Zoopolítica: las redes sociales como zoológicos humanos. Capitalismo y colonialismo en las nuevas formas de subjetivación

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a proliferation of human zoos in which people from colonised nations were studied, exhibited and imprisoned. In this article, we think of power, social networks and the world as a renewed human zoo. We coin the concept of zoopolitics to explain how ongoing forms of exercising power generalise animalisation, thereby managing human life and death. We explore the (dis)continuities of the digital zoo through four dimensions: 1) the laboratory that transforms the relation of knowledge to power; 2) the reconfiguration of intimacy into extimacy and showmanship; 3) the paradoxes of confinement and addiction; and 4) colonialism in its synthesis of psychopolitics and necropolitics. We conclude by affirming our agency in the digital zoo, insisting on the need to construct the human from more inclusive meanings that incorporate our ecological interdependence.