What will be the fate of the victors of the Gulf War? Admittedly, this time
the war did not take place. This difference leaves the Americans some hope, the gods having no real cause to avenge themselves. If
the Helen of the Trojan War was a simulacrum, what was the Gulf Wars Helen? Where was there simulacrum here,
except in the simulacrum of war itself?

Deterrence precludes nuclear war however threats of nuclear annihilation serve

to reify a universal security apparatus. The balance of terror is nothing more
than the terror of balance.
Baudrillard 81 (Jean, Simulacra and Simulation: The Orbital and the Nuclear, 1981,CP)
The apotheosis of simulation: the nuclear. However, the balance of terror is never anything but the spectacular
slope of a system of deterrence that has insinuated itself from the inside into all the cracks of
daily life. Nuclear suspension only serves to seal the trivialized system of deterrence that is at the
heart of the media, of the violence without consequences that reigns throughout the world, of the
aleatory apparatus of all the choices that are made for us. The most insignificant of our behaviors is regulated by
neutralized, indifferent, equivalent signs, by zero-sum signs like those that regulate the strategy
of games (but the true equation is elsewhere, and the unknown is precisely that variable of simulation which makes of
the atomic arsenal itself a hyperreal form, a simulacrum that dominates everything and reduces
all ground-level events to being nothing but ephemeral scenarios, transforming the life left us
into survival, into a stake without stakes not even into a life insurance policy: into a policy that
already has no value). It is not the direct threat of atomic destruction that paralyzes our lives, it is deterrence that gives them
leukemia. And this deterrence comes from that fact that even the real atomic clash is precluded
precluded like the eventuality of the real in a system of signs. The whole world pretends to believe in the reality
of this threat (this is understandable on the part of the military, the gravity of their exercise and the discourse of their
strategy are at stake), but it is precisely at this level that there are no strategic stakes. The whole
originality of the situation lies in the improbability of destruction. Deterrence precludes war
the archaic violence of expanding systems. Deterrence itself is the neutral, implosive violence of
metastable systems or systems in involution. There is no longer a subject of deterrence, nor an
adversary nor a strategy it is a planetary structure of the annihilation of stakes. Atomic war, like
the Trojan War, will not take place. The risk of nuclear annihilation only serves as a pretext, through
the sophistication of weapons (a sophistication that surpasses any possible objective to such an extent that it is itself a
symptom of nullity), for installing a universal security system, a universal lockup and control system
whose deterrent effect is not at all aimed at an atomic clash (which was never in question, except without a
doubt in the very initial stages of the cold war, when one still confused the nuclear apparatus with conventional war) but, rather, at
the much greater probability of any real event, of anything that would be an event in the general system and upset its balance. The
balance of terror is the terror of balance. Deterrence is not a strategy, it circulates and is exchanged between nuclear
protagonists exactly as is international capital in the orbital zone of monetary speculation whose fluctuations suffice to control all
global exchanges. Thus the money of destruction (without any reference to real destruction, any more than floating capital
has a real referent of production) thatcirculates in nuclear orbit suffices to control all the violence and
potential conflicts around the world. What is hatched in the shadow of this mechanism with the pretext of a maximal,
objective, threat, and thanks to Damocles nuclear sword, is the perfection of the best system of control
that has ever existed. And the progressive satellization of the whole planet through this
hypermodel of security.