Neda Atanasoski, Kalindi Vora: Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (2019)

“In Surrogate Humanity Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora trace the ways in which robots, artificial intelligence, and other technologies serve as surrogates for human workers within a labor system entrenched in racial capitalism and patriarchy. Analyzing myriad technologies, from sex robots and military drones to sharing-economy platforms, Atanasoski and Vora show how liberal structures of antiblackness, settler colonialism, and patriarchy are fundamental to human—machine interactions, as well as the very definition of the human. While these new technologies and engineering projects promise a revolutionary new future, they replicate and reinforce racialized and gendered ideas about devalued work, exploitation, dispossession, and capitalist accumulation. Yet, even as engineers design robots to be more perfect versions of the human—more rational killers, more efficient workers, and tireless companions—the potential exists to develop alternative modes of engineering and technological development in ways that refuse the racial and colonial logics that maintain social hierarchies and inequality.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, NC, March 2019
Perverse Modernities series
ISBN 9781478003861, 1478003863
x+240 pages

Interview with authors: Lesia Pagulich, Tatsiana Shchurko (Feminist Critique, 2019).

Reviews:Sibille Merz (Ethnic & Racial Studies, 2019), Barbara Herr Harthorn (American Ethnologist, 2020), Anita Lam (Surveillance & Society, 2020), Andrea Flores (Information & Culture, 2020), Raquel Bosó Pérez (Sociology of Health & Illness, 2020), Nina Trige Andersen (Modern Times, c.2020), Kevin Pabst (Security Journal, 2020).

Publisher
WorldCat

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Zoe Beloff: Emotions Go to Work (2018)

“Emotions Go to Work is an investigation into how technology is used to turn our feelings into valuable assets. One might call it the transformation of emotion into capital. It asks what is at stake in our relationship with the companions we call smart objects? What does the future hold in store for a world where people are treated more and more like things, while the billions of gadgets that make up the Internet of Things are increasingly anthropomorphized, granted agency?

Spanning an arc of time from the 18th century to 21st century and beyond, Emotions Go to Work traces the codification and instrumentalization emotional data in ways both playful and serious. It considers the role emojis play our mental life and their potential to evolve and grow monstrous. It suggests that anthropomorphized technological creatures from early cartoons might inspire a utopian society. Proposing that the first step to re-wiring our world is to picture possibilities in games and in play, in dreams and in far-fetched fictions, so that we can begin new conversations between people and things.”

Publisher Minor Compositions, Colchester, 2018
Open access
ISBN 9781570272301
59 pages

Publisher

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Giorgio Griziotti: Neurocapitalism: Technological Mediation and Vanishing Lines (2016–)

“Analyzes the changing politics of technology, charting out possibilities for autonomous cooperation

Technological change is ridden with conflicts, bifurcations and unexpected developments. Neurocapitalism takes us on an extraordinarily original journey through the effects that cutting-edge technology has on cultural, anthropological, socio-economic and political dynamics. Today, neurocapitalism shapes the technological production of the commons, transforming them into tools for commercialization, automatic control, and crisis management.

But all is not lost: in highlighting the growing role of General Intellect’s autonomous and cooperative production through the development of the commons and alternative and antagonistic uses of new technologies, Giorgio Griziotti proposes new ideas for the organization of the multitudes of the new millennium.”

First published as Neurocapitalismo: Mediazioni tecnologiche e linee di fuga, Mimesis, 2016.

Foreword by Tiziana Terranova
Translated by Jason Francis McGimsey
Publisher Minor Compositions, Colchester, February 2019
Open access
ISBN 1570273421, 9781570273421
244 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF
Reviews and extracts in Italian, Spanish and French