Cyber-Marx

Author: Nick Dyer-Witheford
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252067952
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Book Description
In this highly readable and thought-provoking work, Nick Dyer-Witheford assesses the relevance of Marxism in our time and demonstrates how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict between capital and its laboring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter. Dyer-Witheford maps the dynamics of modern capitalism, showing how capital depends for its operations not just on exploitation in the immediate workplace, but on the continuous integration of a whole series of social sites and activities, from public health and maternity to natural resource allocation and the geographical reorganization of labor power. He also shows how these sites and activities may become focal points of subversion and insurgency, as new means of communication vital for the smooth flow of capital also permit otherwise isolated and dispersed points of resistance to connect and combine with one another. Cutting through the smokescreen of high-tech propaganda, Dyer-Witheford predicts the advent of a reinvented, "autonomist" Marxism that will rediscover the possibility of a collective, communist transformation of society. Refuting the utopian promises of the information revolution, he discloses the real potentialities for a new social order in the form of a twenty-first-century communism based on the common sharing of wealth.

Inhuman Power

Author: Nick Dyer-Witheford
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
ISBN: 9780745338606
Category : Artificial intelligence
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The past several years have brought staggering advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence. And Marxist analysis has to keep up: while machines were always central to Marxist analysis, modern AI is a new kind of machine that Marx could not have anticipated. Inhuman Power explores the relationship between Marxist theory and AI through three approaches, each using the lens of a different Marxist theoretical concept. While the idea of widespread AI tends to be celebrated as much as questioned, a deeper analysis of its reach and potential produces a more complex and disturbing picture than has been identified. Inhuman Power argues that on its current trajectory, AI is likely to render humanity obsolete and that the only way to prevent it is a communist revolution.

Storming Heaven

Author: Steve Wright
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
ISBN: 9780745399911
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Storming Heave in Steve Wright's unsurpassed study of Italian autonomist Marxism. This new edition remains the only book to examine Italian workerist theory and practice, from its origins in teh anti-Stalinist left of the 1950s to its heyday twenty years later. First developed by Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna and others, workerism, or 'orperaismo', includes the refusal of work, class self-organisation, mass illegality and the extension of revolutionary agency, all of which are still practised today by workers across the world. This edition includes a new chapter looking at the debates around operaismo and Autonomia since the book originally appeared in 2002.

Blood of the Dawn

Author: Claudia Salazar Jiménez
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
ISBN: 1941920438
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 78

Book Description
This novel follows three women whose lives intertwine and are ripped apart during what’s known as “the time of fear” in Peruvian history when the Shining Path militant insurgency was at its peak. The novel rewrites the armed conflict in the voice of women, activating memory through a mixture of politics, desire, and pain in a lucid and brutal prose.

Cyberwar and Revolution

Author: Nick Dyer-Witheford
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452960488
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Book Description
Uncovering the class conflicts, geopolitical dynamics, and aggressive capitalism propelling the militarization of the internet Global surveillance, computational propaganda, online espionage, virtual recruiting, massive data breaches, hacked nuclear centrifuges and power grids—concerns about cyberwar have been mounting, rising to a fever pitch after the alleged Russian hacking of the U.S. presidential election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Although cyberwar is widely discussed, few accounts undertake a deep, critical view of its roots and consequences. Analyzing the new militarization of the internet, Cyberwar and Revolution argues that digital warfare is not a bug in the logic of global capitalism but rather a feature of its chaotic, disorderly unconscious. Urgently confronting the concept of cyberwar through the lens of both Marxist critical theory and psychoanalysis, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Svitlana Matviyenko provide a wide-ranging examination of the class conflicts and geopolitical dynamics propelling war across digital networks. Investigating the subjectivities that cyberwar mobilizes, exploits, and bewilders, and revealing how it permeates the fabric of everyday life and implicates us all in its design, this book also highlights the critical importance of the emergent resistance to this digital militarism—hacktivism, digital worker dissent, and off-the-grid activism—for effecting different, better futures.

Experimenting the Human

Author: G Douglas Barrett
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226823393
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Book Description
An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human. In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we’re already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences of never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements. Rather than pursuing the human's beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier’s neurofeedback music, Pamela Z’s BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik’s musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros’s experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human.

Cyberboss

Author: Craig Gent
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 183976855X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
How technologies of organization are redrawing the lines of class struggle Across the world, algorithms are changing the nature of work. Nowhere is this clearer than in the logistics and distribution sectors, where workers are instructed, tracked and monitored by increasingly dystopian management technologies. In Cyberboss, Craig Gent takes us into workplaces where algorithms rule to excavate the politics behind the newest form of managerial power. Combining worker testimony and original research on companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Deliveroo, the cutting edge of algorithmic management technology, this book reveals the sometimes unexpected effects these new techniques have on work, workers and managers. Gent advances an alternative politics of resistance in the face of digital control.

Horizons of the Future

Author: Graham B. Slater
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040047734
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 122

Book Description
Horizons of the Future: Science Fiction, Utopian Imagination, and the Politics of Education examines the relationship between science fiction, education, and social change in the 21st century. Global capitalism is ecologically unsustainable and ethically indefensible; time is running out to alter the course of history if humanity is to have hope of a livable future beyond the next century. However, alternatives are possible, offering much more equality, care, justice, joy, and hope than the established order. Popular culture and schools are key sites of struggles to imagine such alternatives. Drawing on critical theory, cultural studies, and sociology, Slater articulates the promising connection between science fiction and the future of education. He offers cutting-edge engagement with themes, perspectives, and modes of imagination in science fiction that can be mobilized politically and pedagogically to envision and enact critical forms of education that cultivate new utopian ways of relating to self, society, and the future. This thought-provoking book will be of interest to scholars and students in the social sciences and education.

The Coming Revolution

Author: Ben Reynolds
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1785357107
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Book Description
A technological revolution is driving capitalism toward crisis and collapse. Can our society evolve in time to rescue the future? Radical advances in automation, robotics, and computer technology have thrown millions out of work and will only continue to do so in the years to come. At the same time, cheap, individually-accessible machines will wrestle for primacy with both gleaming highly-automated factories and sweatshops alike, ultimately eroding the dominance of industrial production. Economic growth is slowing down, and it is not going to speed up again. The pressures fueling today's global unrest will not go away and are only going to get worse as wages stagnate in many countries, solid employment becomes harder to find, and cuts to social benefits continue. Competing radical and reactionary ideologies will clash as political consensus crumbles and the world's peoples search for answers to these challenges. In its opening decades, the 21st will be a century of war and revolution. By the end of the 21st century, capitalism will be consigned to the history books. Despite the seeming darkness of our era, our future is filled with incredible possibility. If working people join together, we can create a world of freedom, beauty, and abundance, where poverty and tyranny are merely distant memories for our grandchildren. This is the story of The Coming Revolution.

This Thing Called Theory

Author: Teresa Stoppani
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315406241
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
In the age of post-digital architecture and digital materiality, This Thing Called Theory explores current practices of architectural theory, their critical and productive role. The book is organized in sections which explore theory as an open issue in architecture, as it relates to and borrows from other disciplines, thus opening up architecture itself and showing how architecture is inextricably connected to other social and theoretical practices. The sections move gradually from the specifics of architectural thought – its history, theory, and criticism – and their ongoing relation with philosophy, to the critical positions formulated through architecture’s specific forms of expression, and onto more recent forms of architecture’s engagement and self-definition. The book’s thematic sessions are concluded by and interspersed with a series of shorter critical position texts, which, together, propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a critical and productive role for theory in architecture today: theory as a proposition, theory as task and as a ‘risk’ of architecture.