The Digital Siege and Its Self-Backlash: Tech-Capital Collusion in DeLillo's Cosmopolis

Abstract

Don DeLillo's 2003 novel Cosmopolis, framed as a single-day narrative set in early 21st-century Manhattan, delivers a prescient account of the profound collusion between technology and capital in the digital age and its attendant social consequences. Drawing on Fredric Jameson's seminal theoretical framework The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, this paper systematically unpacks the construction mechanism and runaway logic of the "digital siege" depicted in the novel. By virtue of digitization, algorithmization and automation, technology thoroughly remakes the real world into a tradable, manipulable system of virtual symbols across three dimensions: perceptual mediation, spatial form, and linguistic carrier. This study argues that DeLillo incisively exposes the inherent contradiction at the heart of the tech-capital collusion: virtual expansion divorced from the grounding of reality will inevitably culminate in systemic collapse through self-backlash. Tracing this analytical trajectory from "construction" to "loss of control", the paper seeks to systematically articulate DeLillo's literary critique of tech-capital collusion and its practical cautionary relevance to the contemporary AI era.