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.

Animals, Work, and the Promise of Interspecies Solidarity

Author: Kendra Coulter
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137558806
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
In this thought-provoking and innovative book, Kendra Coulter examines the diversity of work done with, by, and for animals. Interweaving human-animal studies, labor theories and research, and feminist political economy, Coulter develops a unique analysis of the accomplishments, complexities, problems, and possibilities of multispecies and interspecies labor. She fosters a nuanced, multi-faceted approach to labor that takes human and animal well-being seriously, and that challenges readers to not only think deeply and differently about animals and work, but to reflect on the potential for interspecies solidarity. The result is an engaging, expansive, and path-making text.

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.

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.

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.

Hacking

Author: Tim Jordan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745658156
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description
Hacking provides an introduction to the community of hackers and an analysis of the meaning of hacking in twenty-first century societies. On the one hand, hackers infect the computers of the world, entering where they are not invited, taking over not just individual workstations but whole networks. On the other, hackers write the software that fuels the Internet, from the most popular web programmes to software fundamental to the Internet's existence. Beginning from an analysis of these two main types of hackers, categorised as crackers and Free Software/Open Source respectively, Tim Jordan gives the reader insight into the varied identities of hackers, including: • Hacktivism; hackers and populist politics • Cyberwar; hackers and the nation-state • Digital Proletariat; hacking for the man • Viruses; virtual life on the Internet • Digital Commons; hacking without software • Cypherpunks; encryption and digital security • Nerds and Geeks; hacking cultures or hacking without the hack • Cybercrime; blackest of black hat hacking Hackers end debates over the meaning of technological determinism while recognising that at any one moment we are all always determined by technology. Hackers work constantly within determinations of their actions created by technologies as they also alter software to enable entirely new possibilities for and limits to action in the virtual world. Through this fascinating introduction to the people who create and recreate the digital media of the Internet, students, scholars and general readers will gain new insight into the meaning of technology and society when digital media are hacked.

Cyberboss

Author: Craig Gent
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839768568
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Book Description
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.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Author: Klaus Schwab
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 1524758876
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolution, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work. Schwab argues that this revolution is different in scale, scope and complexity from any that have come before. Characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the developments are affecting all disciplines, economies, industries and governments, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human. Artificial intelligence is already all around us, from supercomputers, drones and virtual assistants to 3D printing, DNA sequencing, smart thermostats, wearable sensors and microchips smaller than a grain of sand. But this is just the beginning: nanomaterials 200 times stronger than steel and a million times thinner than a strand of hair and the first transplant of a 3D printed liver are already in development. Imagine “smart factories” in which global systems of manufacturing are coordinated virtually, or implantable mobile phones made of biosynthetic materials. The fourth industrial revolution, says Schwab, is more significant, and its ramifications more profound, than in any prior period of human history. He outlines the key technologies driving this revolution and discusses the major impacts expected on government, business, civil society and individuals. Schwab also offers bold ideas on how to harness these changes and shape a better future—one in which technology empowers people rather than replaces them; progress serves society rather than disrupts it; and in which innovators respect moral and ethical boundaries rather than cross them. We all have the opportunity to contribute to developing new frameworks that advance progress.

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: 0226823407
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Book Description
An engaging consideration of 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 have challenged the centrality of the human amid the uneven temporality of postwar capitalism. Experimental music addresses this condition, Barrett contends, not by adhering to the formal strictures of musical modernism but by producing extra-formal meaning through its immanent transdisciplinary involvements with postwar science, technology, and art movements. Hear Alvin Lucier use his brain waves to play percussion. Picture Pamela Z sculpting the sound of her voice using her wearable BodySynth system. Imagine Pauline Oliveros reflecting her voice off of the moon using radio signals. What these musical artworks have in common is an engagement with the notion that the human has been increasingly challenged through cultural, biological, medical, economic, and technoscientific means. This book brings together music studies, art history, and media studies to provide new perspectives on cybernetics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, robotics, and radio astronomy. Through a unique meeting of experimental music, posthumanism, and contemporary art, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into the perennial question of what it means to be human.