McKenzie Wark: Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (2019)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, data, information, labour, marxism, nature, neoliberalism, production, theory
“It’s not capitalism, it’s not neoliberalism—what if it’s something worse?
In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class. Through the ownership and control of information, this emergent class dominates not only labour but capital as traditionally understood as well. And it’s not just tech companies like Amazon and Google. Even Walmart and Nike can now dominate the entire production chain through the ownership of not much more than brands, patents, copyrights, and logistical systems.
While techno-utopian apologists still celebrate these innovations as an improvement on capitalism, for workers—and the planet—it’s worse. The new ruling class uses the powers of information to route around any obstacle labor and social movements put up. So how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyze this new world, but ways to change it. Drawing on the writings of a surprising range of classic and contemporary theorists, Wark offers an illuminating overview of the contemporary condition and the emerging class forces that control—and contest—it.”
Publisher Verso, London, 2019
ISBN 9781788735308, 1788735307
202 pages
Book launch (with Natasha Lennard, video, 90 min).
Interviews with author: Verso Books (video, 2019, 16 min), Red May TV (with Alexander Zevin, Jasper Bernes and Wendy Liu, video, 2020, 110 min), Guy Mannes-Abbot (Tank, 2019).
Reviews: Garrett Pierman (Marx & Philosophy, 2020), Ben Tripp (Hyperallergic, 2020), Madeleine Collier (Afterimage, 2020), Colin Drumm (Cosmonaut, 2019), Mark Steven (Sydney Review of Books, 2020), Steve Hanson (Manchester Review of Books, 2020), Antonio Navarro (Teknokultura, 2020, ES).
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Laboria Cuboniks: The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · accelerationism, alienation, automation, cyberfeminism, feminism, gender, manifesto, materialism, nature, neorationalism, politics, technology, theory, women, xenofeminism
“The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealised.
The Xenofeminist Manifesto calls for the scaling up of feminism. Contemporary feminism, it contends, is limited by its predominant investment in local and micropolitical action. What is needed is a feminism capable of systemic intervention. The Xenofeminist Manifesto propose that such a feminism must start from a new universal–one no longer coded as cis, straight, white, and male–with Xenofeminism as its theoretical and technological platform. Drawing on queer and transfeminist theory, as well as philosophical rationalism, against nature and biological essentialism, the feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks instead invest in alienation and the anti-natural, in seizing technology and in embracing the desire for an alien future.
If nature is unjust, change nature!”
Publisher Verso, London, September 2018
Creative Commons BY 4.0 International License
ISBN 9781788731577, 1788731573
95 pages
Commentary: Annie Goh (2018).
Comment (0)Anti-Natural Even Salon (2016)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, nature, theory
“Anti-Natural prompts invited artists and theorists into a range of responses to notions on the production of the natural, where the human imperative is the need to produce or change nature, to re-nature nature, and so to make the highest poverty, the diagonalising of new ecologies and forms of life without the supra-prosthetic of ‘Nature’ itself.”
Contributions by Danilo Mandic, Himali Singh Soin, Inigo Wilkins, Jelena Stojkovic, Jonathan Kemp, Laboria Cuboniks / Diann Bauer, Marina Vishmidt, Nihal Yesil, Paul Abbott, Roc Jimenez de Cisneros, Sabina Ahn, Tim Goldie, Felix De Bousies, and _blank.
Publisher Even Press, London, 2016
52 pages