State Machines: Reflections and Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, and Art (2019)

“Today, we live in a world where every time we turn on our smartphones, we are inextricably tied by data, laws and flowing bytes to different countries. A world in which personal expressions are framed and mediated by digital platforms, and where new kinds of currencies, financial exchange and even labor bypass corporations and governments. Simultaneously, the same technologies increase governmental powers of surveillance, allow corporations to extract ever more complex working arrangements and do little to slow the construction of actual walls along actual borders. On the one hand, the agency of individuals and groups is starting to approach that of nation states; on the other, our mobility and hard-won rights are under threat. What tools do we need to understand this world, and how can art assist in envisioning and enacting other possible futures?”

Contributors: James Bridle, Max Dovey, Marc Garrett, Valeria Graziano, Max Haiven, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Francis Hunger, Helen Kaplinsky, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Rob Myers, Emily van der Nagel, Rachel O’Dwyer, Lídia Pereira, Rebecca L. Stein, Cassie Thornton, Paul Vanouse, Patricia de Vries, Krystian Woznicki.

Edited by Yiannis Colakides, Marc Garrett, and Inte Gloerich
Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2019
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License
ISBN 9789492302335
260 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (59 MB, updated on 2022-11-14)
EPUB (39 MB)

Annie McClanahan: Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (2016)

“Dead Pledges is the first book to explore the ways that U.S. culture—from novels and poems to photojournalism and horror movies—has responded to the collapse of the financialized consumer credit economy in 2008. Connecting debt theory to questions of cultural form, this book argues that artists, filmmakers, and writers have re-imagined what it means to owe and to own in a period when debt is what makes our economic lives possible. Encompassing both popular entertainment and avant-garde art, the post-crisis productions examined here help to map the landscape of contemporary debt: from foreclosure to credit scoring, student debt to securitized risk, microeconomic theory to anti-eviction activism. A searing critique of the ideology of debt, Dead Pledges dismantles the discourse of moral obligation so often invoked to make us repay. Debt is no longer a source of economic credibility, it contends, but a system of dispossession that threatens the basic fabric of social life.”

Publisher Stanford University Press, 2016
Post ’45 series
ISBN 9780804799058, 0804799059
ix+235 pages

Reviews: Brian Whitener (The New Inquiry, 2017), Sofia Cutler (LA Review of Books, 2017), Julian Murphet (Affirmations, 2017), Davis Smith-Brecheisen (Mediations, 2017), Arne De Boever (boundary2, 2017), Laura Finch (Journal of Cultural Economy, 2018).

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML

MoneyLab Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype (2018)

“MoneyLab is a network of artists, activists, and geeks experimenting with forms of financial democratization. Entering the 10th year of the global financial crisis, it still remains a difficult yet crucial task to distinguish old wine from its fancy new bottles. The MoneyLab network questions persistent beliefs, from Calvinist austerity, growth, and up-scaling, to trustless, automated decision making and (anarcho-)capitalist dreams of cybercurrencies and blockchained solutionism.

We consider experiments with digital coops, internet-based payment and network-based revenue models as spaces of political imagination, with an equally important aesthetic program. In this second MoneyLab Reader the network delves into topics like the financialization of art; love as a binary proposition on the blockchain; the crowdfunding of livelihood; the cashless society; financial surveillance of the poor; universal basic income as the real McCoy or a real sham; the cooperative answer to Airbnb and Uber; the history of your financial dashboard; and, Hollywood’s narration of the financial crisis. Fintech rushes through our veins, causing a whirlwind of critical concepts, ideas and imaginaries. Welcome to the eye of the storm.”

Contributors: Jaya Klara Brekke, Tripta Chandola, Max Dovey, Economic Space Agency, General Intellect, Max Haiven, Robert Herian, David Hollanders, Dmytri Kleiner, Silvio Lorusso, Laura Lotti, Nathalie Maréchal, Rachel O’Dwyer, Nina Power, Patricia Reed, Patrice Riemens, Emily Rosamond, Trebor Scholz, Brett Scott, Nathaniel Tkacz, Pablo R. Velasco, Martin Zeilinger.

Edited by Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink, and Patricia de Vries
Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2018
INC Reader series, 11
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License
ISBN 9789492302199, 9492302195
280 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (8 MB)
EPUB
Issuu