A couple of books arrived in my tray this week. Both of which I’m very much looking forward to reading. Full details below…
When Technocultures Collide: Innovation from Below and the Struggle for Autonomy
Gary Genosko
When Technocultures Collide provides rich and diverse studies of collision courses between technologically inspired subcultures and the corporate and governmental entities they seek to undermine. The adventures and exploits of computer hackers, phone phreaks, urban explorers, calculator and computer collectors, “CrackBerry” users, whistle-blowers, Yippies, zinsters, roulette cheats, chess geeks, and a range of losers and tinkerers feature prominently in this volume. Gary Genosko analyzes these practices for their remarkable diversity and their innovation and leaps of imagination. He assesses the results of a number of operations, including the Canadian stories of Mafiaboy, Jeff Chapman of Infiltration, and BlackBerry users.
The author provides critical accounts of understudied technological detours, such as the prospects of deterritorialized computer mice and big-toe computing, the role of electrical grid hacks in urban technopolitics, and whether info addiction and depression contribute to tactical resistance. The goal of this work is to look beyond means of resistance to find examples of technocultural autonomy in the minor and marginal cultural productions of underground groups, ethico-poetic diversions, and sustainable withdrawals with genuine therapeutic potential to surpass accumulation, debt, and competition. The dangers and joys of these struggles for autonomy are underlined in studies of the BlackBerry and Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks website.
Gary Genosko is a professor in and director of the Communication Program at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. He held a Canada Research Chair in Technoculture from 2002 to 2012. He is the author of Remodelling Communication: From WWII to the WWW (2012), Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction (2009), and co-author, with Scott Thompson, of Punched Drunk: Alcohol, Surveillance and the LCBO (2009).
Reviews
“Gary Genosko has written a book that is conceptually dense and exceptionally timely. When Technocultures Collide deals with the most up-to-date subjects concerning technology, communication, and politics. Whoever wants to talk about these subjects must read it.”
— Franco Bifo Berardi, author of After the Future (2011) and The Uprising (2012)
“Gary Genosko remediates the technoculture of the ’80s and ’90s from below. In the process he takes the reader on a wild ride through hacking, phreaking, and other modes of political resistance to 21st-century digital hegemony, sometimes following a theoretical map drawn up by the likes of Félix Guattari and Bifo Berardi and other times going off-road to blaze his own autonomous trail.”
— Richard Grusin, director, Center for 21st Century Studies,
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; author of Remediation: Understanding New Media (with Jay David Bolter, 1999) and Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (2010)
“Gary Genosko’s new book is again a demonstration of his theoretical flair. From big toes to global media politics, whistling to WikiLeaks, his interventions into the technocultural condition are enjoyable to read and insightful to think-along. Genosko knows how to write transversal theory, and how to weave together media studies with politics.”
— Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art; author of Insect Media (2010) and What Is Media Archaeology? (2012)
Exits to the Posthuman Future
Arthur Kroker (Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory, Professor of Political Science, and the Director of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture (PACTAC) at the University of Victoria. He is the editor with Marilouise Kroker of the internationally acclaimed scholarly, peer-reviewed journal CTheory)
Description
Exits to the Posthuman Future is media theory for a global digital society which thrives, and sometimes perishes, at the intersection of technologies of speed, distant ethics and a pervasive cultural anxiety. Arthur Kroker’s incisive and insightful text presents the emerging pattern of a posthuman future: life at the tip of technologies of acceleration, drift and crash. Kroker links key concepts such as “Guardian Liberalism” and Obama’s vision of the “Just War” with a striking account of “culture drift” as the essence of real world technoculture. He argues that contemporary society displays growing uncertainty about the ultimate ends of technological innovation and the intelligibility of the digital future. The posthuman future is elusive: is it a gathering storm of cynical abandonment, inertia, disappearance and substitution? Or else the development of a new form of critical consciousness – the posthuman imagination – as a means of comprehending the full complexity of life? Depending on which exit to the posthuman future we choose or, perhaps, which exit chooses us, Kroker argues that a very different posthuman future will likely ensue.
Reviews
“With remarkable range and acuity, Arthur Kroker defines the posthuman condition of the twenty-first century as ‘drift culture,’ exploring its ramifications through genetics, data archives, and a variety of other cultural and technological sites. This is an exciting and crucially important synthesis of recent trends that anyone interested in where we are going should read.”
N. Katherine Hayles, Duke University
“This book, on the thorny, arid issue of the posthuman, turns out to be Arthur Kroker’s most humane, personal, and deeply felt work. It is so vast, dark, mythic and oracular that every haunted page should be read aloud by the ghosts of Nietzsche and McLuhan.”
Bruce Sterling, The Well
“Arthur Kroker is a founding figure of posthuman futural studies. He is philosopher of the vectors of speed, theorist of the live data feed, and thinker of our need to ‘drift’ beyond today’s codes, archives, and screens as post-historical mediators of a self-induced techno- catastrophe. A contemporary tour de force, Kroker’s Exits to the Posthuman Future helps transform our understanding of technopolitics and war, consciousness, and power as theoretical categories and futural practices of disappearance.”
John Armitage, University of Southampton
Table of Contents
• 1. Trajectories of the Posthuman
• ACCELERATE
• 2. The Posthuman Imagination: Exits to a Future of Neuro-Diversity, Psychic Trauma and History in the Data Feed
• DRIFT
• 3. Code Drift
• 4. History Drift
• 5. Archive Drift
• 6. Screen Drift
• 7. Media Drift
• CRASH
• Slow Suicide of Technological Apocalypse
• 8. After the Drones
• 9. Guardian Liberalism: Rhetoric of the “Just War”
• Traversal Consciousness
• 10. Premonitory Thought: That Fateful Day When Power Abjected Itself
• EPILOGUE
• 11. Thinking the Future with Marshall McLuhan: Technologies of Abandonment, Inertia, Disappearance, Substitution
VIRALITY 