Politigram and the Post-Left


Book Description

A unique look into young online memetic subcultures where gen Z teens explore radical politics such as: eco-extremism, neoreaction, anarcho-primitivism, transhumanism, anarcho-capitalism, alt-right, post-left, egoism and cyber-nihilism.




20 Interviews


Book Description

In depth conversations with young meme posters across the political spectrum.




The Revenge of the Real


Book Description

The future of politics after the pandemic COVID-19 exposed the pre-existing conditions of the current global crisis. Many Western states failed to protect their populations, while others were able to suppress the virus only with sweeping social restrictions. In contrast, many Asian countries were able to make much more precise interventions. Everywhere, lockdown transformed everyday life, introducing an epidemiological view of society based on sensing, modeling, and filtering. What lessons are to be learned? The Revenge of the Real envisions a new positive biopolitics that recognizes that governance is literally a matter of life and death. We are grappling with multiple interconnected dilemmas—climate change, pandemics, the tensions between the individual and society—all of which have to be addressed on a planetary scale. Even when separated, we are still enmeshed. Can the world govern itself differently? What models and philosophies are needed? Bratton argues that instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention.




The People's Republic of Walmart


Book Description

Are multi-national corporations like Walmart and Amazon laying the groundwork for international socialism? For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us? An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.




Dangerous Moves


Book Description

"The society, politics and future of Cuba are high on the world's agenda in the 21st century. Published in association with the Absolut Art Award, Dangerous Moves presents a fascinating survey of contemporary life and culture in Cuba through some of its most daring and experimental artists. Coco Fusco analyses the ways in which the regime has wielded influence over artists in recent times, showing how - in a context in which overt political speech is subject to censorship - the language of performance has emerged as the favoured means of social commentary. Focusing on a range of performative practices in visual art, music, poetry and political activism, Fusco examines the relationship between the abject body in performance and the greater body politic of a state officially defined as revolutionary yet seeking to limit and constrain dissent. A major new piece of scholarship from a global artist, writer and thinker, this is a key addition to the canon of contemporary art writing, and will be essential reading for students and scholars as well as those with a broader interest in politics, power and contemporary art."--Publisher's description.




Kill All Normies


Book Description

Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battle ground is the internet. On one side the alt right ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression. Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.




Anthropocene Back Loop


Book Description

We are entering the Anthropocene's back loop, a time of release and collapse, confusion and reorientation, in which not only populations and climates are being upended but also physical and metaphysical grounds. Needed now are forms of experimentation geared toward autonomous modes of living within the back loop's new unsafe operating spaces.




The Extreme Self


Book Description

The Extreme Self is a new kind of graphic novel that shows how you've been morphing into something else. It's about the re-making of your interior world as the exterior world becomes more unfamiliar and uncertain.The sudden arrival of the pandemic pushed the world faster and further into the 21st century. Now, life is dictated by two forces you can't see: data and the virus. Are you really built for so much change so quickly?Basar/Coupland/Obrist's prequel, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, became an instant cult classic. It's been described as, "a mediation on the madness of our media," and, "an abstract representation of how we feel about our digital world."Like that book, The Extreme Self collapses comedy and calamity at the speed of swipe. Dazzling images are sourced from over 70 of the world's foremost artists, photographers, technologists and musicians, while Daly & Lyon's kinetic design elevates the language of memes into a manifesto. Over fourteen timely chapters, The Extreme Self tours through fame and intimacy, post-work and new crowds, identity crisis and eternity. This is an eye-opening, provocative portrait of what's really happening to YOUContributor's include: Michael Stipe, Jarvis Cocker, Miranda July, Agnieszka Kurant, Amalia Ulman, Amnesia Scanner, Ana Nicolaescu, Ania Soliman, Anna Uddenberg, Anne Imhof, Asad Raza, Barry Doupé, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Cao Fei, Carsten Höller, Cécile B Evans, Chen Zhou, Christine Sun Kim, Craig Green, Dennis Kavelman, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Emmanuel Iduma, Farah Al Qasimi, Fatima Al Qadiri, GCC, Goshka Macuga, Heman Chong, Ian Cheng, Isabel Lewis, Jenna Sutela, Johannes Paul Raether, John Menick, Jürgen Klauke, Koo Jeong A, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Liam Gillick, Liam Young, Lorraine O'Grady, Lucy Raven, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Miles Gertler, Momus, Pamela Rosenkranz, Pan Daijing, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Peter Saville & Yoso Mouri, Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, Precious Okoyomon, Rachel Rose, Raja'a Khalid, Samuel Fosso, Sara Cwynar, Satoshi Fujiwara, Simon Denny, Sissel Tolaas, Sophia Al-Maria, Stéphanie Saadé, Stephanie Comilang, Suzanne Treister, Tabita Rezaire, Thomas Dozol, Thomas Hirschhorn, Trevor Paglen, Urs Lüthi, Victoria Sin, Wang Haiyang, Yaeji, Yazan Khalili, Yu Honglei, Yuri Pattison.




Platform Capitalism


Book Description

What unites Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and GE, Uber and Airbnb? Across a wide range of sectors, these firms are transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. This transformation signals a major shift in how capitalist firms operate and how they interact with the rest of the economy: the emergence of ‘platform capitalism’. This book critically examines these new business forms, tracing their genesis from the long downturn of the 1970s to the boom and bust of the 1990s and the aftershocks of the 2008 crisis. It shows how the fundamental foundations of the economy are rapidly being carved up among a small number of monopolistic platforms, and how the platform introduces new tendencies within capitalism that pose significant challenges to any vision of a post-capitalist future. This book will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the most powerful tech companies of our time are transforming the global economy." Also available as an audiobook.




Unpayable Debt


Book Description

Coloniality, raciality, and global capitalism from a black feminist “poethical” perspective. Unpayable Debt examines the relationships among coloniality, raciality, and global capital from a black feminist “poethical” perspective. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler's 1979 sci-fi novel Kindred, in which an African-American writer is transported back in time to the antebellum South to save her owner-ancestor, Unpayable Debt relates the notion of value to coloniality—both economic and ethical. Focusing on the philosophy behind value, Denise Ferreira da Silva exposes capital as the juridical architecture and ethical grammar of the world. Here, raciality—a symbol of coloniality—justifies deployments of total violence to enable expropriation and land extraction. This is the first volume in the On the Political series.