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The entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power: how data and algorithms shape the world—and shape us within that world. With the emergence of a post-truth world, we have witnessed the dissolution of the common ground on which truth claims were negotiated, individual agency enacted, and public spheres shaped. What happens when, as Nietzsche claimed, there are no facts, but only interpretations? In this book, Mark Shepard examines the entanglements of people and data, c...

How 1,000 years of global history show why technological and economic progress is often followed by stagnation and even collapseIn How Progress Ends, Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world’s largest, most advanced economies—the United States and China—have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on...

Can We Trust Technology? examines the contemporary crisis of trust, where people’s trust in organisations and in emerging technologies is decreasing. As governments, industry organisations and research funders are investing millions in the quest to design technologies people will trust, this book asks if it is plausible to think tech workers and research designers can produce trustworthy technologies and, moreover, if it is realistic to assume everyday users of those technologies will ever truly...

An Introduction to Global Media for the Twenty-First Century provides a thorough introduction to the field of global media today. The book presents the key changes taking place as the global media landscape evolves, and the main theories of the field, that explain these developments.Tracing, first, the formative development of an international and global media landscape throughout the 20th century from the telegraph, television and film export, and transnational television to the Internet, the b...

The slippery online ecosystem is the perfect breeding ground for identities: true, false, and in between. We no longer question the reality of online experiences but the reality of selfhood in the digital age. In The Secret Life: Three True Stories, Andrew O'Hagan issues three bulletins from the porous border between cyberspace and the 'real world'. 'Ghosting' introduces us to the beguiling and divisive Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whose autobiography the author agrees to ghostwrite with...

Political elites have been evading the causes of climate change through deceptive fixes. Their market-type instruments such as carbon trading aim to incentivise technological innovation which will supposedly decarbonize or replace dominant high-carbon systems. In practice this techno-market framework has perpetuated climate change and social injustices, thus provoking public controversy. Using this opportunity, social movements have counterposed low-carbon, resource-light, socially just altern...

They had their orders, they stopped for nothing. They were carrying a billion dollars, and such a sum of money cannot manifest either sympathy or curiosity; it has enough to do to take care of itself. The year was 1937, and Upton Sinclair had just completed a novel bearing the subtitle A Story of Ford-America. Eighty-three years later, the market capitalisation of Amazon.com has exceeded one trillion dollars, while the value of the Ford Motor Company hovers around thirty billion. We have, it se...

This is the true story of how, against all odds, a remote Mexican pueblo built its own autonomous cell phone network-without help from telecom companies or the government. Anthropologist Roberto J. Gonzalez paints a vivid and nuanced picture of life in a Oaxaca mountain village and the collective tribulation, triumph, and tragedy the community experienced in pursuit of getting connected. In doing so, this book captures the challenges and contradictions facing Mexico's indigenous peoples today, a...

We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by anonymous software. As a result, we no longer understand what is happening around us. Underlying all of these trends is a single idea: the belief that quantitative data can provide a coherent model of the world, and the efficacy of computable information to provide us with ways of acting within it. Yet the sheer volume of information available...

For working people, the cost of getting to work, in terms of time and expense, is a crucial aspect of daily life. In the twentieth century, people's opportunity to travel increased. This did not, however, apply to everyone. The absence of affordable housing near job locations combined with the lack of safe, efficient, and affordable mobility options aggravated social exclusion for some. No Bicycle, No Bus, No Job details how power relations have historically enabled or restricted workers' mobili...

This book explores the colonial history of Cyprus through the history of technology. Based on materialist and actor-network approaches to power, it unfolds the role of technology in the formation of British colonial rule during critical episodes in Cyprus. It considers the entanglement of colonial rule and technology in four cases of infrastructural development: the island-wide electrification project, Famagusta and Larnaca Harbours, and the Cyprus Government Railway. Throughout these cases, the...

We are born with the instinct to create and invent. Indeed our ability to do so is what separates we humans from the rest of the animal world. The moment man first converted a stone to a useful tool set him on a relentless path toward greater power over his environment. But have our creative ideas always produced desirable results in line with their original good intention? Have they really served us well? "Bad Ideas?" traces the fascinating history of our attempts at self-improvement but also q...

Digital technology covers digital information in every form. The world lives in an information age in which massive amounts of data are being produced to improve our daily lives. This intelligent digital network incorporates interconnected people, robots, gadgets, content, and services all determined by digital transformation. The role of digital technologies in children's, adolescent's, and young adult's lives is significantly increasing across the world. New and emerging devices and services p...

The exhaustion, disappointment, and listlessness experienced under digital capitalism, explored through works by contemporary artists, writers, and performers. Sometimes, interacting with digital platforms, we want to be passive—in those moments of dissociation when we scroll mindlessly rather than connecting with anyone, for example, or when our only response is a shrugging “lol.” Despite encouragement by these platforms to “be yourself,” we want to be anyone but ourselves. Tung-Hui Hu calls t...

The genius and artistry behind Superbrothers and the making of an indie video game, from inception to its highly anticipated launch. Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery was released in 2011 at the forefront of an exciting era of “indie games” – with the aesthetic of punk rock and the edge of modernist fiction, indie games pushed gaming into the realm of the avant-garde. Superbrothers (Craig D. Adams) was hailed as a visionary in the video game world. Now, his long-awaited follow-up, JETT: The Fa...

A reconception of the sublime to include experiences of disaster, war, outer space, virtual reality, and the Anthropocene.   We experience the sublime—overwhelming amazement and exhilaration—in at least seven different forms. Gazing from the top of a mountain at a majestic vista is not the same thing as looking at a city from the observation deck of a skyscraper; looking at images constructed from Hubble Space Telescope data is not the same as living through a powerful earthquake. The varieties...