Neo-necromancer

The name is chosen to place a contemporary practice in an old category rather than to insult anyone. Necromancy in the framework's terms is the manipulation of life and of the dead for power, and what makes the third age version new is not the aim but the instruments, since the target is the same intimate circle it has always been. That circle is the one containing control over the body, consciousness, self, will and life, which is the full set of five elements, so the occupation being described is total rather than partial. Torture is a struggle for ownership of the most intimate circle of self, the one protected by privacy, and if that ownership is lost the self will be sublated, so what neo-necromancers seek is what torture seeks, achieved at population scale by other means. The relevant developments are the ones Marsh identifies elsewhere as prerequisites for governance by algorithm: dissociation, externalization of guidance and the establishment of one authority. Removal of privacy and will from people to corporations and algorithms is a transference of dignity, since dignity is preservation of ownership over one's own inner circles. Read this way, surveillance, behavioural prediction, biometric identification and the medical and psychiatric authority to define states of a person are not separate developments but one operation, and the word names the operation rather than any of its instruments.

Surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff's term, describes the extraction of behavioural data and the prediction and modification of conduct, and Foucault's biopower names the administration of life itself as the modern form of power. Deleuze's control societies described continuous modulation replacing enclosure. Agamben's bare life concerns sovereign power over biological existence. Marsh's term overlaps heavily with all of these and differs in framing, since calling the practitioners necromancers claims continuity with older practices for controlling life and the dead rather than treating the contemporary form as historically unprecedented, which is the claim most of this literature makes.