Reflections on Naomi Klein's Pandemic Shock Doctrine

Summary, in English

Drawing on and expanding Klein’s argument, this essay seeks to expose the all-to-human consequences of the emergence and expansion of digital capitalism. It begins with a summary of Naomi Klein’s article, emphasising the main arguments. Next, I discuss Klein’s essay in relation to Shoshana Zuboff’s work on surveillance capitalism to show how they are both essentially criticizing a biopolitical turn in digital capitalism. Finally, I invoke Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to supplement such biopolitical analyses of digital capitalism with an attention to the distant ‘zones of death’ where the precarious workers that form the material bases of the digital-capitalist mode of production are left unprotected and exploited.