Lan Jiang: Digital Scorched Earth and Surplus Data
There are all manner of pessimistic descriptions regarding digital capitalism, from Byung-Chul Han’s The Transparency Society to Jonathan Crary’s Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (hereinafter referred to as Scorched Earth), through to Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism. These works depict for us a contemporary capitalism that, through big data technology and algorithmic governance, reduces the majority of people to a state of being "data-traffic" users who are indistinguishable from one another. In this state, user data is continuously extracted and utilized by platforms, ensuring that every user operates according to trajectories set by algorithms. Here, we no longer see what Martin Buber called "life in a living world," but rather individual souls mediated by digital interfaces.
Western society has gradually entered the era of digital capitalism. From the roar of the British Industrial Revolution’s machines to the laying of the foundations of the globalized world market, and now to the digital platforms established through 5G communication and the digitized internet—is humanity moving forward amidst a flock of technologies to realize the dream that the Tower of Babel failed to achieve, or are we gradually degenerating into souls whose last drops of vitality are wrung out by the hands of Charon, the ferryman of the Styx? Does digital capitalist society bring a new prosperity, or a digital scorched earth? If it is the latter, how can modern people survive on this scorched earth? This is the inner interrogation that the era poses to today’s humanities scholars; it requires us to continue pursuing our hope at the portal opened for us by digital technology.
I. Rootless People under Modern Capitalist Society
During the winter semester at the University of Freiburg in 1929–1930, Heidegger titled his course "The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics." In this semester, he lectured on a particular experience:
I am sitting in the empty room of a small railway station. It is four hours until the next train. The place is uninviting. I have a book in my backpack—shall I read? No. Or think through a problem? I am unable to. I read the timetable or the list of stations with the various connections. I look at the clock—only a quarter of an hour has passed. Then I go out onto the local road. I walk up and down, just to do something. But it’s no use. I count the trees along the road, look at my watch again—only five minutes since the last time I looked. I pace up and down again, sit on a stone, draw figures in the sand. I look at my watch—only half an hour has passed. [1]
Heidegger later defined this experience as "profound boredom" (tiefe Langeweile). This profound boredom was precisely caused by the train being delayed at the small station, which made him feel that this small town—one he passed through every week—was so utterly foreign to him. What was strange was not just the internal structure of the station; he saw unfamiliar tables, an unfamiliar station hall, and even walking onto the main road of the town he always passed through, every plant and tree felt unfamiliar. Usually, when the train was on time, he would hurry through, board the train, and rush toward Freiburg where he taught. As for the town and station he passed every time, he had existed there, yet every scene and object in that town was alienated from him. Only when the train was late would he occasionally stop and, through profound boredom, feel everything within the town and the station; only then did the town and station seem to reveal themselves to the philosopher as a real existence for the first time. Only at this moment did the town and station reveal their possibilities to Dasein. As Heidegger continued: "It is this call that first makes Dasein in me authentically possible. This call to possibility, which goes hand in hand with the refusal, does not point toward some indeterminate, wavering possibility of Dasein, but points quite clearly to the fact that whatever it is that makes it possible, it leads Dasein toward all its essential possibilities." [2]
The truly interesting part of this process is that we have existed in a certain place, but we had no feeling for that place, no thought about it, and no deep interaction with it; naturally, this place could not manifest as a "place" for our lives. In other words, the town and station here did not present authentic possibilities to the Dasein passing through, which necessarily means that for the Dasein hurrying past, there was a loss of authentic existential possibility. What, then, is it that strips Dasein of its authentic possibilities, leaving it to appear only as a fleeting point—a passerby hurrying through? On my life’s journey, such a town or station is merely an abstract point in spatial topology; this point is no different from any other point we have passed through. We are just passing through, hurrying by. We leave no traces of life there; only on an abstract flat map is it marked as a point where I once passed. Or rather, in a life of constant hustling for livelihood and constant regulation, we are integrated into a giant machine. It is precisely this machine that makes us forget our surroundings, the towns, and the stations beside us. Through the apparatuses of the railway station and work, our eyes can only see timetables, the hands on a watch, and the routes planned for our work and life under the capitalist system. But we cannot see a hawking street vendor, a falling leaf, or the ripples in my clothes blown by a breeze. It is precisely this "route" that prevents us from contacting the real world, leading us to understand the world only through that fixed, abstract topological route even though we are in the world. Beyond this, for Dasein situated within the giant modern capitalist system, everything else seems as if it does not exist. We are mediated by this massive capitalist apparatus (dispositif); under this mediation, we are no longer full possibilities or authentic lives, but rootless lives attached to that machine.
In a later lecture given in 1953 for the Technical University of Munich, Heidegger returned to this topic once more. This time, however, he did not use the concept of "profound boredom" but turned toward the more ontological Gestell [3] (Enframing). In the lecture, Heidegger emphasized: "Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological. On the other hand, all those things that we know, such as rods, pistons, and chassis—as well as what we call assembly—belong to the technological. But assembly, together with its components, falls within the sphere of technological work; such work always only responds to the challenge of Enframing, but it never constitutes that Enframing itself." [4]
Heidegger’s meaning is that when technological apparatuses form Enframing, they do not wait for humans to use them; rather, they challenge forth (herausfordern) humans in a certain way, making humans operate around the technological apparatus. In this sense, "We must also see that challenge, as it shows itself, which sets upon man to order the real as standing-reserve. That challenging gathers man into ordering. Such gathering focuses man upon ordering the real as standing-reserve." [5] Heidegger deeply felt that the rhythm and space of modern capitalist apparatuses challenge and set upon man, ensuring that man is no longer his own pure natural biological existence. Direct communication between man, nature, and the world has been interrupted by the Enframing of technology, compressing the authentic life of man into a series of topological points and lines within the capitalist technological apparatus. Our lives, rather than being constituted by direct interaction with the surrounding world, are summoned, challenged, and ordered within a modern technological Enframing or apparatus as abstract lives under a topological spatial mechanism. The process of life is stripped away from the earth; what we feel is not the temperature of the earth, nor the fragrance of flowers and grass in the surrounding world, nor the clamor of the market, nor the warmth or coldness of human relations. Instead, it is a rhythm of the life-world colonized by technology that increasingly manipulates our life processes, making our biological bodies operate according to this mechanical rhythm day after day, year after year.
Compared to Heidegger’s reflection on modern technology and his pointing out of the split between real spatial feeling and the points and lines of topological space, in the work of the French Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre, this simply became the bourgeois manipulation of space in the world market. In his representative work The Production of Space, Lefebvre pointed out that "by manipulating abstract space, the so-called enlightened despotism of the bourgeoisie and the capitalist system are able to achieve partial control over the commodity market." [6] In Lefebvre’s view, it is precisely because the bourgeoisie uses the capitalist market and system to compress the rich sensibility and experience of people’s daily lives into abstract space, turning people into abstract points (i.e., labor power) under the capitalist bureaucracy and production system, moving back and forth continuously in their production process, and thereby becoming tools for bourgeois profit-making. In other words, only when all people and concrete spaces become abstract labor power and the movement of topological capital space—turning people and their modern tools (subways, buses, roads, buildings, as well as our computers and mobile phones, etc.) into an abstract combination—can capitalism maximize the profit principles of the market and turn it into a game of capital circulation and financial operations. Only through the abstract space of capitalism, by extracting concrete people from the surrounding earth and real space and placing them in an abstract space, can concrete people become labor power and commodities. As Karl Polanyi pointed out: "This fictional idea nonetheless organized the actual market for labor, land, and money; they were actually bought and sold on the market." [7] In other words, modern capitalist marketization and abstract spatialization have achieved the extraction of people from the real world, making them an ordered standing-reserve. This is a "universal light" [8]; under the strong radiation of this modern capitalist system, all that is solid melts into the links and combinations of points and lines under abstract space and apparatuses. Our biological bodies become nodes in transportation networks and office buildings. In the dreamworld of capitalist profit-seeking culture, we sacrifice our own bodies, becoming burnt offerings [9] on the altar of capitalism to be stripped and squeezed for massive profits by the bourgeoisie.
This leads us back to Simone Weil’s evaluation of the state of "uprootedness." When evaluating workers under the capitalist system, Weil believed that workers had lost their roots and the essence of what makes a human being, existing in a state of uprootedness. Weil said: "There is a social condition which is wholly and continuously dependent on money—that is, the wage-earning condition; especially since piece-work rates have forced each workman to have his attention continually focused on the amount of small change due to him. It is in this condition that the disease of uprootedness is most acute." [10] Contrary to the state of uprootedness, the true life of a human being needs to take root. As Crary explains, Weil’s "re-rooting" means that "no matter what a person’s circumstances are, whether in the city or the countryside, they must integrate into the surrounding environment through different tentacles. And the way of this integration is, in reality, through work, and morally, through attention to others." [11]
However, under the capitalist system, and especially driven by the ge-stell [9] of technology, man has become an uprooted standing-reserve [10], reduced to a rootless person under capitalism. These rootless people, like wandering souls without fame or infamy, represent the most common state of life in the coming era of capitalism. This state of rootlessness not only means that our direct connection with the earth has been severed, but and also that we have become puppets of a gargantuan capitalist machine. If in the era of the Industrial Revolution, workers could still use their physical bodies to resist the ravaging torrents of capitalism and use a Paris Commune-style revolution to toll the death knell of bourgeois rule, then as technology continues its march—especially after entering the gates of digital space—it is not only our bodies that are set-in-place by the technology of industrial capitalism, but our souls that are driven and arrayed by pulsing bytes, flowing short videos, and kaleidoscopic game interfaces. On that terrestrial expanse covered in digital bytes, can the nomadic lives of the rootless find soil in which to take root once again?
II. Digital Scorched Earth: From the 24/7 System to the Specter Beneath the Interface
Once we step through the digital gate, are we truly without hope? Hope does not lie in the abstractions of the mind, but in whether we can find the potential to nourish the subject upon a barren earth. Perhaps this is the root of Jonathan Crary’s 2022 book Scorched Earth. In fact, in his earlier work that earned him widespread acclaim, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Crary had already turned his attention to the fate of the human subject under the biopolitical technical control of capitalism. Under new biotechnologies and medical techniques—for instance, the invention of drugs to reduce a person’s daily sleep—hired workers or soldiers on the battlefield can be granted more labor and operation time to serve the capitalist system. Capitalist biopolitical control is no longer confined to the eight hours within factories and office buildings, nor is it limited to the control of people’s consumption and entertainment time while awake; it has become a total control of 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Biopolitics has thus entered an unprecedented state of total control: “24/7” total-time control. In the era when Marx lived, once we walked out of the factory gates, workers—despite their meager circumstances—remained masters of their own bodies. In Baudrillard’s era, despite being subjected to the temptations of advertising and various dazzling spectacles of commodities, we still reserved a realm of dreams for ourselves during sleep. But under the “24/7” capitalist system, due to the intervention of these new biopolitical technologies, capitalism directly invades our biological bodies, giving our bodies greater productive capacity, while the subject becomes a submissive entity accepting the control of these new biotechnologies. Crary laments with no small amount of sorrow that the subject produced by biopolitical technology is a soul that can neither move forward nor retreat, unattached to others yet utterly helpless: “these technologies and procedures construct a world entirely without care, protection, or solace, where a wretched, submissive subjecthood is produced” [11]. Through the “24/7” capitalist system, the space for human autonomy is encroached upon step by step, and human bodies and behaviors are increasingly placed under a transparent apparatus. Byung-Chul Han uses the “transparent society” to describe the state of the contemporary social subject: “The human soul obviously needs spaces where it can be itself, without the gaze of the other. It possesses an impenetrability. Total transparency would burn it out and cause a kind of psychic burnout. Only machines are transparent” [12]. Just as Crary and Han describe, the subject in contemporary capitalist society is a subject scorched under the illumination of transparency; the subject has lost not only internal free will but also physical potential. Under the “24/7” system, one can only fall into a machine-like fatigue. The subject is no longer a soul existing for-itself, but a helpless specter suspended beneath the “24/7” capitalist system.
If the distorted bodies of workers beside automated factory machines and the weary, helpless mechanical subjects at computers in office cubicles have turned into the digital-era subjects we see today—holding mobile phones and laptops anytime and anywhere—what then is the situation? In Scorched Earth, Crary depicts the subjective scene of digital capitalist society using various social applications and devices:
These phenomena portend the disappearance of human contact and of a lifeworld built on the indispensable principle of "being with others." Yet we are told that this is merely an annoying but inconsequential side effect of the high-efficiency production methods of the digital age, that we will eventually get used to it, or that this behavior will gradually moderate over time. The fracturing of a world of human interaction is built on mandatory behaviors such as busyness and self-absorption. Whether it is watching, working, texting, shopping, surfing the web, listening to music, playing games, or something else, what people actually do no longer matters. The result is a mass acquiescence to an immaterial structure of separation, maintained by simulated self-interest and indifference to anything beyond the immediate task. In this situation, there exists a nihilistic will—to let the world fail. [13]
In the view of Crary and others, when we turn our attention to the screens of various mobile phones and computers, and replace real everyday interactions with digital networks, we undergo a new round of abstraction. That digital network, branded with the mark of capitalism, is further detaching us from the shackles of the real world. We are not merely abstract lives in subway networks and office cubicles, lives continuously produced by capitalism to accept biopolitical control; rather, within the digital network, our physical existence is constantly purged, allowing us to enter a virtual world completely dominated by digital capitalist platforms as "users" and "virtual entities." The rules of that world were long ago defined according to the laws of finance and profit; any subject entering this application interface can only tread timidly and laboriously across it. Slavoj Žižek also pointed out:
“These forms are not part of value relations: a slave or a woman doing housework does not receive a wage and is not exploited like a wage-earner. Here, we encounter digital exploitation, where we are ‘looted’ of our data by the capitalist digital machines that control us.” [14]
Against this backdrop, we do not need to go to the towns and stations Heidegger passed through, nor do we even need to rush from suburban residences to downtown office buildings from nine to five every day. On mobile phones, on home computers, and in various modern communication devices, we can all become part of the digital traffic of capitalism, a bubble of capitalist profit constantly rolling on the digital waves. In previous capitalist societies, capitalists only exploited and oppressed their own employees and workers; in digital capitalist society, capital has achieved a high degree of control, extending its tentacles to every platform user. Thus, through the digital gate and through a registered identity, we become the prey of capitalist data hunters. In our nihilistic browsing and scrolling, we not only detach ourselves from the earth but also turn ourselves into parts of the digital social capitalist machine.
If the success of the industrial bourgeoisie in Marx’s time lay in transforming the peasant living a leisurely country life into a worker who clocked in according to fixed times and produced commodities according to machine programs, then in today's digital capitalist society, the success of digital capitalism lies in every user transforming their own physical existence into an abstract registered user in a digital network. In the capacity of this abstract user, they wander from one platform to another—from online shopping, scrolling through short videos, and hailing rides or booking tickets, to deep involvement in electronic games and the establishment of work groups. This creates even better conditions for today’s gargantuan digital capital to extract profit. When our bodies, via mobile screens, mice, and keyboards, detach from concrete physical existence and take social interaction on the internet as the only “real” interaction, we have already fallen victim to the expansion of contemporary digital capitalism. As Crary emphasizes, we have formed an illusion today: “away from the internet, we are nothing” [15]. Our vital existence is no longer a body in close contact with the earth, feeling the swaying of grass in the breeze or gazing at winding mountains and the eastward flow of great rivers under the blue sky. Instead, on the digital interfaces created by the network world, we experience a life that extracts us from the earth. Our lives are further enveloped within the giant machine of capitalism, and this omnipresent digital megamachine further creates an illusion for us: that outside of this “digital world,” nothing else is worthy of our attention. This is the reality we are experiencing; the massive digital world increasingly eclipses our connection with the real world and eliminates our bodies' perception of the surrounding environment. Trending topics and traffic in the digital world seem to have become the so-called “reality.”
This is perhaps why Crary titled the earth of the digital age “scorched earth.” According to Crary’s own analysis, the word “scorch” originates from the Old French escorchier, meaning “to flay.” As Crary explicitly points out: “Scorched earth refers to a place full of life regressing to a barren state, while simultaneously losing the ability to recover” [16]. Of course, scorched earth is scorched earth not only because of the sun’s searing heat, but more importantly because all traces of life have been flayed from the earth. The earth becomes a lifeless expanse—this is the precise meaning of “scorched earth.” Thus, in the digital age, although we still suffer from scorched earth phenomena such as petrochemical pollution, global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, and soil degradation, the more fundamental cause of “scorched earth” lies in the digitalization and abstraction of life. Life has become the “uprooted” life described by Simone Weil—wandering everywhere, flickering and unstable, unable to take root in the earth, capable only of turning into a virtual entity composed of a set of data in the digital network. People no longer dwell on the earth but place their lives within that constantly flowing, ge-stell-like digital network. Through this apparatus, capitalism has implanted its means of control into every single body. Blochian hope has gradually degenerated into digital traffic and attention; there, one finds only Crary’s neuromarketing and digital pharmacology—everything becomes traffic, and everything becomes capitalist profit following that traffic.
From this, it is evident that the true scorched earth is not the planet we inhabit, but the internet that has intervened in our digital existence. The earth that nurtures life still exists, but because we look at mobile phones and computer screens without blinking, that vibrant earth is eclipsed by the interfaces of the virtual world constructed by the digital. We live in a giant bubble of interfaces surrounded by the digital world. Žižek tells us the mystery of the interface in the digital age lies in:
“For my partners in Metaverse communication, there is a fundamental uncertainty; I can never be sure who they are. Are they ‘really’ as they describe themselves? Is there a ‘real’ person behind the screen persona? Is the screen persona a mask for multiple people? Does the same ‘real’ person own and manipulate more screen personas, or am I simply dealing with a digital entity that does not represent any ‘real’ person? In short, ‘Inter-Face’ precisely means that my relationship with the other is never ‘face-to-face’; it is always mediated by the digital mechanism in between. It represents Lacan’s ‘Big Other,’ the anonymous symbolic order, structured like a labyrinth.” [17]
Žižek’s analysis aims to tell us that in the digital present, our lives are not without roots, but are rooted in a lifeless interface. This interface is Crary’s “scorched earth.”
A digital scorched earth. Because the digital scorched earth possesses no nutrients to truly nourish life, its sole rule of operation follows the laws of capitalist profit and exploitation. Subjects have become helpless, ghost-like subjects who have lost all care; they wander and linger on digital interfaces without hope. The only possibility of rescuing these subjects on the digital scorched earth lies in the objects obscured beneath the digital interface—those scattered fragments of surplus data. For this, we require a new archaeology, an archaeology under which the possibilities of life can be reconstructed.
III. The Archaeology of Surplus Data
In a set of theses on history left behind during his final years, Walter Benjamin wrote in a prophetic tone: "History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now (Jetztzeit) [18]. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history." [33] When Benjamin says that historiography is a homogenous and coherent narrative timeline, it implies that a coherent historical narrative inevitably obscures countless "nows" that are inconsistent with the mainstream historical narrative. It is precisely these "now" moments that question and deconstruct the coherent, Roman-style mainstream historical narrative, viewing such narratives as tools used by the ruling class to maintain its own dominion. It is in this sense that countless "nows" inconsistent with ancient history manifest themselves. These inconsistent "nows" are revealed not only to signify the fragmentation of Roman-style historical narratives but also the birth of a new calendar. Benjamin cried out: "The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera." [34]
This is the true meaning of revolution: it requires not only a physical revolution but also a thorough fragmentation of the ruling class’s coherent narrative within historical discourse. It is evident, then, that Benjamin’s philosophy of history is one of rupture. Historical redemption does not lie in a high-and-mighty deity saving us, but rather in the fact that when we face a historical narrative as hard as steel, the coherent, orderly, and smooth surface of history cracks open before a residue that history cannot digest. In Benjamin's view, this is true not only of history but also of our insight into the world; within a complete field of vision, there are always things that are lost.
Here we encounter the concept of the "indivisible remainder" (der nie aufhebbare Rest) in the sense of Schelling [19]. Slavoj Žižek comments: "Schelling’s 'indivisible remainder' is a remainder that has escaped formal structure, like the trash that legendarily prevents the machine from running smoothly, and the purely formal distortion of the machine's structure itself, which makes it turn upon itself. These two are strictly related: this piece of trash gives the machine its own distortion, and which came first is impossible to determine." [35] This "indivisible remainder" obstructs the operation of the overall mechanism and prevents the incorporation of all things into a single structure with a unified principle. The reason they become "trash" is precisely because of their absolute incompatibility with the unified structure. Perhaps only within this pile of trash can we find the truth obscured by capitalism. Precisely for this reason, in the alleys of Paris, Benjamin was more enthusiastic about scavenging the trash that was incompatible with the arcades of real commercial capitalism. Only those residues, incompatible with capitalist prosperity, could wake the bourgeois masses—obsessed with commodity fetishism—from their slumber to witness the ruins at the cracks of that prosperity. At that moment, the illusion of the unity of capitalist commodities and prosperity could be torn asunder.
Similarly, the digital interfaces under capitalist control possess a similar continuity. However, we are no longer facing the historical narratives described by Benjamin, nor can we, like his Baudelaire, stroll through the streets of Paris "scavenging trash." Once we enter the digital gate, the laws of unity are not on the surface but in the underlying protocols of the digital interface. These most basic algorithmic protocols have already determined that anything incompatible with the interface of digital capitalist society will not be represented on the interface. This means that today's digital space or Metaverse space is an even smoother space than Benjamin's arcades. These platforms create for us a rule system without "trash" and a world without remainders. We cannot find the cracks in the capitalist interface simply by wandering through the alleys. Everything is hidden; all remainders have vanished like smoke. The solid fortress has been further reinforced before the user, as impregnable as a military bastion. All things "pious" can only circulate in digital space after being stamped with a digital seal [20]. The question is: can we, like Benjamin, find an "indivisible remainder" in the virtual space created by digital capitalism to break the illusion of unity under the digital interface and further reconstruct hope upon the digital scorched earth?
In this context, we might more clearly understand Michel Foucault's motivation for writing The Archaeology of Knowledge. After completing The Order of Things, Foucault proposed the concept of the power of discourse, because a discursive formation (formation discursive) itself implies the synthesis of the system of objects by a continuous and smooth discursive system. Rebellion against discursive power cannot be carried out entirely from within that power. We cannot defeat historical narratives through historical narratives, nor can we defeat digital platforms through digital platforms, because they belong to the same system. Regardless of the narrative power or platform algorithm, they all incorporate people into a preemptive system, acting according to its rules and protocols. Under these rules and protocols, we can only see what we are able to see, speak the discourse we are permitted to speak, and think the connotations we are able to think.
Foucault's strategy against this coherent discursive force is "archaeology." Foucault wrote: "Archaeology does not seek to rediscover the continuous, insensible transition that gradually connects discourses to what precedes them, surrounds them, or follows them... On the contrary, the problem of archaeology is to define discourses in their specificity; to show in what way the set of rules they put into operation is irreducible to any other; to follow them along the whole of their external ridge in order to accentuate them." [36] Just as Foucault attempted to verify another historical possibility by finding obscure documents among the Bastille records in the French National Archives, when we conduct archaeological research on historical documents, the previously coherent and smooth historical narrative begins to churn.
Can we, then, find traces on the scorched earth of digital capitalist society that allow for archaeological research? The French philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler provides an affirmative answer: there must be some form of data that cannot be digested by capitalist algorithms and data platforms, which we may call "surplus data" [37]. Borrowing the concept of "tertiary retention" (souvenir tertiaire) [21], Stiegler points out that any of our actions in digital networks today leave behind data: "It constitutes a threat through a system of generalized computerization and automation, which exploits the traces transmitted and received by screens, and screens constitute all kinds of interfaces: social network systems, user archives, smart cities, etc., through which 'massive data' is intercepted and channeled, and then exploited by technologies of intensive calculation in real-time (at the speed of light) to develop so-called Big Data." [38] In other words, for any user action—whether conscious or unconscious, even an accidental browse—data is produced on the network and retained in digital space.
The problem is that this data does not always manifest itself. Various platforms extract vast amounts of data, but these digital platforms controlled by capital do not directly utilize or analyze all of it. Platforms develop algorithms with the sole objective of refining and analyzing data for the capitalized platform and extracting data that can be used by them. In other words, the data that actually gets used by the platform is a tiny fraction of the data generated by all users participating in digital spaces and the internet. The vast majority of data is simply stored on servers and anonymous terminals, much like documents in libraries and archives that remain untouched for a century, forever ignored.
However, the contribution of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge does not lie merely in these beings (existents); rather, it requires the invention of a new discourse to allow these "vanishing," obscure documents to reappear before people. Foucault said: "Archaeology places the following statements as guiding statements at the root: they concern the determination of observable structures and the field of possible objects; they define the forms of description and the perceptual criteria available for the field of possible objects; they cause the most general possibilities of characterization to appear and thus open up the entire field of concepts to be constructed... and archaeology will find again at the top of the derivative tree, or at least throughout the whole thorny path, 'discoveries' (such as the discovery of fossil series), concept transformations (such as new definitions of species), the emergence of ideas never seen or heard (such as the idea of mammals or organisms), and technical adjustments (the organizational principles of specimens, methods of classification, and nomenclature)." [39]
Only through the invention of new statements and narratives can those covered documents and ruins open their mysteries to us. Their mystery does not lie in themselves but in the discursive system to which they are attached—Benjamin's "new calendar." The revolutionary effort lies in creating a new discourse, a new platform, and a new calendar to allow those data points, traces, documents, and ruins—which existed before but were obscured—to be revealed to the world once more, thereby breaking old discourses, dissolving these "indiscerptible remainders," and turning impossible events into historical possibilities.
Following the spiritual inclinations of Benjamin and Foucault, what modern people need on this scorched earth ruled by algorithms and platforms in digital capitalist society is an archaeology of surplus data. That data, abandoned intentionally or unintentionally by platforms and algorithms, still exists, right beside each of us. The reason we cannot see this data is simply that we are already subjects mediated by the digital interface. Our inter-subjectivity is also a product of the interface and the platform; therefore, we can only see the characters, information, and images provided to us by the platform, and interact with fixed objects. We only move along the paths predicted and planned by platform algorithms. Even if those "indivisible remainders" are right beneath our feet, we remain blind to them. The existence of that surplus data is an existence that has not been modeled by algorithms. Modern people cannot, like Foucault and Benjamin, obtain these documents buried in the dust of history by wandering and scavenging trash, nor can they even look "awry" like Žižek to discover those invisible clues through a "view of parallax."
In other words, it is difficult for modern people to discover buried surplus data through shifts in the subject. The archaeology of surplus data is not built upon inter-subjectivity, but rather upon "inter-objectivity"—the direct communication and exchange between data and data, and object and object.
By allowing objects and surplus data to manifest in the digital space and before human eyes in new ways—at the very moment when algorithms controlled by capital are intercepted by new algorithms of inter-objectivity [22]—Charon [23], who controls the ferry crossing between the virtual and the reality, will slowly lose his color and transform into a mere void on the digital interface. At the moment Charon’s body dissolves, the path of hope leading toward the Truth begins to shimmer indistinctly behind the "Digital Gate." There, beneath a data archaeology of inter-objectivity, hope has not been extinguished; rather, it has been obscured by the corporeal presence of a Charon controlled by capital. Once modern subjects find the archaeological path leading to surplus data, they are no longer anonymous souls, but living beings capable of pursuing hope.
(The author is a Professor and Doctoral Supervisor in the Department of Philosophy at Nanjing University, and a Young Scholar of the Ministry of Education’s "Changjiang Scholars Program" [24]) Web Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Qiusuo (The Search) [25], Issue 1, 2023