Evgeny Morozov: To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (2013)

“Our society is at a crossroads. Smart technology is transforming our world, making many aspects of our lives more convenient, efficient and – in some cases – fun. Better and cheaper sensors can now be embedded in almost everything, and technologies can log the products we buy and the way we use them. But, argues Evgeny Morozov, technology is having a more profound effect on us: it is changing the way we understand human society.

In the very near future, technological systems will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions into many more areas of public life. These are the discourses by which we have always defined our civilization: politics, culture, public debate, morality, humanism. But how will these disciplines be affected when we delegate much of the responsibility for them to technology? The temptation of the digital age is to fix everything – from crime to corruption to pollution to obesity – by digitally quantifying, tracking, or gamifiying behavior. But when we change the motivations for our moral, ethical and civic behavior, do we also change the very nature of that behavior? Technology, Morozov proposes, can be a force for improvement – but only if we abandon the idea that it is necessarily revolutionary and instead genuinely interrogate why and how we are using it.

From urging us to drop outdated ideas of the Internet to showing how to design more humane and democratic technological solutions, To Save Everything, Click Here is about why we will always need to consider the consequences of the way we use technology. ”

Publisher PublicAffairs, 2013
ISBN 161039139X, 9781610391399
433 pages

review (Kevin Driscoll, LA Review of Books)
review (Siva Vaidhyanathan, Bookforum)
review (Steven Poole, The Guardian)
review (Pat Kane, The Independent)
review (Adam Thierer, Reason.com)
Interview (with Terry Winograd, Boston Review)

Publisher

PDF (added on 2019-4-3)
EPUB (updated on 2019-4-3)

Theory, Culture & Society 29(4-5): Topologies of Culture (2012)

“In social and cultural theory, topology has been used to articulate changes in structures and spaces of power. In this introduction, we argue that culture itself is becoming topological. In particular, this ‘becoming topological’ can be identified in the significance of a new order of spatio-temporal continuity for forms of economic, political and cultural life today. This ordering emerges, sometimes without explicit coordination, in practices of sorting, naming, numbering, comparing, listing, and calculating. We show that the effect of these practices is both to introduce new continuities into a discontinuous world by establishing equivalences or similitudes, and to make and mark discontinuities through repeated contrasts. In this multiplication of relations, topological change is established as being constant, normal and immanent, rather than being an exceptional form, which is externally produced; that is, forms of economic, political and cultural life are identified and made legible in terms of their capacities for continuous change. Outlining the contributions to this Special Issue, the introduction discusses the meaning of topological culture and provides an analytic framework through which to understand its implications.” (from the Abstract)

With contributions by Celia Lury, Luciana Parisi, and Tiziana Terranova, Peter Sloterdijk, Rob Shields, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Penelope Harvey, Mike Michael and Marsha Rosengarten, Evelyn Ruppert, Steven D. Brown, Luciana Parisi, Richard Rogers, Xin Wei Sha, Brian Rotman, Scott Lash, Noortje Marres, Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, Julian Henriques.

Publisher Sage
ISSN 0263-2764
342 pages

Publisher

PDF (6 MB, updated on 2016-12-12)

Sven Spieker: The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (2008)

“The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive’s content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the “living” past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of ways—from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp’s “anemic archive” of readymades and El Lissitzky’s Demonstration Rooms to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive—as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science and art—and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism.

Dadaists, constructivists, and Surrealists favored discontinuous, nonlinear archives that resisted hermeneutic reading and ordered presentation. Spieker argues that the use of archives by such contemporary artists as Hiller, Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Walid Raad, and Boris Mikhailov responds to and continues this attack on the nineteenth-century archive and its objectification of the historical process.

Spieker considers archivally driven art in relation to changing media technologies—the typewriter, the telephone, the telegraph, film. And he connects the archive to a particularly modern visuality, showing that the avant-garde used the archive as something of a laboratory for experimental inquiries into the nature of vision and its relation to time. The Big Archive offers us the first critical monograph on an overarching motif in twentieth-century art.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2008
Art: Cultural Studies series
ISBN 0262195704, 9780262195706
219 pages

Reviews: Sas Mays (caa.reviews 2009), Andrew J. Lau (InterActions 2009).

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2017-4-22)