The Politics of Digital Culture: Verso Student Reading

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  Everything to Play For

  by Marijam Did

  Everything To Play For asks if videogames can achieve egalitarian goals instead of fuelling hyper-materialist, reactionary agendas. Combining cultural theory and materialist critiques with accessib...
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  The Internet Con

  by Cory Doctorow

  When the tech platforms promised a future of "connection," they were lying. They said their "walled gardens" would keep us safe, but those were prison walls.The platforms locked us into their syste...
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  How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism

  by Cédric Durand

  Translated by David Broder

  The rise of the IT industry in the nineties promised a new era of freedom and prosperity. It didn’t deliver. Today, algorithms are everywhere, but digital monopolies push us towards the feudal logi...
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  Disordered Attention

  by Claire Bishop

  The reception of art and performance is changing. Smartphones and social media have troubled the old model of individual appreciation and close looking, giving rise to new forms of mediated percept...
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  The Eye of the Master

  by Matteo Pasquinelli

  What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence" - a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as i...
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  The Double Shift

  by Jason Read

  Even as the rewards of work decline and its demands on us increase, many people double-down on their commitment to wage slavery—working harder, doing overtime, and learning to hustle. To paraphrase...
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  With and Against

  by Dominique Routhier

  No other art movement has so profoundly influenced radical politics as the Situationist International. But beyond the clichés about its purported leader Guy Debord, the "society of the spectacle," ...
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  Glitch Feminism

  by Legacy Russell

  The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our...
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  Scorched Earth

  by Jonathan Crary

  Selected as one of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2022Finalist for the 2022 Big Other Book Award for NonfictionIn this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality...
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  Aesthetics and Politics

  by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács

  Afterword by Fredric Jameson

  No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics...
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  Uncomputable

  by Alexander Galloway

  Narrating some lesser known episodes from the deep history of digital machines, Alexander R. Galloway explains the technology that drives the world today, and the fascinating people who brought the...
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  Humankind

  by Timothy Morton

  What is it that makes humans human? As science and technology challenge the boundaries between life and non-life, between organic and inorganic, this ancient question is more timely than ever. Accl...
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  For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign

  by Jean Baudrillard

  What if the problems of modern society don't come from production, but rather consumption and the system of cultural signs? In this classic work from the defining intellectual of the postmodern, Je...
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  New Dark Age

  by James Bridle

  From the highly acclaimed author of WAYS OF BEING. We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically gener...
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  Breaking Things at Work

  by Gavin Mueller

  In the Nineteenth-century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new technologies on the factory floor by smashing them to bits. For years the Luddites roamed the English country...
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  Revolutionary Mathematics

  by Justin Joque

  Our finances, politics, media, opportunities, information, shopping and knowledge production are mediated through algorithms and their statistical approaches to knowledge; increasingly, these metho...
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  Psychopolitics

  by Byung-Chul Han

  Translated by Erik Butler

  Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower...
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  Capital Is Dead

  by McKenzie Wark

  In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capit...
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  Future Histories

  by Lizzie O'Shea

  The key to understanding technology lies not in the future--but in the past. That's the contention of Lizzie O'Shea's Future Histories, a grand tour through past and present to explore the practica...
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  Silicon Values

  by Jillian C. York

  The Internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond the control of money or politics, but today corporations and platforms exercise more control over our ability to access info...
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  Radical Technologies

  by Adam Greenfield

  Everywhere we turn, a startling new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Gree...
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  Fully Automated Luxury Communism

  by Aaron Bastani

  Fully Automated Luxury Communism promises a radically new left future for everyone. New technologies will liberate us from work, providing the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism ...
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  Road to Nowhere

  by Paris Marx

  Elon Musk and the masters of Silicon Valley want us to believe technology can revolutionize our cities and means of transport. Road to Nowhere exposes the paucity of their vision, a distracting fan...
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  The Knowledge Economy

  by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

  Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized that the best way to understand the economy is to study the most advanced practice of production. Today that practice is no longer conventional manufacturing: it...
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  Internet for the People

  by Ben Tarnoff

  In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your pri...
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  The Emancipated Spectator

  by Jacques Rancière

  Translated by Gregory Elliott

  The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an act...
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  The Future of the Image

  by Jacques Rancière

  Translated by Gregory Elliott

  In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. He argues ...
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  Investigative Aesthetics

  by Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman

  Today, artists are engaged in investigation. They probe corruption, state violence, environmental destruction and repressive technologies. At the same time, fields not usually associated with aesth...

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  The Future of the Image

  by Jacques Rancière

  Translated by Gregory Elliott

  In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. He argues ...

Book strip #12

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  30% off

  Investigative Aesthetics

  by Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman

  Today, artists are engaged in investigation. They probe corruption, state violence, environmental destruction and repressive technologies. At the same time, fields not usually associated with aesth...

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  24/7

  by Jonathan Crary

  The bestselling and internationally translated book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century...

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  Uncomputable

  by Alexander Galloway

  Narrating some lesser known episodes from the deep history of digital machines, Alexander R. Galloway explains the technology that drives the world today, and the fascinating people who brought the...

Book strip #16

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  30% off

  Psychopolitics

  by Byung-Chul Han

  Translated by Erik Butler

  Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower...

Book strip #17

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  30% off

  Capital Is Dead

  by McKenzie Wark

  In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capit...

Book strip #18

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  The Social Photo

  by Nathan Jurgenson

  The selfie, the faux-vintage photo, the self-destructing image, the food photo—these new visual forms and the devices and platforms that facilitate them have fomented a cultural revolution. Not onl...