The Techno-Capitalist Fallacy

We are living in a moment in which philosophy, technology and capitalism have fused into a single ideological machine. Today, philosophies of technology, focusing on AI and the problem of consciousness, no longer interpret current realities but actively legitimize their transformation, from Silicon Valley’s transhumanism to dark authoritarian fantasies. But what if the anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence and automation stemmed less from technology than from those philosophies themselves? In the end, what they do is simply helping capitalism flourish by making fears of human obsolescence appear inevitable. But there is a possible alternative. Treating human subjectivity as one mere perspective among others, this alternative dismantles anthropocentrism and challenges the illusions that capitalism depends upon.

We need to return to reality – a reality that is, at last, given the chance to speak by itself, beyond the abstractions of philosophy.

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Katarina Kolozova is professor at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities in Skopje, North Macedonia, and one of the leading figures in contemporary critical thinking and feminism. Her last book in English is Defending Materialism: The Uneasy History of the Atom in Science and Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2024, with William Paul Cockshott and Greg Michaelson).