An interdisciplinary, cross-cultural collection that decenters familiar narratives to provide a fresh perspective on what artificial intelligence is today, and what it might become. Historians, media theorists, science-fiction writers, philosophers, and artists from China and elsewhere reexamine the nation’s intense engagement with AI, moving beyond the clichés that still dominate contemporary debate. Today, visions of the contested future of AI veer between common planetary goals and a new Co...
How is morality understood in the marketplace? Why do brands speak out about certain issues of injustice and not others? And what is influencer culture’s role in social and political activism? Big Brands Are Watching You investigates corporate culture, from the branding of companies and nations to television portrayals of big business and the workplace. Francesca Sobande analyzes media, interviews, survey responses, and ephemera from the history of advertising as well as exhibitions in London,...
In January 2013, Aaron Swartz, under arrest and threatened with thirty-five years of imprisonment for downloading material from the JSTOR database, committed suicide. He was twenty-six years old. But in that time he had changed the world we live in: reshaping the Internet, questioning our assumptions about intellectual property, and creating some of the tools we use in our daily online lives. Besides being a technical genius and a passionate activist, he was also an insightful, compelling, and...
Intersubjectivity – Scripting the Human
by Lou Cantor, Katherine Rochester, Anselm Franke, Victoria Ivanova, and Hannah Black
Intersubjectivity considered as both historical phenomenon and nascent mode of present-day relation.This collection of essays considers the relationship between performance, subjectivity, and human agency. Encompassing both historical and speculative perspectives, this book explores the ways in which nonhuman (or trans/post-human) entities complicate notions of subjectivity and exert intersubjective pressures of their own on social, political, scientific, and philosophical discourses. Ranging fr...
In the 20th century humanity consumed products faster than ever, but this way of living is no longer sustainable. This new and important book shows how technological advances are driving forms of ‘collaborative consumption’ which will change forever the ways in which we interact both with businesses and with each other. The average lawn mower is used for four hours a year. The average power drill is used for only twenty minutes in its entire lifespan. The average car is unused for 22 h...
Re-envisioning your relationship with technology to reclaim health, happiness, and sanity in a plugged-in world Evolution shapes behavior--and as a species, we've evolved to be drawn to the instant gratification, constant connectivity, and the shiny lights, beeps, and chimes of our ever-present devices. In earlier eras, these hardwired evolutionary patterns may have set us up for success, but today they confuse our instincts, leaving us vulnerable and stressed out from fractured attention, miss...
How we can create artificial intelligence with broad, robust common sense rather than narrow, specialized expertise. It’s sometime in the not-so-distant future, and you send your fully autonomous self-driving car to the store to pick up your grocery order. The car is endowed with as much capability as an artificial intelligence agent can have, programmed to drive better than you do. But when the car encounters a traffic light stuck on red, it just sits there—indefinitely. Its obstacle-avoidance...
Whose Time Is It? (Sternberg Press / The Contemporary Condition)
by Stamatia Portanova
Following the “emerging life adventures and experiences” of Sophia, a robot animated by blockchain and AI, to present a study in temporal automation. In what way do the two technologies of blockchain and artificial intelligence actualize and, crucially, automatize the cognition of time? These kinds of machines are increasingly part of both our contemporary present and our prospective future, but how do we really define a present and a future? And more important, how do these machines themselves...
An essential exploration of video game aesthetic that decenters the human player and challenges what it means to play. Do we play video games or do video games play us? Is nonhuman play a mere paradox or the future of gaming? And what do video games have to do with quantum theory? In Playing at a Distance, Sonia Fizek engages with these and many more daunting questions, forging new ways to think and talk about games and play that decenter the human player and explore a variety of play formats a...
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...
It may be surprising to focus on and praise imperfection, but, in reality, perfection is a fiction. Every aspect of our technologies is based on understanding and exploiting imperfections in the materials we use. Imperfections are key to our use of metals, glass, electronics, computers, optical fibres, and building materials. Catalysis, as used throughout chemical industries, is dependent on imperfections, as are a wide range of modern advances in biology and medicine. This book provides example...
Anthology of Noonomy: Fourth Technological Revolution and Its Economic, Social and Humanitarian Consequences
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...
With over three billion regular gamers, the videogame industry is a cultural titan. It surpasses the revenues of music and film combined; and on track to generate half a trillion dollars annually by 2027. The finals of Counter-Strike and League of Legends now captivate more viewers than many top-tier sports championships. Grand Theft Auto releases are the highest-grossing cultural artefacts of all time. And yet, gaming has been largely overlooked as a space for political dispute, change, or imag...
Everyone knows that the media surround us, but no one quite understands what this means for our lives. In "Media Unlimited," a remarkable and original look at our media-glutted, speed-addicted world, Todd Gitlin makes us stare, as if for the first time, at the biggest picture of all. From video games to elevator music, action movies to reality shows, Gitlin evokes a world of relentless sensation, instant transition, and nonstop stimulus. He shows how all media, all the time fuels celebrity worsh...
Digital Fissures offers numerous lenses through which to explore the relationships between genders, bodies and technologies. It rethinks feminist archives, argues for inserting postpornography into academia, approaching sex toys from a transpositive perspective, and examines attempts to dismantle the foundations of techno-capitalism. Each chapter works to reimagine the body as a hybrid, malleable and subversive source of potentiality. These essays provide readers with road maps for unimagined an...
A revealing look at how user behavior is powering deep social divisions online—and how we might yet defeat political tribalism on social mediaIn an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderate...
Geoengineering, the idea of addressing climate change through large-scale technological projects, is a unique example of a contested emerging technology. It stands out in the degree to which both its scope of possibilities and its premise are characterized by global existential risks. Despite controversy, this field has been shifting toward mainstream consideration. Geoengineering Discourse Confronting Climate Change: The Move from Margins to Mainstream in Science, News Media, and Politics exami...
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...
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening—and how to get our attention back. “The book the world needs in order to win the war on distraction.”—Adam Grant, author of Think Again “Read this book to save your mind.”—Susan Cain, author of Quiet In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five sec...
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...
Competence, Presence, Trust, and Hyperpersonal-Ness
by B C Bouchillon