Deng Bojun: A Critique of the Ideological Logic of Cognitive Capitalism
The concept of "cognitive capitalism" originates from the French scholar Yann Moulier-Boutang. Boutang argues that cognitive capitalism represents a transformational phase of capitalism, shifting from traditional productive labor toward immaterial labor. In this phase, immaterial factors such as knowledge, information, and data replace material resources as the primary means of production. Cognitive labor becomes the dominant force in value creation, and the logic of capital accumulation is restructured around the appropriation and exploitation of cognitive resources. As Boutang notes, "cognitive capitalism produces not only knowledge, but also the lifestyles of contemporary people; this construction of contemporary lifestyles by cognitive capitalism is termed 'the production of life.'" Consequently, cognitive capitalism is also referred to as "cognitive biopolitics" or "cognitive biocapitalism." Cognitive capitalism has achieved a transition in ideology from explicit repression to implicit productivity; the degree of sophistication in its logic of capital rule far exceeds that of the industrial capitalist era.
Industrial capitalism centered on large-scale machine production, and its ideological construction revolved around a productivist narrative of labor creating value. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx profoundly revealed this capitalist ideology characterized by "alienated labor": on the one hand, capital alienates concrete labor into abstract labor by possessing the means of production; on the other hand, workers participate in value creation by selling their labor power, disguising the relationship of exploitation as an equivalent exchange between labor and capital. The ideology of industrial capitalism is oppressive, and its governance mechanisms are visible. Workers perceive the discipline of the machine over labor and the deprivation of value through wages via bodily experience, providing a cognitive basis for the awakening of proletarian consciousness.
Cognitive capitalism, conversely, takes data/knowledge as its core means of production. The essence of its ideological construction is the alienation of knowledge into a commodity for market exchange. Through the symbolic packaging of a "liberation narrative," it induces laborers to actively participate in the production of surplus value. While industrial capitalism manifested as the alienation of labor, cognitive capitalism manifests as the alienation of knowledge built upon the foundation of labor alienation. Laborers produce not only digitized commodities but also a digitized version of the self. Platforms transform the process of knowledge production into a process of User-Generated Content (UGC) through algorithms, leading laborers to mistakenly believe that knowledge creation is self-actualization.
Compared to the industrial capitalist period where "labor is the species-essence of man," cognitive capitalism presents a superficial liberation narrative of "knowledge changing one’s destiny." It ostensibly raises the knowledge level of laborers through intellectual property narratives, but in reality, it carries out a "cognitive enclosure movement" [1] of capital, privatizing knowledge that originally belonged to the public domain. Thus, the non-rivalrous nature of public knowledge is replaced by the exclusivity of capital. In contrast to the external discipline of industrial capitalism's panopticism, cognitive capitalism internalizes capital power as the self-discipline of the laborer through algorithmic governance. The subtlety of this self-discipline lies in the fact that laborers internalize the exploitative logic of capital as a rational choice, thereby completing their own exploitation within an "illusion of freedom."
The ideological transition from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism is, in essence, an evolution of capital rule from "hard control" to "soft penetration." The carriers of capital rule have shifted from factory machinery to digital platforms and algorithms, achieving a de-substantialized and concealed control. The logic of capital rule has shifted from external discipline to self-governance, utilizing ideology to make laborers "voluntarily" submit to capital. The form of capital exploitation has shifted from the explicit appropriation of labor time to the implicit plunder of cognitive value; the subjectivity of the laborer has become a new tool for capital valorization. Regarding this, only by returning to Marx’s critique of political economy can we pierce through the mist of cognitive capitalism’s so-called "liberation narrative" and reveal its deepest logic of rule—it no longer coercively oppresses the subject but rather allows the subject to be oppressed voluntarily, achieving a more concealed and efficient form of exploitation. In short, the deep logic of voluntary oppression in cognitive capitalism is not a "humanization" of capital rule, but rather an upgrade of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to adapt to new forms of knowledge production, cognitive labor, and digital technology, shifting the logic of rule from external coercion to cognitive internalization. If industrial capitalist ideology falls under a binary framework of "oppression-resistance," cognitive capitalism’s ideology belongs to a composite framework that both oppresses and produces. It not only disciplines the subject but also reproduces the subject's "voluntariness," thereby constructing a more stable, concealed, and efficient structure of bourgeois ideological rule.
I. Reinterpreting the Essence of Ideology: The Specific Positioning of Cognitive Capitalist Ideology
If the definition of the concept of ideology by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology belongs to a scientific "judgment of truth or falsehood," then Karl Mannheim’s definition belongs to the "situational analysis" of the sociology of knowledge. In Mannheim's view, ideology is a system of thought and a cognitive framework formed by a certain social group (class, stratum, professional group, etc.) in a specific historical situation, reflecting its conditions of existence and interest demands. If industrial capitalist ideology was based on substantive means of production—where capital valorization originated from capital’s external coercion of labor and the laboring subject maintained a cognitive distance from the logic of rule, forming an ideological mechanism of repressive governance—then cognitive capitalism is based on data/knowledge as the means of production. Through technological intermediaries such as algorithms and platforms, the logic of capital rule is internalized as the inherent needs of the laboring subject, completing a closed loop from external coercion to internal identification and forming a new ideological mechanism of non-repressive governance.
The difference between industrial capitalist ideology and cognitive capitalist ideology lies in whether the rule is visible. The visibility of industrial capitalist ideological rule provided laborers with a clear fulcrum for resistance. Capital rule was anchored in centralized physical space; that is, laborers could identify "who is oppressing," "how they are being oppressed," and "how to resist." The invisibility of cognitive capitalist ideological rule dissolves the laborer’s fulcrum for resistance. Capital rule is anchored in de-bounded digital space, making it difficult for laborers to perceive "who is oppressing," "how they are being oppressed," and "how to resist." This difference reflects the shift of capital rule from the direct manifestation of external violence to the implicit internalization of self-discipline; its goal is to weaken the resistance consciousness and action capacity of laborers by reducing the visibility of rule. It must be pointed out that whether it is industrial capitalist ideology or cognitive capitalist ideology, they are both essentially the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
1. The Theoretical Legacy of Traditional Ideological Critique
The theoretical legacy of traditional ideological critique constitutes the fundamental framework for understanding the operations of power in modern society. From Marx’s "how to identify false consciousness," to Althusser’s "how to institutionalize ideology," and to Foucault’s "how to make ideology effective," the theory of ideological critique presents an evolutionary logic from macro-level class rule to meso-level institutional mechanisms and then to micro-level subject construction. It progressively reveals the complete logical chain of how ideology shifted from masking external exploitation to the production of internal subjectivity. This lineage is not merely an accumulation of academic history but a response to the deep transformation of the forms of bourgeois ruling power.
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels for the first time systematically proposed the theory of "false consciousness," laying the foundation for ideological critique. "Consciousness [das Bewußtsein] can never be anything else than conscious existence [das bewußte Sein], and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process." In the view of Marx and Engels, "false consciousness" is essentially an inverted representation of social relations. "False consciousness" is not a set of erroneous ideas but a conceptual tool actively constructed by the ruling class. Through conceptual packaging, it provides a so-called cloak of legitimacy for class rule, transforming exploitation from violent oppression into moral justification.
Althusser concretized Marx and Engels’ theory of "false consciousness," proposing that ideology is not only a system of ideas but also a material practice realized through state apparatuses. Schools and churches do not merely disseminate the ideology of the ruling class; they also mold individuals into subjects under specific social structures through institutionalized daily rituals and practical behaviors in repetition. The core breakthrough of Althusser’s theory of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) lies in the following: through the mechanism of interpellation, ideology hails the individual as a subject conforming to the ruling order, transforming class rule from external oppression into internal identification. It achieved a shift in ideological critique from the critique of ideas to the critique of institutions, from class tools to subject production, and from rule by violence to rule by consent.
Foucault turned Althusser’s ideological interpellation toward daily practice, transforming ideology from external oppression into internal demand. His core view was that rule in modern society no longer relies on interpellation but rather, through the symbiosis of knowledge and power, allows individuals to achieve self-governance through active discipline. Ideology thus transforms from a tool of the "other" into a "technology of the self." The individual is no longer a passive interpellated subject but an active subject who participates in rule through technologies of the self, thereby making the rule of bourgeois ideology more concealed and robust.
2. The Specific Breakthroughs of Cognitive Capitalist Ideology
The core breakthrough in the ideological control of cognitive capitalism is the shift of the carrier from traditional media to digital platforms. Digital platforms under cognitive capitalism construct distributed networks through algorithmic recommendations, social relation chains, and scenario-based services. From digital platforms recommending homogenized content through user profiling, to digital platforms transforming social relation chains into "social capital maps" as a means of production, and to digital platforms internalizing users' digital behaviors into their own "autonomous choices" through scenario-based embedding, a qualitative change has been achieved in ideological control—shifting from explicit discipline to implicit shaping.
The control logic of cognitive capitalist ideology has shifted from masking forced exploitation to actively rationalizing exploitation. Cognitive capitalism utilizes immaterial labor to dissolve the visibility of exploitation. Through the ideological packaging of knowledge sharing, the de-alienated mythic narrative of creative labor, and the expectation of self-actualization through human capital investment, it leads laborers to incorporate capital’s needs into their own value coordinate systems. Laborers may even actively participate in and maintain the exploitative mechanism; in this way, exploitation transforms from "exploitation by others" to "self-exploitation." This control is completed under the appearance of so-called free choice: users actively accept information cocoons within personalized recommendations, relinquish deep thinking in interactions with AI assistants, and lose their true selves in digital socializing.
The value core of cognitive capitalist ideology has achieved a legitimate substitution from traditional "sacred narratives" to "cognitive-rational narratives." The core of this substitution is that knowledge has been elevated from a tool to a value, becoming the ultimate standard for measuring the legitimacy of all social behaviors. Cognitive capitalism forcibly links knowledge production with liberation narratives, shaping a cognitive inertia that "technology inevitably brings freedom" through disruptive technologies like AI, blockchain, and gene editing. Cognitive capitalism uses its monopoly on scientific discourse to tilt the power of knowledge production entirely toward capital, forming a ruling pattern where capital defines knowledge and knowledge controls humanity.
However, the liberation narrative of cognitive capitalism must still follow Marx’s dialectical laws regarding human liberation. Advancing political liberation, such as digital rights equality, algorithmic transparency, and data sharing, constitutes the necessary prerequisite for the liberation narrative of cognitive capitalism. Economic liberation—breaking data monopolies, dissolving algorithmic control, and abolishing the privatization of knowledge—constitutes the core foundation. Finally, cognitive liberation—achieving total knowledge sharing, placing algorithms under collective social control, and making cognitive labor a free and conscious activity—constitutes the ultimate goal. In other words, political liberation is the necessary prerequisite, requiring an extension from traditional formal rights to digital political rights; economic liberation is the core, requiring a deepening from the public ownership of material means of production to the comprehensive sharing of cognitive means of production; and cognitive liberation is the goal, requiring the elimination of cognitive colonization on the basis of eliminating the economic alienation of digital capitalism, ultimately realizing "the free and comprehensive development of the individual" as envisioned by Marx.
II. The Generative Foundation of Ideology: The Transformation of the Mode of Production in Cognitive Capitalism
As Marx and Engels pointed out in The German Ideology,
"It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness." The fundamental transformation of cognitive capitalism lies in the new form of the means of production: data has replaced land, machinery, factories, and other objective conditions of labor to become the core means of production. Its non-rivalrous and infinitely reproducible nature subverts the traditional logic of property rights. The reason the logic of data property rights gives birth to the cognitive capitalist ideology of "knowledge sharing" is that the non-rivalrous nature of data necessitates that its monopoly be packaged in a discourse of openness and sharing. Directly declaring private ownership of data would trigger user resistance and regulatory intervention; however, the narrative of so-called "knowledge democratization" both conceals the inequality of data appropriation and stimulates users to proactively surrender the fruits of their cognitive labor. In essence, this ideology serves to defend the legitimacy of the "data enclosure movement." The generation of cognitive capitalist ideology is essentially the inevitable projection of data monopoly, cognitive exploitation, and the colonization of attention into the realm of ideas. Only by disguising the valorization of capital as human cognitive liberation can the legitimacy of capital's rule be maintained in the era of cognitive capitalism.
1. The "Knowledge-fication" of the Means of Production
The transformation of the form of the means of production has always been the core driving force behind the evolution of the capitalist mode of production. In the era of industrial capitalism, the contradiction in the ownership of the means of production was manifested in the opposition between the monopolistic possession of the objective conditions of labor and living labor. As Marx stated, from the perspective of capital, it is not that one element of social activity becomes an increasingly massive body for another, but rather that the objective conditions of labor possess an ever-increasing independence over living labor, while an ever-larger portion of social wealth stands opposed to labor as an alien and dominant power. By possessing land, machines, factories, and other objective conditions of labor, capitalists achieve the quantitative division of the labor time of living labor and the structural extraction of surplus value.
In the era of cognitive capitalism, the revolution in the means of production presents a dual variation of dematerialization and knowledge-fication. Data, algorithmic models, and intellectual property have become the core forms of the new means of production. The non-rivalrous nature of data, the self-iterative nature of algorithms, and the legal exclusivity of intellectual property constitute the institutional barriers of the "knowledge enclosure movement." This cognitive monopoly forms a control mechanism more concealed than that of the industrial capitalist era—it no longer relies on physical coercion, but rather shapes the cognitive framework of the laboring subject by controlling the process of knowledge production.
If industrial capitalism exploited the labor time of the subject, then cognitive capitalism has achieved a "cognitive turn" in the object of exploitation. The "disciplinary society" described by Foucault [2] has evolved into "algorithmic discipline" in the digital age. This cognitive standardization pushes exploitation deep into the level of thought processes, forming "technologies of the self" in the Foucaultian sense, where laborers proactively discipline themselves according to the cognitive frameworks set by capital, completing the self-execution of exploitation. In a certain sense, cognitive capitalism does not merely monopolize the means of production; it defines "how to produce knowledge" through algorithms, incorporating the entire social cognitive system into the orbit of capital valorization.
From the steam engine to generative AI, the knowledge-fication of the means of production marks the escalation of capitalist contradictions into the cognitive dimension. The contradiction between data non-rivalry and data monopoly, between the public nature of algorithms and the private ownership of algorithms, and between cognitive universality and cognitive enclosure constitute the self-evident contradictions of cognitive capitalism. When data becomes a more central means of production than land, and when algorithms can determine the value of labor more than machines, the socialist movement must consider cognitive liberation. Reconstructing public ownership of data, the democratization of algorithms, and the sharing of knowledge thus becomes a historical necessity for transcending the logic of capital in the digital age.
2. The "Cognitive-fication" of Labor Forms
The labor form of the industrial capitalist era belonged to a body-disciplining type. It achieved physical control over labor through the spatial enclosure of the factory system, completely stripping away the autonomy of the labor process. Through the de-skilling of the production assembly line, workers' labor was reduced to mechanical operations such as "tightening screws" or "mounting tires." Through ideological construction, it cleverly concealed the essence of capital exploitation, transforming class contradictions into differences in individual ability, thereby completing a deep-seated control over labor. From the textile mills of Manchester to the automobile assembly lines of Detroit, industrial capitalism constructed a four-in-one labor disciplinary system of "space-time-body-cognition."
Labor forms in the era of cognitive capitalism exhibit heterogeneity: new types of labor such as knowledge creation, affective services, and data labeling were defined by the Italian Autonomist scholar Maurizio Lazzarato as "immaterial labor"—that is, labor that produces the informational and cultural content of commodities. The concept of "immaterial labor" profoundly reveals the operational logic of cognitive capitalism: when data becomes the core means of production, when algorithms define labor value, and when computing power becomes a capitalized means of production, capitalist exploitation has shifted from body control to cognitive colonization.
When the labor form transforms from material labor to immaterial labor, the "socially necessary labor time" standard for measuring value encounters a systemic challenge. As Marx predicted, "As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value." The value of cognitive labor is rooted in "general intellect" as the social knowledge system as a whole. Every line of a programmer's code, every transaction by a teller, and every judgment by a data labeler is a concrete application of the cognitive resources accumulated by human civilization.
From Amazon’s cognitive piece-rate wages to data labeling factories in Manila, millions of "cognitive proletarians" are transforming the pulses of neural synapses into binary code for algorithm training. The cognitive-fication of labor forms has catalyzed a geometric leap in cognitive productive forces, while also constructing an exploitation embedding mechanism at the neuro-cognitive level. This fragmentation and de-skilling of cognitive labor degrades uniquely human judgment, emotional empathy, and creative thinking into the computational units of "biological algorithms." This "playbor" [3] phenomenon allows capital exploitation to permeate every symbolic interaction in daily life. When emotions become commodities, inspiration becomes a KPI, thinking becomes algorithm training data, and users are immersed in the pleasure of "likes, comments, and shares," cognitive resources complete their surrender to digital capital.
3. The "Concealment" of Capital Valorization
The most fundamental change in the mode of production in cognitive capitalism lies in the shift of the means of production from tangible matter to intangible symbols. This shift blurs the boundaries of capital ownership; hereafter, capital’s data enclosure movement no longer relies on violent dispossession, but rather completes the peaceful appropriation of cognitive means of production through the digital contracts of user agreements. In this process, the ideology of property rights plays a key role. The myth of "labor creates ownership" from the industrial capitalist era has transformed into the myth that "technological innovation determines property rights" in the era of cognitive capitalism. This property rights ideology cleverly conceals the non-rivalrous nature of cognition.
The exploitation of industrial capitalism relied on the explicit mechanism of "factory walls + hourly/piece-rate wages," whereas cognitive capitalism—through the ideological disguise of "prosumerism" [4]—achieves the thorough concealment of capital exploitation across content production, data labeling, and social dissemination. The hidden nature of this capital exploitation lies in the blurring of lines between labor time and leisure time, the interleaving of production space and living space, and the fusion of the roles of producer and consumer. In this process, the ideology of "technological neutrality" of algorithms plays a key role; the plunder of capital within the algorithmic "black box" is transformed into the so-called "natural result of fair competition." Laborers blame capital exploitation on market laws or individual ability, thus masking the true source of surplus value derived from the living labor of the worker.
The core of cognitive capitalist ideology is the construction of a value myth regarding the "special nature" of cognitive labor, portraying designers, programmers, and content creators as privileged groups who have transcended alienated labor. Their high incomes are attributed to creative talent rather than the exploitative distribution of capital. Furthermore, through "successology" [5] narratives and the cult of skills, the attention of cognitive laborers is diverted from class exploitation to individual competition, dissolving their class consciousness. Even more deceptive is the ideology of knowledge sharing: from the post-capitalist production models of open-source communities to the free-knowledge ideals of Wikipedia, all of these beautify capital's appropriation of the "cognitive commons" as "philanthropic acts."
What Althusser called the "Ideological State Apparatus" [6] has acquired an entirely new material carrier in the age of algorithms. Traditional Ideological State Apparatuses relied on the explicit dissemination of symbolic violence, whereas the "Algorithmic Ideological State Apparatus" operates through a triple-nested process: the symbolic plunder of cognitive raw materials through "data violence," the ideological implantation of algorithmic logic through "code discipline," and the symbolic manipulation of interaction design through "interface illusions." This transforms ideological infiltration into a "naturalized" cognitive mechanism. The essence of this transition is that ideology has evolved from a represented system of ideas into a computable behavioral script; the algorithm has become the neural center connecting the logic of capital with individual cognition.
III. The Generative Mechanism of Ideology: The Collusion Network of Knowledge, Power, and Capital
If the generation of industrial capitalist ideology was based on the private monopoly of material means of production like machines and factories, then the generation of cognitive capitalist ideology is based on the private possession of implicit digital apparatuses such as user agreements, recommendation algorithms, and API interfaces. If industrial capitalist ideology relied on the dual disciplinary mechanism of "violence and contract" to be realized, then cognitive capitalist ideology is completed through a refined mechanism of "self-discipline." If the ideology of industrial capitalism was manifested in a clear discourse of class opposition, then the ideology of cognitive capitalism presents itself as a de-classed symbolic disguise. If the core justificatory strategy of industrial capitalist ideology was the alienated explanation of the labor theory of value, then cognitive capitalist ideology constructs a value myth of cognitive rent monopoly. If resistance to industrial capitalist ideology was characterized by physical resistance, then resistance to cognitive capitalist ideology turns toward symbolic "decryption." When knowledge packages the logic of capital as scientific law, power disguises the demand for control as public interest, and capital transforms the mechanism of exploitation into "user experience," ideology shifts from a questioned idea to an unreflective reality. In short, the essence of this naturalizing transformation of cognitive capitalist ideology is the "de-ideologization of ideology."
1. The "Depoliticized" Packaging of Knowledge Production
In the era of cognitive capitalism, knowledge is not a value-neutral objective truth, but a symbolic ideological carrier shaped by the collusion of power and capital. The core function of knowledge production is to provide cognitive legitimacy for capital valorization and the rule of power. This "ideologization" of knowledge production is essentially capital's transformation of the underlying logic of capital rule into so-called "scientific common sense" through its monopoly on the power to define problems, making knowledge itself a production tool for capitalist ideology.
The most successful ideological strategy of cognitive capitalism is to package digital technologies such as AI and Big Data as value-neutral tools, using the closed-loop demonstration of "using technology to solve technological problems" to mask their essence as media for capital power. This narrative is rooted in Max Weber’s tradition of "instrumental rationality," but in the era of cognitive capitalism, it has been refashioned by capital into a hegemonic discourse of technological determinism. Silicon Valley giants claim that "algorithms are just sets of code," while deliberately avoiding the ideological judgments centered on capital that are embedded in the selection of training data, the design of feature engineering, and the setting of optimization goals. This "myth of technological neutrality" causes the public to overlook the capital power structures implicit in technological design—whoever controls the technology controls the power to define the cognitive framework.
The colonization of knowledge production by cognitive capitalism is more profoundly reflected in capital's systematic infiltration of the academic system. By sponsoring research directions, controlling publication channels, and domesticating evaluation systems, capital has transformed the "knowledge community" into a patent incubation base for capital. This alienates knowledge production from the pursuit of truth into the production of technical patents that can be absorbed by capital. When the MIT Media Lab defines "Ethical AI" research as a solution to reduce corporate compliance costs, academia has thoroughly degenerated into a "risk control department" for capital. Even more subversive is the "corporate-academic revolving door" mechanism. This dual identity makes scholars both producers of knowledge and spokespersons for capital interests: when they declare at academic conferences that "AI regulation will hinder innovation," they are essentially packaging the corporate pursuit of monopoly profits as an inevitable law of scientific development. The most subtle technique of rule in cognitive capitalism is to have intellectuals proactively write the interests of capital into the DNA of knowledge production.
The ultimate consequence of the depoliticized packaging of knowledge production is the public's cognitive numbness toward technological power and the systematic deconstruction of critical thinking. When...
When AI decision-making is proclaimed to be objective and neutral, ordinary people tend to blame algorithmic discrimination on technical imperfections rather than on capital's ultimate pursuit of efficiency. As academic research repeatedly emphasizes technological optimism, the public gradually accepts capitalist narratives—such as the idea that "data colonialism" is the price of progress or that "cognitive exploitation" is a necessity for innovation. This state of cognition confirms the contemporary form of Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony: the ruling class does not require violent oppression; it only needs to de-politicize knowledge production to internalize the logic of capital as natural common sense. The de-political packaging of knowledge production functions precisely by transforming the requirements of capital into technical necessities, thereby shaping cognitive capitalism into the "end of history."
2. The "Algorithmic" Transfer of Power Operations
The generation of cognitive capitalist ideology is achieved through the construction of cognitive frameworks. Algorithmic cognition reconstructs the way humans perceive the world through the priority of data representation, simplifying complex reality into calculable digital symbols, which in turn shapes the cognitive foundation of ideology. In essence, algorithmic cognition replaces existential thinking with computational thinking; it transforms non-market values into market-priced cognitive commodities. Through the identity-based presupposition that "digital = truth," it forcibly converts qualitative differences into quantitative hierarchies. This creates a closed cognitive ecosystem where users—under the illusion of so-called free choice—actively submit to the cognitive discipline of the algorithm. By encoding ideology into a "naturalized" symbolic system, power relations are transformed into common sense. This unconscious symbolic identification allows the "ideological state apparatus," in Althusser's sense, to achieve the ultimate penetration of micro-powers in the digital age.
The capture of behavioral data by algorithmic power marks the transition of cognitive capitalism from the exploitation of physical labor to the exploitation of cognitive labor. Through new labor forms such as "playbor" [7], "prosumption" [8], and "affective labor," algorithmic power transforms the cognitive activities of users into data capital, while simultaneously allowing exploitative relations to remain completely hidden beneath the appearance of "life," "leisure," and "socializing." When likes, reposts, and searches are all reconstructed by algorithms as so-called voluntary leisure activities, exploitation has ascended from the economic level to the cognitive level. The algorithmic capture of behavioral data does not stop at the behavioral level but goes deep into the neurophysiological level. Through intermittent reinforcement and mechanisms of neuroplasticity, it causes cognitive labor to shift from forced participation to a physiological need, achieving biopolitical control over the cognitive laborer. Henceforth, capital no longer suppresses the body through violence but subjects the body to the logic of capital by "optimizing" life processes. Algorithms construct user identities as data files and, through "label-commodity" relational recommendations, simplify fluid and diverse human identities into sets of calculable labels. This implants consumerist ideology into the user’s self-perception, alienating "I consume, therefore I am" into "I am labeled by algorithms, therefore I am," which consequently facilitates capital's screening of qualified cognitive laborers.
Algorithms are not only carriers of ideology but have become "meta-governance" tools of capitalist ideology—by encoding social relations, they participate directly in policy-making and institutional design, transforming cognitive capitalist ideology into "hard law norms" and "soft law consensus." Through social network analysis technology, algorithms transform offline social relations into online data nodes and reshape social structures through functions such as relationship recommendations and community partitioning. Through functions like "mutual friend" recommendations and interest-based community matching, the intimacy and distance of social relations are defined by algorithmic recommendation weights. Through rules of "attention politics" such as "hot-topic" weighting and chronological sorting, anti-capitalist public issues are marginalized. The digital colonization of affective labor by algorithms turns human emotional relationships upside down into relationships between humans and algorithmic commodities. In short, the encoding of social relations by algorithms ultimately serves the biopolitical diffusion of cognitive capitalist ideology, allowing the discourse of capital to replicate itself automatically through social networks like a computer virus, forming a cognitive ecosystem characterized by group polarization.
Algorithms reshape the human experience of time and space through temporal acceleration and spatial folding, providing ontological support for the generation of capitalist ideology. From the 15-second completion rate of short video platforms to the real-time push mechanisms of social media, authentic time is compressed into calculable instantaneousness. The algorithm’s "cult of real-time" causes users to be immersed in an eternal present, gradually losing the ability to understand historical context, forming what Paul Virilio called the colonization of human cognition by "dromology" [9]. Through heat-map scheduling algorithms and geofencing technology, platforms transform physical space into calculable "data-fied" text. From the digital monopoly of perceived space to the class-based encoding of urban space and the algorithmic colonization of global space, the essence is capital’s micro-governance over life through the algorithmic manipulation of time and space. This upgrades what Marx called capital's exploitation of labor-time into capital’s comprehensive appropriation of life-time, and elevates the physical spatial segregation of classes into algorithmic interval segregation of groups.
3. The "Interest-Binding" of Capital Logic
In the context of the cognitive turn of global capitalism, cognitive labor has replaced productive labor as the primary source of surplus value. Unlike productive labor in the era of industrial capitalism, the production of surplus value in the era of cognitive capitalism depends primarily on the "immateriality" of cognitive labor. Cognitive capitalism does not only expropriate material resources; it commodifies cognitive faculty itself through legal, technical, and discursive means. Cognitive capitalism completes the binding of cognitive faculty to the logic of capital through institutional cognitive enclosures, the plucking of algorithmic rents, and the symbolic violence of cognitive value.
Cognitive capitalism incorporates intellectual labor, affective labor, and relational labor into the private property system through institutional cognitive enclosures. This enables capital to possess ownership over the cognitive process itself. Platform capital disguises the exploitative relations of cognitive labor as products of "autonomy of will" through boilerplate contracts, causing laborers to lose their capacity for cognitive resistance under the appearance of consent. The inclusion of cognitive data into the private property system is essentially a digital-age "second enclosure movement" of capital's primitive accumulation. The fundamental contradiction of cognitive capitalism manifests as the antagonism between the socialization of cognitive labor and the privatization of cognitive results.
Cognitive capitalism transforms the cognitive activities of users into quantifiable and exploitable cognitive labor through the plucking of algorithmic rents. Platform algorithms reshape the attention mechanisms of users by monitoring real-time changes in pupil dilation and EEG responses, converting the user's free time into surplus labor time. Platform algorithms use data indicators such as "like rates," "completion rates," and "share rates" as value signals to construct a hierarchy of cognitive labor, defining content that conforms to capital's interests as high-value while marginalizing critical cognitive outputs against capital. Through behavioral data mining and predictive modeling, algorithms upgrade the exploitation of cognitive labor from ex-post-facto exploitation to ex-ante control, achieving precise regulation of user cognitive behavior. In essence, algorithmic rent is the super-surplus value generated after "General Intellect" [10] is appropriated by capital. Its degree of exploitation far exceeds the "formal subsumption" [11] of industrial capitalism, achieving "real subsumption" [12] over the entire process of cognitive production. Henceforth, "the organizational form of capital's absorption of labor has completed a 'magnificent metamorphosis'."
Cognitive capitalism transforms the exploitative logic of capital into a naturalized cognitive order through cognitive symbolic violence, making laborers active participants in the disciplining of their own cognition. By reconstructing capital’s exploitation of cognitive labor as a fair game of individual competency competition, the platform masks the monopoly of structural social advantages over the distribution of cognitive resources. Backed by scientific authority, platform capital disguises elitist cognition as objective cognitive laws, achieving a "gentle" domination over cognitive labor; users not only grant voluntary consent but internalize this domination as a pursuit of self-improvement. By constructing the myth of generational cognitive differences, the platform induces the young "Gen Z" to actively cede their cognitive autonomy, transforming platform exploitation into a necessary investment in digital survival skills. This self-disciplining causes laborers to participate in the governance of themselves through self-cognitive transformation. In essence, cognitive symbolic violence is the most hidden and fundamental tool of rule in cognitive capitalism. Capital has achieved deep rule over cognitive labor; capital not only exploits the cognitive results of the laborer but appropriates their cognitive faculty itself.
The ideological collusion of "knowledge-power-capital" in cognitive capitalism is not a static structure. Instead, capital provides the material impetus, power provides the institutional guarantee, and the intellectual sphere completes the legitimacy argumentation. Together, they construct an ideological control chain of "false needs — collective cognition — exploitation closed-loop — historical necessity." First, capital creates false needs by binding commodity symbols to values such as self-actualization; power grants them political legitimacy through policy endorsements; and the intellectual sphere provides theoretical rationality. Second, platform algorithms transform false needs into collective cognition through personalized recommendations; power incorporates this collective cognition into the curriculum via the education system; and the intellectual sphere provides scientific demonstration for it. Third, power defines rights for data enclosures through law; platforms obtain cognitive rents through data monopolies; and users obtain identity authentication by paying these cognitive rents. Finally, power institutionalizes the exploitation of cognitive labor through legislation, and the intellectual sphere writes the preferences of capital into the history of technical development. Through the dual co-option of institutions and knowledge, the logic of capital is transformed into a law of historical development, completing the closed-loop control of cognitive capitalist ideology. The collusion network of "knowledge-power-capital" utilizes this "naturalization" strategy to transform the potential logic of capitalist rule into a lived control that permeates daily life. This is both the generative mechanism of cognitive capitalist ideology and its most profound art of governance.
IV. The Practical Penetration of Ideology: The Comprehensive Colonization of "Economy-Politics-Culture"
The ideology of cognitive capitalism is not confined to penetration at the level of ideas and concepts; it achieves deep control over social reproduction through multi-domain colonization of "economy, politics, and culture." This process of cognitive capitalist colonization takes the commodification of cognition as its core driver and the digital platform as its spatial carrier, extending the logic of capital from the economic sphere to the political and cultural spheres, forming a trinity of cognitive capitalist colonization: "economic exploitation—political control—cultural identification."
1. The Economic Sphere: The "Legitimatization" of Surplus Value Exploitation
Cognitive capitalism reconstructs the meaningful system of cognitive labor, transforming capitalist exploitative relations into the "naturalized" result of self-actualization or market exchange. By transforming cognitive faculty into quantifiable and tradable cognitive commodities, cognitive capitalism achieves the extraction of super-cognitive surplus value by virtue of the monopoly status of digital platforms. By defining the unpaid cognitive activities of users as "prosumptive" non-productive labor, cognitive capitalism blurs the boundaries between "production-consumption" and "labor-leisure," causing capital exploitation to lose its visibility. By constructing a narrative of "cognitive elites," cognitive capitalism portrays a tiny minority of top producers as models of success determined by ability. This "fetishism of cognitive capital" masks the fact of capital’s structural exploitation of laborers.
With the help of the value-neutral mediatory characteristics of digital technology, cognitive capitalism causes capitalist exploitative relations to shift from explicit to implicit. Through algorithmic "Taylorism," cognitive laborers are reduced to appendages of the algorithm; labor intensity, rhythm, and content are entirely controlled by platform algorithms. Through the "data enclosure movement," cognitive capitalism establishes private property rights over the cognitive labor results of users. This is essentially a reenactment of the "primitive accumulation" of capital in the digital age, its inherent violence masked by the legal cloak of user consent. Through "digital colonialism," cognitive capitalism allocates cognitive labor to the low end of global value chains. This is essentially the continuation of the "center-periphery" division of labor from the industrial capitalist era into the cognitive capitalist era, with the object of exploitation merely shifting from material labor to cognitive labor.
Cognitive capitalism constructs institutional barriers through intellectual property law, labor law, and tax policies, transforming the exploitation of cognitive labor by cognitive capital into "governance by consent." Intellectual property law grants ownership of cognitive labor results to the platform rather than the laborer; labor law evades the labor-law obligations of platform capitalists by categorizing cognitive laborers as "self-employed"; and tax policies that "rob the poor to give to the rich" regarding cognitive labor exacerbate the concentration of cognitive capital and the impoverishment of cognitive laborers. This institutional coercion provides a rigid institutional guarantee for the relations of production in cognitive capitalism.
2. The Political Sphere: The "Cognitive Monopoly" of Technical Elites
The penetration of cognitive capitalist ideology in the political sphere is primarily achieved by transforming cognitive advantages into political dominance, forming a cognitive monopoly centered on technocracy. The cognitive monopoly of technical elites is essentially capital's transformation of—
The dual monopoly of "living knowledge" and "dead knowledge" transforms cognitive advantages in the economic sphere into political dominance, thereby realizing a bourgeois dictatorship within the cognitive realm. The concept of "general intellect" proposed by Marx in the Grundrisse [13] provides the core analytical tool for understanding the political power structure of cognitive capitalism. Through the capitalistic monopoly of the "general intellect," cognitive capitalism has achieved a reconstruction of political power.
Cognitive capitalism packages capital interests as cognitive necessities. By influencing elections, lobbying for legislation, and shaping public opinion, it converts its own cognitive preferences into social consensus and national strategy. This cognitive monopoly causes public policy-making to deviate from the public interest, degenerating into a tool for large technology companies to maintain their monopoly status. Simultaneously, it embeds the logic of capital into global governance frameworks through structural selection.
"As a vital tool and manifestation of neo-imperialism, cognitive capitalism—leveraging technological monopolies and the platform economy—has constructed a globalized system of exploitation. It utilizes the advantages of cognitive capital to achieve capital valorization, maintains the unequal structures of global capitalism, and exerts influence and control over other nations." This reflects the neo-imperialist attributes of cognitive capitalism: the monopoly of the global means of cognitive production through political means.
Cognitive capitalism reinforces agendas approved by capital through algorithmic recommendation mechanisms while suppressing critical voices such as those concerning the exploitation of digital labor. The cognitive monopoly achieved through these mechanisms is, in essence, a technocratic colonization of the public sphere by the logic of capital. Its core mechanism is the transformation of information distribution into the private appropriation of the means of cognitive production, thereby achieving structural control over agenda-setting. To break the cognitive monopoly of algorithmic recommendations, one must return to Marx’s core proposition regarding the socialization of the "general intellect" and promote the socialized appropriation of the means of cognitive production. This is precisely the manifestation of the significance of Marx’s proposition to "abolish private property" in the era of cognitive capitalism.
3. The Cultural Sphere: The "Cognitive Colonization" of Subjectivity
Compared to the alienation of the "culture industry" [14] in the sense described by Horkheimer and Adorno during the era of industrial capitalism, cognitive capitalism—through the triple mechanisms of datafication, algorithmization, and platformization—achieves a comprehensive private monopoly over the transformation of human cognitive, emotional, and mnemonic means of production, ultimately completing the colonization of cognitive subjectivity. The cultural alienation of cognitive capitalism is essentially the comprehensive private appropriation and colonial reconstruction of the means of cognitive production by the logic of capital, empowered by digital technology. This cultural alienation marks a shift in the logic of capital from the appropriation of the material means of production to the appropriation of the cognitive means of production.
Through the operational logic of algorithmic recommendation feedback loops, cognitive capitalism domesticates human cognitive pathways into data-driven programs that are predictable and controllable by capital. This is essentially the reconstruction of the human cognitive "operating system" with recommendation algorithms. In terms of cognitive objectives, it shifts from the pursuit of truth to data adaptation; in the cognitive process, from dialectical thinking to pattern matching; and in cognitive results, from subjective knowledge to datafied commodities. The alienation of technological rationality criticized by Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man [15] reaches its peak in the algorithmic era. Algorithms are not merely tools; they are an ideology. Through a discourse of "efficiency-first," they lead people to voluntarily surrender their cognitive autonomy and embrace a "one-dimensional cognition" domesticated by capital.
Cognitive capitalism transforms diverse and heterogeneous human subjects into calculable and controllable data objects through standardized data profiling. Using interest tags, consumption preferences, and behavioral trajectories, it compresses an individual’s historical experience, emotional life, and values into standardized data. By categorizing users—based on tag similarity—into data classes such as "high-value/low-value," "active/silent," or "mainstream/marginal," it effectively embeds class logic into the data system. Cognitive capitalism predicts users' future needs through historical tag data and converts these predictions into behavioral commands, trapping individuals in a cognitive closed-loop determined by tags, eventually causing the loss of the capacity for autonomous choice of information.
Cognitive capitalism uses platforms to execute a digital "enclosure movement," [16] incorporating human cognitive productive activities into a "core-periphery" exploitation system dominated by capital. Platforms control the "digital checkpoints" of cognitive flow by monopolizing the power of algorithmic distribution, directing cognitive production toward the optimal path for capital valorization. They achieve the privatized plunder of the means of cognitive production by monopolizing data ownership, completing the enclosure of the cognitive commons. By monopolizing the power to price "traffic" (user attention/engagement), they control the meter for exploiting cognitive labor, achieving the systematic expropriation of creators' surplus value. In short, by privatizing public cognitive resources, platforms construct a "core-periphery" colonial division of labor more concealed than that of industrial capitalism. The platform becomes the digital landlord, the creator becomes the digital tenant farmer, and the user becomes the data serf.
V. Resistance Strategies Against the Ideology of Cognitive Capitalism
Resistance strategies against the ideology of cognitive capitalism are, in essence, a systematic decolonization movement within the cognitive field. This involves fundamentally negating the capital logic of data privatization and restoring data, algorithms, and traffic from the private domain of capital to social public resources, thereby ensuring the public nature of cognitive resources. It requires fundamentally ending the "center-periphery" colonial division of labor in the field of cognitive production, cultivating a non-capital-dominated ecosystem of knowledge production, and rebuilding egalitarian and collaborative relations of cognitive production based on sharing. It demands fundamentally breaking capital’s algorithmic domestication of cognitive subjects, promoting the transformation of individuals from passive algorithmic prisoners into active cognitive subjects. At its core, cognitive capitalism is a bourgeois dictatorship, manifested as the manipulation of political agendas by data oligarchs, the monopoly of the means of cognitive production, and the control over cognitive social relations. Therefore, the core of the resistance strategy is to transform spontaneous cognitive laborers into an "in-and-for-itself" digital proletarian union by establishing digital trade unions, cognitive labor cooperatives, and digital class alliances. Through the establishment of public ownership of data, the democratization of algorithms, and open-source collaboration, we must break the private monopoly of data and the capital dictatorship of algorithms to achieve the sharing of cognitive means of production across the whole of society. By establishing cognitive labor councils and user self-governance committees, we can reconstruct digital social relations and promote the realization of the principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" in the cognitive field, ultimately moving toward human liberation.
- Institutional Constraints: Constructing a Global Governance System Against Capital Monopoly
Breaking the dilemma of knowledge privatization through legislation for the "public-ization" of knowledge is, in essence, an institutional response to the core contradictions of cognitive capitalism. To counter capital’s use of intellectual property rights for so-called "legal enclosures," it is necessary to establish the meta-principle that use-value takes precedence over exchange-value. We must dismantle the legal foundation of monopoly through compulsory licensing clauses and anti-enclosure review mechanisms. To counter the exploitative logic where platforms plunder users' cognitive labor via "free-to-use" models, we must reconstruct the value distribution paradigm of knowledge production and establish systems for the remuneration of data labor and the sovereign management of public data. To counter the academic trusts formed by academic publishing oligarchs, we must break the exploitation chain of "authors provide manuscripts for free—academic institutions subscribe at high prices." Relying on blockchain technology, we should construct decentralized, distributed global knowledge public pools, mandating immediate open access for papers funded by public money and implementing compensation mechanisms for open access. In short, by defining the boundaries between the rational private sphere and the public sphere through legislation, we can reconstruct the relations of production in the cognitive field, end capital’s monopolistic possession of knowledge, and—through the creative reconstruction of social ownership of the means of cognitive production—terminate the rule of cognitive capital over cognitive labor, laying the institutional foundation for human liberation in the digital age.
Reconstructing the institutional boundaries of non-compensated cognitive labor through cognitive labor rights legislation is essentially a systematic correction of the exploitation mechanism of cognitive capitalism. Platforms redefine knowledge production activities as voluntary contributions through user agreements, which in fact colonizes the users' cognitive activities into behavioral data, forming an alienation of cognitive labor masked by "prosumption." At the level of value titling, we must rely on blockchain measurement technology and data dividend systems to achieve the transition of cognitive labor from unpaid contribution to remunerated labor. Regarding the definition of exploitation, through algorithmic transparency legislation and labor-hour regulation, we should push to move cognitive exploitation from a legal gray area into a zone of rigid constraint. At the level of global governance, we should rely on the International Labour Organization to promote international conventions on digital cognitive labor and construct a transnational collaborative regulatory mechanism, achieving a leap from unilateral protection to transnational co-governance. This institutional reconstruction is by no means a denial of the innovative vitality of the digital economy; rather, by establishing the legal status of cognitive labor rights as a fundamental human right, it restores the laborer from being mere data "raw material" to the status of a cognitive subject. Only when the knowledge contribution of every user can be fairly measured and reasonably compensated can cognitive sovereignty truly return to the laborers themselves. This is both a theoretical extension of the Marxist "labor theory of value" in the digital age and the institutional foundation for constructing cognitive justice in the era of algorithms.
The institutional regulation of platform power to limit its overreaching expansion is, in essence, a systematic domestication of the "Digital Leviathan" through a "technology-institution" interaction framework. In terms of algorithmic governance, a full-lifecycle accountability system for algorithms must be constructed: through mandatory ex-ante impact assessments, tiered transparency mechanisms during operation, and the principle of reversed burden of proof ex-post, we can achieve a paradigm shift from technological autonomy to institutional discipline. Regarding data property rights, a revolution in the definition of property rights is necessary: public data should be placed in national health data trusts, personal data should be managed via data asset certificates, and data supervision should utilize "penetrative sandboxes," forming a system of checks and balances where ownership is socialized, use-rights are marketized, and regulatory power is made public. In terms of institutional innovation, we should embed public interest boards into platform governance structures, promote transnational coordination, and develop blockchain auditing tools to achieve "technology-enabled governance." Ultimately, through regulatory innovation, platform power will be incorporated into the institutional framework of the digital public sphere. In short, only when algorithmic transparency becomes a basic right, data property rights return to social public ownership, and governance networks achieve multi-dimensional synergy, can the "Digital Leviathan" be truly domesticated within the framework of the socialist system.
- Technological Countermeasures: Developing De-capitalized Digital Tools and Ecosystems
As the hegemonic form of late-capitalist ideology, the technological hegemony of cognitive capitalism has escalated into a symbolic violent rule of algorithmic ideology. Platforms, as monopolists of digital infrastructure, exchange free services for user data, transforming non-material labor into cognitive capital and incorporating it into the system of capital valorization. The core contradiction of cognitive capitalism is the fundamental opposition between the appearance of knowledge as a public good and its essence as private appropriation. Data, as the core carrier of cognitive surplus value, reconstructs the spatial-temporal logic of capital accumulation through the monopoly of ownership and control. Algorithms, as a new form of "digital Taylorism," [17] achieve fine-grained control over the labor process through behavioral prediction algorithms and emotional manipulation technologies, forming the cognitive paradox of "voluntary exploitation." From data to algorithms, the ideology of cognitive capitalism simplifies systematic capital exploitation into a technical problem rather than an inherent contradiction of capital accumulation in the Marxist sense. This diverts the public demand for reform of the capitalist system itself, creating a cognitive trap of technological determinism. The essence of de-capitalized digital tools and digital ecosystems is that they serve as material weapons for ideological struggle. Starting from a clear definition of de-capitalization, we must break the capital monopoly over core digital means of production—such as data, algorithms, and platforms—and reconstruct relations of cognitive production based on the principles of "publicness," "decentralization," and "user sovereignty," providing a technological fulcrum for ideological resistance by labor subjects under cognitive capitalism.
The basic path of data de-capitalization begins with Deleuze's...
Taking the theory of the "rhizome" [18] as a starting point for reconstruction, data is decomposed via distributed ledger technology into encrypted fragments stored across a global network of nodes. Through decentralized storage protocols, the market-based allocation of storage resources is achieved, ensuring that data flows—much like a rhizomatous plant—without a center or hierarchy, attaining risk resistance through multifaceted connections. Simultaneously, this confirms the warning of Hardt and Negri: the rule of cognitive capitalism has shifted from macro-control to micro-penetration, and technical resistance must accordingly achieve a "capillary" deconstruction of power. The revolutionary significance of data de-capitalization lies in reconstructing the value logic of data collaboration; data is transformed from a possessive resource into a relational resource, reconstructing the value distribution mechanism through a market for data usage rights. Data de-capitalization reconstructs the cognitive framework of data subjectivity through "counter-governmentality," transforming Foucault’s sense of self-governance into a strategy of resistance. Users transition from being the governed to being self-governors, forming a power of passive resistance against surveillance capitalism. The ultimate significance of data de-capitalization lies not in the optimization of technical tools, but in reconstructing the biopolitics of the digital age: users are no longer mere carriers of data but become weavers of data relations, transforming data from a tool for capital valorization into the material basis for realizing the free and well-rounded development of individuals.
The fundamental contradiction of algorithmic de-capitalization lies in the eternal gamble between technical autonomy and the logic of capital subsumption. Lawrence Lessig’s proposition that "code is law" has, in the era of cognitive capitalism, evolved into "algorithms are power." Algorithmic black boxes achieve behavioral manipulation and data exploitation through opaque rules. The adversarial development of open-source algorithms, through practices of reverse coding, reconstructs algorithms from private property into a knowledge commons, making algorithms serve the public interest rather than capital valorization. The technical struggle for algorithmic de-capitalization must confront a core question: can transparency truly achieve the redistribution of power? Only through the adversarial design of bias-detection tools can the decision-making logic of complex models be translated into human-understandable rules, thereby preventing latent discrimination in algorithmic decision-making. Through governance innovations such as blockchain-based evidence preservation and algorithmic traceability, the hashes of algorithm versions, digests of training data, and parameters of decision logic are stored on-chain as evidence. This forms an "algorithm ID card," achieving evidence preservation for the entire algorithmic lifecycle and shifting algorithmic governance from ex-post accountability to process-controllability. Algorithmic transparency is not merely a technical issue but a political practice of power redistribution; its goal is to break the monopoly held by platform enterprises over the right to interpret algorithms and to achieve the "democratization of algorithmic accountability." The true algorithmic revolution lies not in tool optimization, but in liberating algorithms from the control logic of capital and re-embedding them into the emancipatory practice of humanity.
The deep contradiction of platform de-capitalization lies in the transformation of the legitimate basis of governance power—that is, the shift from the one-dimensional rule of capital sovereignty toward the distributed collaboration of multi-stakeholder governance. Traditional capital platforms center on shareholder sovereignty, constructing a governance order of rational calculation through hierarchical management and data monopoly; its essence is the colonization of the public sphere by the logic of capital. The "code-as-collaboration" governance of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), mediated by blockchain technology, is essentially a digital recreation of public space. It shifts governance power from capital possession to contributor consensus, marking an ontological transformation of the basis of governance legitimacy from a monopoly of ownership to a collaborative community. What Marx and Engels proposed in the Communist Manifesto as "expropriating the expropriators" manifests in the era of cognitive capitalism as a revolution in the ownership of digital means of production.
3. Subjective Awakening: Cultivating Individual Critical Cognitive Skills and Collective Action Capacities
The ideological violence of cognitive capitalism has shifted from the "technical framework" (Gestell) [19] of industrial capitalism to a "cognitive framework," thereby achieving the epistemological capture of the subject—internalizing datafied existence, attention exploitation, and the alienation of cognitive labor as transcendental conditions for technical progress. The fragmented cognitive feeding system constructed by platform capitalism is essentially the concretization of the ideological state apparatus [20] (in Althusser’s sense) in the digital age. Through the "micro-content/instant feedback" closed loop of algorithmic recommendation, it shapes the cognitive habits of the subject, ultimately leading to the degradation of deep thinking capacities and the dissolution of critical consciousness. When algorithms produce not only knowledge but the very conditions of the possibility of knowledge, and when platforms control not only information but its mode of existence, how can the subject—within the predicament of cognitive colonization—break the shackles of the cognitive framework through the deconstruction of cognitive resistance and the biopolitical reconstruction of collective action, achieving a breakthrough from being a governed subject to becoming a self-constructing subject?
The cultivation of critical cognitive skills is by no means competency training at the level of instrumental rationality; rather, it is the reconstruction of cognitive subjectivity. This involves reclaiming the subject's power to construct the conditions of cognitive possibility through a reflexive suspension of the process of technical embodiment. Through "cognitive object genealogy," one reveals how data constructs cognitive objects via the cognitive violence of "correlation = causality," restoring the fact that recommended objects are actually a symbolic reconstruction of user behavior data by algorithms. Through "memory contrast," one exposes the power bias in platform memory filtering, reclaiming the subject’s right to memory so that digital memory reverts from a tool of control to a narrative construction of existence. Through the practice of "cognitive deceleration," one refuses to be passively sucked into the "swipe-click-feedback" cognitive loop, restoring the original meaning of cognition as an active interrogation of existence. When the subject can refuse the cognitive paths recommended by algorithms, they achieve a leap from cognitive puppet to cognitive sovereign. The essence of this leap is that the subject is no longer the object of algorithmic governance, but the legislator of their own conditions of cognitive possibility.
Cognitive capitalism twists the technical infrastructure of the "being-with" (Mitsein) of knowledge into an "atomized connection mediated by algorithms." Collective action must reconstruct technical co-presence, restoring the original meaning of "being-with" as free coexistence within difference. Through distributed technologies such as blockchain and P2P networks, we can break through the geographical limitations of traditional communities and construct a world-historical co-presence. Through decentralized storage technologies such as IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) and Arweave (often called the "permaweb" or a blockchain storage protocol), we can construct "public memory archives," storing the narratives of marginalized groups, the history of social movements, and alternative knowledge production in fragments across global nodes. By establishing a global-local knowledge graph blockchain, which includes indigenous oral histories, local craft knowledge, and non-Western histories of philosophy, we can form a symbolic space of co-presence where differences resonate. In a sense, this collectivity is not a negation of individuality, but a digital reconstruction of Heidegger’s "being-with"—each cognitive subject, while maintaining their own uniqueness, realizes the basic conditions for an "association of free individuals" [21] through the construction of distributed technical infrastructure.
4. Transnational Collaboration: Breaking Through the Global Liquidity Barriers of Capital
Transnational capital achieves unimpeded valorization through spatial arbitrage, technical monopoly, and ideological penetration. In contrast, cognitive laborers are restricted by the judicial boundaries of nation-states, technical access barriers, and cultural divides, making it difficult to form effective resistance. Transnational collaboration, as a key dimension of resistance strategy, breaks the space for institutional arbitrage, breaches the channels of technical monopoly, eliminates mechanisms of cognitive isolation, and constructs a "transnational cognitive community," forming a systemic breakthrough against the liquidity barriers of capital.
The space for institutional arbitrage is a systemic loophole through which transnational capital achieves surplus accumulation via institutional differences between states; its essence is the transformation of the fragmentation of state sovereignty into a tool for capital valorization. Data arbitrage is the most concealed form of institutional arbitrage in cognitive capitalism, utilizing the logic of separating the place of registration from the place of value creation, thereby severing the value created by cognitive labor from tax jurisdiction—creating an unfair pattern of "global value creation vs. local tax payment." To address this rift, we must establish the principle of taxation at the user's location, creating a data value-sharing mechanism where taxes are allocated based on a weighted ratio of the user population and data usage in each location. To address the rift between data control and value distribution rights, we must break through the mechanical perception that "data localization = data sovereignty" and instead construct an autonomous framework for data sovereignty that embeds data value-sharing clauses and establishes "look-through" regulation of data flows. To address the rift between institutional discourse power and rule-execution power, technical means must be used to construct decentralized regulatory networks, weakening the rule-execution advantages of central states.
Technical monopoly channels refer to capital’s monopolistic possession of technical pathways. Transnational capital, by controlling cross-border payments, cloud services, and communication infrastructure, constructs a "digital feudalism." The right of technical access is defined by capital as a "grant," and cognitive subjects are forced to achieve data flow, value transfer, and knowledge production through infrastructure controlled by capital, falling into the passive predicament of "attach or be eliminated." We must build decentralized payment networks and establish real-time linkage between data and value, forming a "data-value-subject" cyborg symbiotic system to achieve co-present value flows without capital intermediaries. We must build distributed storage and cloud services to break the data possession monopoly of Amazon Web Services, achieving a symbiotic possession of subject-data-storage technology, where data is upgraded from a capital good to a knowledge commons shared by cognitive subjects. We must build decentralized communication networks to break the communication hegemony of "center nations vs. peripheral regions," so that cognitive subjects are no longer terminal users of capital's communication networks but co-constructors of communication space.
The mechanism of cognitive isolation is the core ideological mechanism by which cognitive capitalism maintains global rule. Its essence is to prevent cognitive subjects from forming effective solidarity across regions and identities by amplifying cultural differences, splintering identity politics, and isolating individuals within information cocoons. The ultimate goal of this mechanism is to lock cognitive subjects into the predicament of "atomized cognition and fragmented resistance," maintaining capital’s monopolistic exploitation of cognitive labor. Cracking the mechanism of cognitive isolation requires synergistic efforts from the dual perspectives of organizational network reconstruction and ideological decolonization, achieving co-present solidarity on the premise of acknowledging difference, and ultimately constructing a co-present order of cognitive subjects. Through the distributed reconstruction of organizational networks, we break the identity opposition and geographical isolation dominated by capital. Through ideological decolonization, we dismantle the symbolic violence of "cultural superiority" and "identity antagonism" dominated by capital, reconstructing an ethic of being-with amid difference. Cracking the mechanism of cognitive isolation is not merely a strategic innovation of resistance tools but an ontological revolution of the cognitive subject, achieving the transition from a capital-dominated cognitive order to a co-present order of cognitive subjects, finally transcending capital-dominated cognitive isolation.
Conclusion
Cognitive capitalism is, in essence, the extension of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie into the cognitive realm. Through an algorithmic framework (Gestell), cognitive capitalism alienates the "being-in-the-world" of the proletariat into a "cognitive Dasein," achieving the dissolution of proletarian cognitive subjectivity. By degrading the common knowledge-wealth of cognitive labor into private data assets, it carries out a predatory seizure of proletarian cognitive sovereignty in the form of user agreements. Through the "cognitive enclosure movement" implemented by the intellectual property system, it privatizes the socialized cognitive achievements that should belong to the proletariat. In short, the systemic reconstruction of the relations of cognitive production by cognitive capitalism is essentially an ideological domestication carried out by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to maintain the valorization of capital.
To crack the ideological rule of cognitive capitalism, we must use decentralized technology to break capital’s monopoly over cognitive channels, allowing cognitive subjects to regain control over the symbiotic relationship between cognition and technology through data sovereignty and algorithmic auditing rights. This enables the cognitive subject to confirm their existence within a "being-with" characterized by difference, rather than being homogenized by algorithms. By constructing a knowledge commons and breaking the monopoly of intellectual property—using open-source collaboration and distributed knowledge production to break through intellectual property barriers—we reconstruct knowledge from a product of capital into a co-present cognitive achievement. We must liberate cognitive labor from data exploitation, making knowledge production serve the free and well-rounded development of the person, subordinating technical rationality to the "people-centered" [22] nature of our project, and confirming that the standard of value for technical progress is the realization of essential human powers. In summary, cracking the ideological rule of cognitive capitalism is essentially the class struggle carried out by the proletariat in the cognitive realm: by seizing control of the cognitive means of production, eliminating the cognitive forms of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and constructing a communist knowledge commons, we drive human civilization from capitalist civilization toward socialist and communist civilization.
Author Profile: Deng Bojun, Professor and PhD Supervisor at the School of Marxism, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Source: Marxism Studies (马克思主义研究), Issue 12, 2025. Editor: Huihui