Abstract
This paper takes from architecture theory and contemporary artistic practices to describe the shift we are facing today from social reproduction to metabolic synchronization. From D.O.G.E., to Gaza, from Brexit to the gig economy, capital, through finance, believes the digital has delivered it from any dependency on social reproduction. The current reactionary politics and the normalization of mass death are exemplary to a new regime of metabolic synchronization where labor flows of surplus populations replace the working class. Under these conditions shifts occur from value to price, from labor to debt, from rights to services from revolution to disruption, from strategy to logistics, from avant garde to speculation, from citizen to petty sovereign, from the point of production to the point of realization, and from social reproduction to metabolic synchronization. The digital regime’s metabolic synchronization brings together body, location and device; monitoring heartbeats, hookups, food deliveries, administration of bodies into registered and undocumented, customized ready to deliver services and goods. Metabolic synchronization emerges as the form totalizing all forms of human activity making them subjected to finance on various scales of life. Through contemporary artworks and social phenomenon, this paper presents the new regime we are faced. The digital regime is a concentrated assault on social reproduction, which devised a new form of metabolic synchronization.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2026 Special Focus—Modeling Life Systems: Art, Algorithms, Ecologies
KEYWORDS
METABOLISM, SYNCHRONIZATION, SOCIAL REPRODUCTION, CAPITAL, FINANCE, DIGITAL REGIME
