How platforms reinforce cognitive capitalism?: Consideration of the main points of discussion in “The human condition in the age of artificial intelligence”
Authors:   Korean Association for Literacy, Joo Minjae 
Published: July 2023

“The human condition in the age of artificial intelligence” analyzes artificial intelligence from the perspective of a combination of data and artificial intelligence in terms of the connection between cybernetics and cognitive capitalism. The human condition in the age of artificial intelligence] discusses cognitive capitalism, focusing on the keywords of mechanical subjugation and social subordination and the cyclical causal relationship between individuation and disintegration occurring in the digital environment. Cognitive capitalism and the way it develops based on its critical perspective helps to form a critical perspective on the impact of artificial intelligence on human existence and life. In this paper, “The human condition in the age of artificial intelligence” is centered on the three keywords of cognitive capitalism, platform, and divided entity, and the way to recognize the essence of the AI era and the mechanism of artificial intelligence, as well as the human perception and understanding of it. Discuss how to respond.
Cybernetics, which presented the basis for independent automated machines that adapt to environmental changes through automation and feedback, evolved in the form of artificial intelligence and shifted control initiative between humans and machines from humans to machines. The daily use of the Internet and smartphones and the development of artificial intelligence inevitably speed up the inter-transformation between data, information and knowledge and promote automation of the transition. Platforms have become the backbone of cognitive capitalism, which sees information and knowledge as a source of new wealth. In industrial capitalism, if factories that produce products were the main foundation of the economy, in cognitive capitalism, platforms take their place, establishing a system in which most of the labor of workers is also performed through platforms. The foundation of cognitive capitalism is a mechanism built by platforms, big data generated through platforms, and algorithms that combine big data into meaningful information to transform it into concrete profits.
The platform seeks coexistence with state power by accommodating access by state devices for specific purposes. The ruling system built on the basis of a mixture of mechanical subjugation and social submission causes people's class consciousness or critical social consciousness to change into other forms. It is not the confrontation or contradiction between capital and labor as before, but takes the form of subjectivity combined with consumer consciousness formed in the life world. The platform automates individual thoughts and actions while repeating divisionalization, which reduces individual actions to numerical values, and fragmentation, which returns the data set of divided figures back to the individual.
The reason why platform companies can grow with high profits lies in the accumulation of various contents produced and shared through voluntary participation and interaction of individuals and the data generated in this process, but platform companies conceal this as much as possible. It is because the platform plays the role of ‘platform rent price’ that it can build a dual accumulation system that receives unlimited data on the results of users’ activities while maximizing their own profits by minimizing responsibility for workers. A platform company is a digital landlord that realizes a dual accumulation system that accumulates both rent profits through land capital and profits using industrial capital. In the end, cognitive capitalism as platform capitalism is maintained through the dual accumulation system of platform rent price. Therefore, a more specific discussion is needed on how to activate the will of individuals to escape from the platform and attempt to recover from a divided body to a substantial body.