The sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato’s writing deepens the critique of computism. He argues that, beyond reducing us to data-generating objects, capitalism uses that data to manufacture subjectivity from the inside out. In his book Signs and Machines (2014), he argues that technology bypasses our conscious behaviour to break us down into pre-individual components (like algorithmically detected ‘interests’) that can be made into measurable inputs. In this way, technology has the capacity not just to observe and respond to us, but to construct our responses to it.

It’s similar to the way design itself has been broken down into atomic elements that can be snapped together and recombined to produce new interfaces. As if to illustrate Lazzarato’s point, many designers and engineers have moved increasingly toward feeding their design systems to large language models (LLMs) to produce simulacra of designed interfaces. Elsewhere, synthetic data is used to, for example, create synthetic user personas – imaginary people made of Lazzarato’s fragmentary, pre-individual information against which to test their ideas. The actual human can be abstracted out of the process entirely, leaving just a simulation. After all, in the computist model, humans can be understood as data, so data can be substituted in for humans.

This is what it means to treat the body and the mind as a device. Embodied subjective experience is abandoned in favour of measurement. Speaking to a consortium of longevity clinics in 2024, the entrepreneur Peter Diamandis said: ‘It’s either a hardware problem or a software problem, and we’re going to be able to fix that!’ If the body is complicated hardware, the mind is its buggy, degraded software waiting to be optimised and put to more productive work.