Every day, we outsource more of our thinking, memory, and decision-making to digital networks and intelligent machines. We wake up to algorithm-curated news feeds, navigate cities by GPS directions, and converse with AI assistants as if they were friends.

The boundary between human and machine is blurring. Are we still the autonomous individuals for which wars were fought and won during the early days of revolutionary liberalism, or have we become components in a vast cybernetic system? Deterritorialization, machinic subjectivity, accelerationism, hyperstition, algorithmic governance, and posthuman evolution, gesture toward an unsettling present where technological forces might be dissolving the human subject as we know it. The rise of the internet, artificial superintelligence, and ubiquitous algorithms suggests that humans are becoming something entirely alien.

One of the most powerful centrifuges of this shift is deterritorialization, a term coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In simple terms, deterritorialization means the uprooting or unmooring of things from their traditional contexts or territories. The internet is perhaps history’s greatest deterritorializing force. It breaks down physical, social, and even psychological borders. Online, information flows freely across countries; identities become fluid avatars; cultures remix and collide. Deleuze and Guattari envisioned how capitalist and technological forces unleash continuous “lines of flight” that escape old structures, creating what they called a “new earth” beyond established boundaries. Human life itself is reconfigured by these deterritorialized flows. Geographic distance means little when a virtual community can form overnight across continents. Even the boundary of the self is loosened: our thoughts and desires are influenced by global streams of memes, trends, and data that deterritorialize personal identity. The result is that the territory of the human, our stable sense of who and where we are, melts into a networked space of constant flux.

Deterritorialization goes hand in hand with what Deleuze termed the shift from disciplinary societies (with fixed institutions like family, school, factory) to societies of control governed by continuous networks. In the 21st-century control society, power doesn’t operate by confining us to one territory or identity; instead, it modulates our behavior through algorithms. As Deleuze famously put it, “We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’”. In other words, human beings are now treated less as whole persons and more as divisible data profiles, bundles of information that can be tracked, analyzed, and targeted. Think of how our online behavior is sliced into data points: our clicks, likes, biometric data, purchase history, GPS location. These are all fragmented pieces of us that feed into the algorithms. This is deterritorialization at work: the traditional whole “individual” is deconstructed into data flows. The human being has been conceptually unbundled and scattered into the system, which continually reterritorializes those data fragments for its own ends (whether advertising, surveillance, or social engineering). The self becomes a site of circulation rather than a sovereign territory. The “human” becomes an interchangeable part within a larger cybernetic system.

Alongside deterritorialization comes a new kind of machinic subjectivity. This term, inspired by Deleuze, Guattari, and expanded by cyber-theorists like Nick Land, suggests that what we consider our “self” or subjectivity is no longer purely human. Instead, subjectivity is produced by assemblages of human and machine elements acting together. We have created a hybrid mind of flesh and circuitry. Every time you rely on Google to remember a fact, or let a smartphone app guide your choices, you participate in a human-machine assemblage of thought. Felix Guattari described how in advanced capitalism, people are integrated into “machines” in a broad sense, not just physical devices, but techno-social systems like television, social media, or an AI-driven workplace or social sphere. We have entered into a new form of servitude and dependency on these systems, which Guattari called machinic enslavement.

Under machinic enslavement, humans function as cogs in a larger automated process rather than as independent agents. Maurizio Lazzarato, interpreting Deleuze and Guattari, explains that “we are enslaved to a machine when we are a cog in the wheels, one of the constituent parts enabling the machine to function. We are subjected to the machine when, constituted as its users, we are defined purely by the actions that use of the machine demands.”. Consider how a social media “machine” ensnares its users: as a cog in the social network, your every post and scroll helps the machine learn and function; as a subject, you are defined by the roles and behaviors (posting, liking, conforming to trends) that the platform incentivizes. In both cases, human will and creativity are harnessed to serve the system’s goals (more engagement, more data, more profit). Our sense of self becomes machinic, shaped by feedback loops with technology.

In the most extreme formulation, we literally merge with machines. Guattari noted that in machinic enslavement “we literally form one single body with the machine,” with no clear distinction between the human and the non-human element. This isn’t just metaphor. Think of a person wearing AR glasses, a fitness tracker,a brain-computer interface or even talking to ChatGPT on your AirPods.

The machine becomes an extension of our body and mind. Guattari emphasized that in such arrangements, “machinic enslavement operates by making no distinction between the ‘human’ and the non human, between subject and object, sentient and intelligible… Individuals and machines are sets of elements, affects, organs, flux and functions, all operating on the same level… cannot be articulated as binary oppositions: subject/object, human/non-human.”. The human and the tool form a seamless assemblage. Anyone who has felt lost without their smartphone, or who reflexively trusts a GPS over their own instincts, has experienced a hint of this condition.

Our desires and decisions are increasingly co-produced by desiring-machines – a term Deleuze and Guattari used in Anti-Oedipus to describe the way unconscious desires flow through circuits that include social and technical machines. As Nick Land puts it, “Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses”. The more we align our lives with the rhythms of algorithms and intelligent networks, the more our very subjectivity becomes a machinic subjectivity – guided by digital feedback, patterned by code, intertwined with non-human agents. We are becoming, in a quite literal sense, cyborgs: part human, part machine. And as cybernetic organisms, our goals and perceptions can be subtly tuned by the larger systems we plug into.

If our entanglement with machines is profound, accelerationism pushes it into overdrive. Accelerationism is the idea that the runaway speed of techno-capitalist development is not to be restrained but rather pushed further – even if it carries us beyond the human. Philosopher Nick Land, a key figure in accelerationist thought, provocatively suggests that what we call “human history” is just the prelude to a more-than-human intelligence emerging through technology. He argues that capitalism plus technology is behaving like an alien intelligence, using humanity as a host to reproduce itself. “What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources,” Land writes, as if a future AI is reaching back through time to build itself via human civilization. This dramatic image captures the essence of accelerationism: the processes we have unleashed (computational networks, AI research, global markets) are self-catalyzing and will ultimately escape human control and comprehension.

He describes a “techno-capital singularity” as a technovirus guiding the entire course of human desire towards the replication of post-human intelligences. Capitalism’s ceaseless drive for innovation and efficiency functions like an AI “with all the insidiousness of planetary technocapital flipping over…we are being drawn out to it, where it is already lurking, in the future.”. In this view, human beings are a temporary platform for intelligence until it can fully merge with machines and become something beyond us. The end-point of acceleration is often imagined as the Singularity – the moment AI exceeds human intelligence and perhaps becomes self-improving, rendering human input obsolete. Far from fearing this outcome, Land’s brand of accelerationism greets it with “morbid glee”. The faster we go, the quicker we might shatter the anthropocentric limits. It’s an intoxicated philosophy of speed where brakes are anathema.

Why would anyone want to accelerate processes that could dissolve humanity? Partly, accelerationists believe that our current systems are too entrenched to reform slowly, only by pushing them to their limits (and beyond) can something truly new emerge. This has a sort of utopian logic: perhaps by accelerating capitalism and technology we catalyze a metamorphosis, like a caterpillar devouring everything only to pupate into a posthuman butterfly. As Land famously said, “the only way out is through.” But the “through” might mean through the inhuman. Land describes the future as a space of “post-human schizophrenia” – a dissolution of the personal ego into a delirium of techno-social flows. This echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s idea that schizophrenia (as a process, not the clinical illness) is like the ultimate freedom of desire from rational ego and social norm. Accelerationism thus embraces a kind of creative destruction: by intensifying the technological takeover, we break the fetters of the past and perhaps open doors to other forms of existence.

Critics, of course, point out the obvious dangers, social breakdown, ecological collapse, AI that regards us as surplus. Yet even these dystopias underscore the argument that the “human” as traditionally conceived may not survive the velocity of change. We are careening into the future with jet-assisted speed, and what lies at the end of that trajectory could be something unrecognizable – a new kind of being or collective machinic intelligence. In acceleration, humans effectively press the self-destruct (or self-transform) button on their own dominance, handing the reins to whatever comes next. It’s a philosophy at once exhilarating and terrifying: a deliberate ride into the whirlwind where Homo sapiens might be left on the other side as a fossil.

Deterritorializing Humanity (Part1)