Kim Stanley Robinson: The Ministry for the Future (2020)

“Kim Stanley Robinson is one of contemporary science fiction’s most acclaimed writers, and with this new novel, he once again turns his eye to themes of climate change, technology, politics, and the human behaviors that drive these forces. But his setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world – rather, he imagines a more hopeful future, one where humanity has managed to overcome our challenges and thrive.”

Publisher Orbit Books, New York and London, Oct 2020
ISBN 9780316300131, 0316300136
563 pages

Interviews with author.
Reviews: Derrick O’Keefe (Jacobin, 2020), Gerry Canavan (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2020), Bill McKibben (New York Review, 2020), Steven Poole (The Guardian, 2020), Mark Yon (SFF World, 2020), Kirkus Reviews (2020),Michael Svoboda (Yale Climate Connections, 2020), Nick Robins (LSE blog, 2021), Cory Doctorow (2020), Ian Maxton (Spectrum Culture, 2020), George Katsiaficas (PM Press, 2021), Martin Empson (Climate & Capitalism, 2021), Bob Frame and Patrick Flamm (Polar Record, 2021).
Commentary: Andreas Malm (Verso Blogs, 2021).
Book seminar: Crooked Timber (2021, Robinson’s response).

Publisher
Wikipedia
WorldCat

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Charlton D. McIlwain: Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter (2020)

“Activists, pundits, politicians, and the press frequently proclaim today’s digitally mediated racial justice activism the new civil rights movement. As Charlton D. McIlwain shows in this book, the story of racial justice movement organizing online is much longer and varied than most people know. In fact, it spans nearly five decades and involves a varied group of engineers, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, journalists, and activists. But this is a history that is virtually unknown even in our current age of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Black Lives Matter.

Beginning with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions in the 1960s, McIlwain, for the first time, chronicles the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet. In turn, he argues that the forgotten figures who worked to make black politics central to the Internet’s birth and evolution paved the way for today’s explosion of racial justice activism. From the 1960s to present, the book examines how computing technology has been used to neutralize the threat that black people pose to the existing racial order, but also how black people seized these new computing tools to build community, wealth, and wage a war for racial justice.

Through archival sources and the voices of many of those who lived and made this history, Black Software centralizes African Americans’ role in the Internet’s creation and evolution, illuminating both the limits and possibilities for using digital technology to push for racial justice in the United States and across the globe.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2020
ISBN 9780190863845, 0190863846
xi+296 pages

Video interview with author (Morning Joe, MSNBC, 2019).
Podcast interview with author (The Human and the Machine, 2019).
Reviews: Lori Emerson (LA Review of Books, 2021), Brian Alleyne (Computational Culture, 2021).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (7 MB)

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)