Automated (post)positivism |
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| Authors: | Elvin Wyly |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, 1984 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2ewyly@geog.ubc.ca |
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| Abstract: | With a mantra that ‘nobody is as smart as everybody,’ Google maintains giant databases that enable unprecedented quantitative analysis of a social world that is now majority urban. A Wall Street web-based broker offers an App that promises to turn ‘thoughts into trades.’ Economists and marketers now use evolutionary theory in ‘neuroimaging’ brain scans of consumer behavior. The United States Air Force now trains more joystick-maestro drone pilots than old-fashioned Do-the-Right-Stuff human fighters and bombers. In this article, I suggest that these trends signal a troubling reincarnation of an aggressive Right-wing (post)positivist zombie reanimated by global, digitized neoliberalism. The long-forgotten revolutionary project launched by Auguste Comte in 1822 was hijacked and corrupted after his death, and now we confront a hybrid cyborg zombie, a dehumanized, automated adaptation to the post-structuralist situated knowledges of consumer sovereignty. #Comtebot: The positivist era is right now; the question is what kinds of politics it will have. |
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| Keywords: | positivism epistemology social media Internet methodology |
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