Scorched Earth

Scorched Earth:Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World

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Refusing the digital world of late capitalism

Selected as one of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2022
Finalist for the 2022 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction

In this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our 'digital age' is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialization of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support. This polemic by the author of 24/7 dismantles the presumption that social media could be instruments of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life.

Reviews

  • At last a book about the urgency to find a way out from a system that has crossed a threshold of irreparability and toxicity. A book that is simultaneously desperate and refreshing.

    Franco "Bifo" Berardi
  • Following on 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary here confirms his position as our most ruthless critic of all that exists. With a hammer of critical theory, he smashes the golden calf around which our lives revolve: the very internet itself. His sentences come packed with urgent truths long felt but only now articulated with the force they deserve. His clear-sightedness is the gift of prophets.

    Andreas Malm
  • A passionate denunciation of the destructive character of capitalist technology, built on evidence drawn from every corner of the world, Scorched Earth is a major contribution to the reclaiming of our radical imagination and the creation of a new internationalism.

    Silvia Federici