CONCEPT
Machinic Enslavement
The mechanism by which human capacities — perception, attention, affect, cognition — are integrated directly into technical assemblages below the threshold of individual awareness, as components rather than as subjects.
Machinic enslavement operates at a level distinct from social subjection. It does not produce individual subjects who make conscious choices. It integrates human capacities — perception, attention, affect, cognition — directly into technical assemblages that function according to their own operational logic, independent of any individual's consciousness or intention. In machinic enslavement, the human is not a subject who uses a machine but a component of a machine — a relay in a circuit, a processing node in a system that operates below individual awareness. AI platforms operate simultaneously through social subjection (where the user experiences herself as directing the tool) and machinic enslavement (where her cognitive capacities are captured as data feeding back into the system).
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept draws on Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus and on Lazzarato's development of it in Signs and Machines (2014). The distinction from social subjection is not metaphorical: the two mechanisms operate on different levels of the human-technical interaction,