'Technology' tag archive

Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, eds., A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 211pp., £20.00 hb., 978 0 69118 883 6. One thing a lot of people are saying right now – especially after the events of January 6th 2021 – is […]

In November 2021, over 140 Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers signed a letter asking the German government to oppose developments in autonomous weapons systems. With this they attempted to draw distinctions between beneficial and destructive AI: ‘Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no […]

In the wake of the Gilets Jaunes movement, the late Bernard Stiegler proclaimed, in one of his final interviews: ‘what I’m interested in is to put down capitalism, for good. Or to do something else in the meanwhile.’ 1 Stiegler’s anti-capitalist statement signals his debt to Marx, who is frequently invoked in his writings. Indeed, […]

Seb Franklin, The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2021). 254pp., £86.00 hb., £19.00 pb., 978 1 51790 714 3 hb., 978 1 51790 715 0 pb. As our tech overlords flee a blighted planet, a scholarly consensus is taking shape around the fallout of unchecked innovation and […]

Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism (London and New York: Verso, 2020), 192pp., £9.99 pb., 978 1 78663 266 1 In her endorsement of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, culture and media theorist McKenzie Wark locates its author Legacy Russell among those who are ‘playing in the ruins’ of ‘the old empire of imperatives about both flesh and […]

Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019). 172pp., £60.00 hb., £14.99 pb., 978 1 50952 639 0 hb., 978 1 50952 640 4 pb. If you’ve ever listened to Pod Save America, the voice of centrist Democratic politics presented by a crew of former Obama staff, […]

Amit S. Rai, Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 208pp., £79.00 hb., £18.99 pb., 978 1 47800 110 2 hb., 978 1 47800 146 1 pb. In Amit S. Rai’s Jugaad Time, the Delhi-based freelance music manager Renu tells her interviewer proudly that jugaad is ‘our [i.e. […]

Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto (London: Verso, 2019). 288pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 78663 262 3 ‘This is not a book about the future but about a present that goes unacknowledged’, Aaron Bastani writes in Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Bastani does not set out to describe what an ideal communist society would […]

The general intellect of the whole community, male and female, is stunted or perverted in infancy, or more commonly both, by keeping from women the knowledge possessed by men. … The only and the simple remedy for the evils arising from these almost universal institutions of the domestic slavery of one half the human race, […]

Bernard Stiegler, Automatic Society: The Future of Work, Volume 1, trans, Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). 341pp., £55.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 1 50950 630 9 hb., 978 1 50950 631 6 pb. Despairing over the conditions of living and working in Foxconn’s ‘factory city’ in China, a total of 14 workers leapt to their […]

COMMENTARy Deadly algorithms Can legal codes hold software accountable for code that kil s? Susan schuppli Algorithms have long adjudicated over vital processes that help to ensure our wellbeing and survival, from pacemakers that maintain the natural rhythms of the heart, and genetic algorithms that optimise emergency response times by cross-referencing ambulance locations with demographic […]

‘For all that gives rise to an inscription in general’ hans-Jörg Rheinberger * This is a translation of ‘Al es, was überhaupt zu einer Inskription führen kann’, the first chapter of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Iterationen [Iterations], Merve Verlag, Berlin, 2005, pp. 9–29. It is published here with the kind permission of Merve Verlag. Its title cites Liechtensteiner […]

Bernard Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies, trans. Daniel Ross, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2011. 200 pp., £55.00 hb., £16.99 pb., 978 0 74564 809 5 hb., 978 0 74564 810 1 pb. Bernard Stiegler’s work addresses the relationship between philosophy, technology and culture. This combination has proved popular, and has been furthered by Stiegler’s impressive output: […]

A popular computing magazine recently counterpoised two potential internet futures. The first suggested that unequal access would polarize society in the next century, as Marx predicted polarization as a result of the capitalist mode of production in the last. The second saw the internet as little more than the CB radio of the late twentieth […]

COMMENTARY Red alert in cyberspace! Paul Virilio One of the major problems now facing political as well as military strategists is the phenomenon of immediacy, of instantaneity. For ‘real time’ now takes precedence over real space, now dominates the planet. The primacy of real time, of immediacy, over space is an accomplished fact, and it […]

Romanticism and technology Andrew Bowie Romanticism and technology are often regarded as inherently at odds with each other, one supposedly relying upon a desire to get in touch with a nature in us and outside us which the modern ‘technologized’ world risks losing sight of altogether, the other upon the domination of external nature for […]

‘The world spirit on the fins of a rocket’ Adorno’s critique of progress Michael Lowy and Eleni Varikas The ideology of progress, born (in its modern guise) during the Enlightenment, finds its culminating philosophical expression in Hegel’s conception of history. Here, everything that happens marks a further step in mankind’s march towards freedom: watching Napoleon […]

NEWS Uneasy Excitement ‘Technology and Subjectivity’, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy Middlesex University, 29 October 1994 A few days before the ‘Technology and Subjectivity’ conference there was an item on MTV about ‘surfing on the cyberspace’ followed by a report on a surfers’ convention organised to raise awareness of the problem of sea […]

The Artificial Womb Patriarchal Bone or Technological Blessing? Carl Hedman Every area of technological innovation has an idea that can serve as a kind of ‘Rorschach Test’ for revealing some of our deepest intuitions.l Consider, e.g., the idea of a fully automated factory. This idea can be used to bring out a person’s intuitions as […]

practice, or realism and idealism. Different forms of it are attacked in different books. In The Clue to History Macmurray looks at the split between the theory and practice of religion; in Reason and Emotion he argues that the real distinction should be intellect and emotion, and that both are capable of rationality or irrationality. […]

Technology’ aDd LlbeJlaIIOD Robert Eccleshall critics of capitalism have traditionally considered technological development as subject to the control of dominant interests and thus as one aspect, albeit crucial, of a broader strategy aimed at reproducing existing social relations. In opposition to technological determinists (who hold material progress to be dependent on the number of individuals […]