Software, Infrastructure, Labor

Author: Ned Rossiter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135016380
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Book Description
Infrastructure makes worlds. Software coordinates labor. Logistics governs movement. These pillars of contemporary capitalism correspond with the materiality of digital communication systems on a planetary scale. Ned Rossiter theorizes the force of logistical media to discern how subjectivity and labor, economy and society are tied to the logistical imaginary of seamless interoperability. Contingency haunts logistical power. Technologies of capture are prone to infrastructural breakdown, sabotage, and failure. Strategies of evasion, anonymity, and disruption unsettle regimes of calculation and containment. We live in a computational age where media, again, disappear into the background as infrastructure. Software, Infrastructure, Labor intercuts transdisciplinary theoretical reflection with empirical encounters ranging from the Cold War legacy of cybernetics, shipping ports in China and Greece, the territoriality of data centers, video game design, and scrap metal economies in the e-waste industry. Rossiter argues that infrastructural ruins serve as resources for the collective design of blueprints and prototypes demanded of radical politics today.

Software, Infrastructure, Labor

Author: Ned Rossiter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Supply Chain Cinema

Author: Kay Dickinson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 183902464X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 191

Book Description
Why are big budget films typically made across an array of seemingly dissociated sites? Supply Chain Cinema shows how the production journeys of such films exemplify the principles of the supply chain, whose core imperative is to nimbly and opportunistically manufacturing wherever is most amenable and efficient. Through extensive on-site investigations and in-depth interviews with film professionals, Kay Dickinson delivers nuanced insight into working practices in the UK and the UAE. Among the sites she examines is Warner Bros' permanent base at Leavesden Studios near London. From tax breaks designed to attract foreign projects to infrastructures, logistical support and expertise offered, she considers why Hollywood giants elect to make more of their films in Britain than in the USA. Dickinson goes on to show how the UK's ambitions to enlarge its creative economies has opened up a host of competitive advantages with British higher education increasingly fashioned to conform to the needs of border-hopping enterprise, thus generating a workforce keenly adapted to the demands of blockbuster moviemaking.

The Digital Factory

Author: Moritz Altenried
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226815501
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
The Digital Factoryreveals the hidden human labor that supports today’s digital capitalism. The workers of today’s digital factory include those in Amazon warehouses, delivery drivers, Chinese gaming workers, Filipino content moderators, and rural American search engine optimizers. Repetitive yet stressful, boring yet often emotionally demanding, these jobs require little formal qualification, but can demand a large degree of skills and knowledge. This work is often hidden behind the supposed magic of algorithms and thought to be automated, but it is in fact highly dependent on human labor. The workers of today’s digital factory are not as far removed from a typical auto assembly line as we might think. Moritz Altenried takes us inside today’s digital factories, showing that they take very different forms, including gig economy platforms, video games, and Amazon warehouses. As Altenried shows, these digital factories often share surprising similarities with factories from the industrial age. As globalized capitalism and digital technology continue to transform labor around the world, Altenried offers a timely and poignant exploration of how these changes are restructuring the social division of labor and its geographies as well as the stratifications and lines of struggle.

Global Cities and Urban Theory

Author: Donald McNeill
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1473933447
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Global Cities and Urban Theory provides an innovative set of approaches to understanding some of the world′s major cities, working with concepts such as smart cities, volumetric urbanism, and critical accounting to illustrate the everyday agents and practices that place cities in the world. Donald McNeill draws on detailed discussions of major cities such as London, San Francisco, Paris and Singapore to provide a deep understanding of how urban theory can be grounded in the cultural economies of urban development. The book: Reviews the insights of key thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Mike Davis, and Jane M. Jacobs in relation to specific cities. Highlights methodological and epistemological notes on each theme. Provides case studies of nine key global cities, examined in the context of specific material and spatial practices. Essential reading for upper level students and researchers across urban studies, urban geography, urban sociology and urban policy.

The SAGE Handbook of Marxism

Author: Beverley Skeggs
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1526455722
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1684

Book Description
The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest in Marxism both within and without the academy. Marxian frameworks, concepts and categories continue to be narratively relevant to the features and events of contemporary capitalism. Most crucially, an attention to shifting cultural conditions has lead contemporary researchers to re-confront some classical and essential Marxist concepts, as well as elaborating new critical frameworks for the analysis of capitalism today. The SAGE Handbook of Marxism showcases this cutting-edge of today’s Marxism. It advances the debate with essays that rigorously map and renew the concepts that have provided the groundwork and main currents for Marxist theory, and showcases interventions that set the agenda for Marxist research in the 21st century. A rigorous and challenging collection of scholarship, this book contains a stunning range of contributions from contemporary academics, writers and theorists from around the world and across disciplines, invaluable to scholars and graduate students alike. Part 1: Reworking the critique of political economy Part 2: Forms of domination, subjects of struggle Part 3: Political perspectives Part 4: Philosophical dimensions Part 5: Land and existence Part 6: Domains Part 7: Inquiries and debates

Logistical Asia

Author: Brett Neilson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811083339
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
This book explores how the management science of logistics changes working lives and contributes to the making of world regions. With a focus on the port of Kolkata and changing patterns of Asian regionalism, the volume examines how logistics entwine with political power, historical forces, labour movements, and new technologies. The contributors ask how logistical practices reconfigure both Asia’s relation to the world and its internal logic of transport and communication. Building on critical perspectives that understand logistics as a political technology for producing and organizing space and power, Logistical Asia tracks how digital technologies and material infrastructure combine to remake urban and regional territories and produce new forms of governance and subjectivity.

Assembly Codes

Author: Matthew Hockenberry
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478013036
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Book Description
The contributors to Assembly Codes examine how media and logistics set the conditions for the circulation of information and culture. They document how logistics—the techniques of organizing and coordinating the movement of materials, bodies, and information—has substantially impacted the production, distribution, and consumption of media. At the same time, physical media, such as paperwork, along with media technologies ranging from phone systems to software are central to the operations of logistics. The contributors interrogate topics ranging from the logistics of film production and the construction of internet infrastructure to the environmental impact of the creation, distribution, and sale of vinyl records. They also reveal how logistical technologies have generated new aesthetic and performative practices. In charting the specific points of contact, dependence, and friction between media and logistics, Assembly Codes demonstrates that media and logistics are co-constitutive and that one cannot be understood apart from the other. Contributors Ebony Coletu, Kay Dickinson, Stefano Harney, Matthew Hockenberry, Tung-Hui Hu, Shannon Mattern, Fred Moten, Michael Palm, Ned Rossiter, Nicole Starosielski, Liam Cole Young, Susan Zieger

Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers

Author: Vivek Kale
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1482219220
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 582

Book Description
Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers: From Distributed Computing to Cloudware Applications unravels the mystery of cloud computing and explains how it can transform the operating contexts of business enterprises. It provides a clear understanding of what cloud computing really means, what it can do, and when it is practical to use. Addressing the primary management and operation concerns of cloudware, including performance, measurement, monitoring, and security, this pragmatic book: Introduces the enterprise applications integration (EAI) solutions that were a first step toward enabling an integrated enterprise Details service-oriented architecture (SOA) and related technologies that paved the road for cloudware applications Covers delivery models like IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and deployment models like public, private, and hybrid clouds Describes Amazon, Google, and Microsoft cloudware solutions and services, as well as those of several other players Demonstrates how cloud computing can reduce costs, achieve business flexibility, and sharpen strategic focus Unlike customary discussions of cloud computing, Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers: From Distributed Computing to Cloudware Applications emphasizes the key differentiator—that cloud computing is able to treat enterprise-level services not merely as discrete stand-alone services, but as Internet-locatable, composable, and repackageable building blocks for generating dynamic real-world enterprise business processes.

Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age

Author: Ranabir Samaddar
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319632876
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
This book seeks to explicitly engage Marxist and post-colonial theory to place Marxism in the context of the post-colonial age. Those who study Marx, particularly in the West, often lack an understanding of post-colonial realities; conversely, however, those who fashion post-colonial theory often have an inadequate understanding of Marx. Many think that Marx is not relevant to critique postcolonial realities and the legacy of Marx seldom reaches the post-colonial countries directly. This work will read Marx in the contemporary post-colonial condition and elaborate the current dynamics of post-colonial capitalism. It does this by analysing contemporary post-colonial history and politics in the framework of inter-relations between the three categories of class, people, and postcolonial transformation. Examining the structure of power in postcolonial countries and revisiting the revolutionary theory of dual power in that context, it appreciates and explains the transformative potentialities of Marx in relation to post-colonial condition.