Download or read book Technocapitalism written by Luis Suarez-Villa and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-03 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new version of capitalism, grounded in technology and science, is spawning new forms of corporate power and organization that will have major implications for the twenty-first century. Technological creativity is thereby turned into a commodity in new corporate regimes that are primarily oriented toward research and intellectual appropriation. This phenomenon is likely to have major social, economic, and political consequences, as the new corporatism becomes ever more intrusive and rapacious through its control over technology and innovation. In his provocative book Technocapitalism, Luis Suarez-Villa addresses this phenomenon from the perspective of radical political economy and social criticism. Grounded in the premise that relations of power influence how human creativity and technology are exploited by the new corporatism, the author argues that new forms of democratic participation and resistance are needed, if the social pathologies created by this new version of capitalism are to be checked. Considering the new sectors affected by technocapitalism, such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, bioinformatics, and genomics, Suarez-Villa deciphers the common threads of power and organization that drive their corporatization. These new sectors, and the corporate apparatus set up to extract profit and power through them, are imposing standards, creating business models, molding social governance, and influencing social relations at all levels. The new reality they create is likely to affect most every aspect of human existence, including work, health, life, and nature itself.
Download or read book Globalization and Technocapitalism written by Professor Luis Suarez-Villa and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-01-28 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globalization and Technocapitalism considers the global reach of a new capitalist era, exploring the nature of 'technocapitalism' as grounded in new forms of accumulation, commodification, and corporate organization. As technological creativity, corporate research, and talent flows become more important than ever, this book explores the manner in which globalization acquires new contextual features that will become central to the macro-social dynamics of the twenty-first century. It thus sheds light on the resultant growth in global inequalities and more intrusive forms of global domination that are grounded in emerging sectors, such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and its diverse fields, such as genomics, synthetic bioengineering, bioinformatics and biopharmacology, and related advances in computing and telecommunications. A rigorous examination of developments in contemporary capitalism as driven by the forces of globalization, Globalization and Technocapitalism will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of social and political theory, international political economy, political philosophy, science and technology studies and globalization.
Download or read book Invention and the Rise of Technocapitalism written by Luis Suarez-Villa and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2000 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the context of the historic evolution of capitalism, Suarez-Villa (social ecology, U. of California-Irvine) explores the advent of a form of market capitalism rooted in invention and the development of new technologies. He examines the infrastructure that supports invention and the relationship of techno-capitalism with science, corporate business, and government. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Globalization and Technocapitalism written by Luis Suarez-Villa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globalization and Technocapitalism considers the global reach of a new capitalist era, exploring the nature of 'technocapitalism' as grounded in new forms of accumulation, commodification, and corporate organization. As technological creativity, corporate research, and talent flows become more important than ever, this book explores the manner in which globalization acquires new contextual features that will become central to the macro-social dynamics of the twenty-first century. It thus sheds light on the resultant growth in global inequalities and more intrusive forms of global domination that are grounded in emerging sectors, such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and its diverse fields, such as genomics, synthetic bioengineering, bioinformatics and biopharmacology, and related advances in computing and telecommunications. A rigorous examination of developments in contemporary capitalism as driven by the forces of globalization, Globalization and Technocapitalism will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of social and political theory, international political economy, political philosophy, science and technology studies and globalization.
Download or read book Performing Technocapitalism written by Alev Coban and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Kenya, technology entrepreneurs and makers have to employ their work and emotions in order to re-script their peripheral positionalities within technocapitalism and make Kenya a place for technology development. Based on ethnographic research in makerspaces and co-working spaces in Nairobi, Alev Coban argues that postcolonial technology entrepreneurship is neoliberal and inherently political work. Technology developers, narratives, prototypes, and digital fabrication tools unite to achieve ambiguous Kenyan futures of technocapitalist market integration and decolonial emancipation in order to foster national well-being and disentangle Kenya from exploitative global structures.
Download or read book TechnoFeminism written by Judy Wajcman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely and engaging book argues that technoscientific advances are radically transforming the woman-machine relationship. However, it is feminist politics rather than the technologies themselves that make the difference. TechnoFeminism fuses the visionary insights of cyberfeminism with a materialist analysis of the sexual politics of technology.
Download or read book Technology and Democracy Toward A Critical Theory of Digital Technologies Technopolitics and Technocapitalism written by Douglas Kellner and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-06 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As we enter a new millennium, it is clear that we are in the midst of one of the most dramatic technological revolutions in history that is changing everything from the ways that we work, communicate, participate in politics, and spend our leisure time. The technological revolution centers on computer, information, communication, and multimedia technologies, is often interpreted as the beginnings of a knowledge or information society, and therefore ascribes technologies a central role in every aspect of life. This Great Transformation poses tremendous challenges to critical social theorists, citizens, and educators to rethink their basic tenets, to deploy the media in creative and productive ways, and to restructure the workplace, social institutions, and schooling to respond constructively and progressively to the technological and social changes that we are now experiencing.
Download or read book Zizek and Heidegger written by Thomas Brockelman and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-11-03 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Žižek and Heidegger offers a radical new interpretation of the work of Slavoj Žižek, one of the world's leading contemporary thinkers, through a study of his relationship with the work of Martin Heidegger. Thomas Brockelman argues that Žižek's oeuvre is largely a response to Heidegger's philosophy of finitude, an immanent critique of it which pulls it in the direction of revolutionary praxis. Brockelman also finds limitations in Žižek's relationship with Heidegger, specifically in his ambivalence about Heidegger's techno-phobia. Brockelman's critique of Žižek departs from this ambivalence - a fundamental tension in Žižek's work between a historicist critical theory of techno-capitalism and an anti-historicist theory of revolutionary change. In addition to clarifying what Žižek has to say about our world and about the possibility of radical change in it, Žižek and Heidegger explores the various ways in which this split at the center of his thought appears within it - in Žižek's views on history or on the relationship between the revolutionary leader and the proletariat or between the analyst and the analysand.
Download or read book Corporate Power Oligopolies and the Crisis of the State written by Luis Suarez-Villa and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The largest, wealthiest corporations have gained unprecedented power and influence in contemporary life. From cradle to grave the decisions made by these entities have an enormous impact on how we live and work, what we eat, our physical and psychological health, what we know or believe, whom we elect, and how we deal with one another and with the natural world around us. At the same time, government seems ever more subservient to the power of these oligopolies, providing numerous forms of corporate welfare—tax breaks, subsidies, guarantees, and bailouts—while neglecting the most basic needs of the population. In Corporate Power, Oligopolies, and the Crisis of the State, Luis Suarez-Villa employs a multidisciplinary perspective to provide unprecedented documentation of a growing crisis of governance, marked by a massive transfer of risk from the private sector to the state, skyrocketing debt, great inequality and economic insecurity, along with an alignment of the interests of politicians and a new, minuscule but immensely wealthy and influential corporate elite. Thanks to this dysfunctional environment, Suarez-Villa argues, stagnation and a vanishing public trust have become the hallmarks of our time.
Download or read book Technologized Desire written by D. Harlan Wilson and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Technologized Desire, D. Harlan Wilson measures the evolution of the human condition as it has been represented by postcapitalist science fiction, which has consistently represented the body and subjectivity as ultraviolent, pathological phenomena. Operating under the assumption that selfhood is a technology--i.e. a creative projection from the body encompassing everything from language to electronic machinery--Wilson studies the emergence of selfhood in philosophy (Deleuze & Guattari), fiction (William S. Burroughs' cut-up novels and Max Barry's Jennifer Government), and cinema (Army of Darkness, Vanilla Sky, and the Matrix trilogy) in an attempt to portray the schizophrenic rigor of twenty-first century mediatized life. We are obligated by the pathological unconscious to always choose to be enslaved by capital and its hi-tech arsenal. The universe of consumer-capitalism, Wilson argues, is an illusory prison from which there is no escape--despite the fact that it is illusory.
Download or read book Cooperatives Confront Capitalism written by Peter Ranis and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cooperatives the world over are successfully developing alternative models of decision-making, employment and operation without the existence of managers, executives and hierarchies. Through case studies spanning the US, Latin America and Europe, including valuable new work on the previously neglected cooperative movement in Cuba, Peter Ranis explores how cooperatives have evolved in response to the economic crisis. Going further yet, Ranis makes the novel argument that the constitutionally enshrined principle of 'eminent domain' can in fact be harnessed to create and defend worker cooperatives. Combining the work of key radical theorists, including Marx, Gramsci and Luxemburg, with that of contemporary political economists, such as Block, Piketty and Stiglitz, Cooperatives Confront Capitalism provides what is perhaps the most far-reaching analysis yet of the ideas, achievements and wider historical context of the cooperative movement.
Download or read book Disassembly Required written by Geoff Mann and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2013-08-16 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capitalism is a complex, dynamic, and extraordinarily robust way of organizing human life; it is also a system that achieves prosperity for the few, impoverishes the many, and depletes the commons for all. We know that capitalism is a broken system, in desperate need of change. But, to imagine a different system, we first need to understand how capitalism actually exists today —and be able to explain to others how it works, and why change is needed. Disassembly Required is an attempt to meet these challenges. It offers an anti-capitalist analysis of capitalism, and, even more important, it explains why it is anti-capitalist. It does not stop at claiming that the present way of organizing the “economic” aspects of our lives is politically indefensible and ecologically unsustainable, but digs into the details of capitalist institutions and the economics that justify them. From money and markets to the subprime crisis, it explains the fundamental features of contemporary capitalism and how they contribute, sometimes in surprising ways, to overall capitalist dynamics. “A brilliantly lucid book. Mann illuminates the basic principles of modern capitalism, their expressions in contemporary economies and states, and their devastating socio-ecological consequences for working people everywhere. This is a must-read if we are to envision ways of organizing our common planetary existence that are not based upon the illusory promises of market fundamentalism and the suicidal ideology of endless economic growth.”—Neil Brenner, New State Spaces “Geoff Mann is a new breed of monkey-wrencher. He knows that contemporary capitalism has a perverse habit of dismantling itself and gives us a toolkit to build a new, more socially just edifice.”—Andy Merrifield, Magical Marxism “Insightful and incisive, thoughtful and thorough, filled with new avenues for thinking about resistence. Pass this one by at your own peril.”—Matt Hern, Common Ground in a Liquid City “An essential handbook for understanding ‘actually existing’ capitalism, and thus the world as it really is—rather than as it is theorized and justified by the dissembling high priests of mainstream academia, policy, and politics.”—Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos
Download or read book Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America written by Edward King and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin America is experiencing a boom in graphic novels that are highly innovative in their conceptual play and their reworking of the medium. Inventive artwork and sophisticated scripts have combined to satisfy the demand of a growing readership, both at home and abroad. Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America, which is the first book-length study of the topic, argues that the graphic novel is emerging in Latin America as a uniquely powerful force to explore the nature of twenty-first century subjectivity. The authors place particular emphasis on the ways in which humans are bound to their non-human environment, and these ideas are productively drawn out in relation to posthuman thought and experience. The book draws together a range of recent graphic novels from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, many of which experiment with questions of transmediality, the representation of urban space, modes of perception and cognition, and a new form of ethics for a posthuman world. Praise for Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America '...well-referenced and… well considered - the analyses it brings are overall well-executed and insightful...' Image and Narrative, Jan 2018, vol 18, no 4
Download or read book The Metainterface written by Christian Ulrik Andersen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the interface has moved from the PC into cultural platforms, as seen in a series of works of net art, software art and electronic literature. The computer interface is both omnipresent and invisible, at once embedded in everyday objects and characterized by hidden exchanges of information between objects. The interface has moved from office into culture, with devices, apps, the cloud, and data streams as new cultural platforms. In The Metainterface, Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold examine the relationships between art and interfaces, tracing the interface's disruption of everyday cultural practices. They present a new interface paradigm of cloud services, smartphones, and data capture, and examine how particular art forms—including net art, software art, and electronic literature—seek to reflect and explore this paradigm. Andersen and Pold argue that despite attempts to make the interface disappear into smooth access and smart interaction, it gradually resurfaces; there is a metainterface to the displaced interface. Art can help us see this; the interface can be an important outlet for aesthetic critique. Andersen and Pold describe the “semantic capitalism” of a metainterface industry that captures user behavior; the metainterface industry's disruption of everyday urban life, changing how the city is read, inhabited, and organized; the ways that the material displacement of the cloud affects the experience of the interface; and the potential of designing with an awareness of the language and grammar of interfaces.
Download or read book The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism written by Ben Little and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-23 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an original critique of the billionaire founders of US West Coast tech companies, addressing their collective power, influence, and ideology, their group dynamics, and the role they play in the wider sociocultural and political formations of digital capitalism. Interrogating not only the founders’ political and economic ambitions, but also how their corporations are omnipresent in our everyday lives, the authors provide robust evidence that a specific kind of patriarchal power has emerged as digital capitalism’s mode of command. The ‘New Patriarchs’ examined over the course of the book include: Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Elon Musk of Tesla, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Peter Thiel. We also include Sheryl Sandberg. The book analyses how these (mostly) men legitimate their rapidly acquired power, tying a novel kind of socially awkward but ‘visionary’ masculinity to exotic forms of shareholding. Drawing on a ten million word digital concordance, the authors intervene in feminist debates on patriarchy, masculinity, and postfeminism, locating the power of the founders as emanating from a specifically racialised structure of oppression tied to imaginaries of the American frontier, the patriarchal household, and settler colonialism. This is an important interdisciplinary contribution suitable for researchers and students across Digital Media, Media and Communication, and Gender and Cultural Studies.
Download or read book Technocapitalism written by Loretta Napoleoni and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2024-04-16 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating look at how the Space Barons and Techtitans—heads of companies like Uber, Amazon, Tesla—have hijacked technology, preventing it from being used on behalf of the common good and profiting from the politics of fear and consumerism. The respected Italian economist and journalist offers a bold and provocative argument that the speed of technological transformation is threatening our future At the dawn of the digital revolution, the internet was going to be the great equalizer, a global democratic force. Instead, with the money printed electronically to bail out banks, Wall Street ended up funding a new breed of serial capitalists, the Techtitans, who embraced rapid, transformational change while stripping their workers of rights and enriching themselves beyond anybody’s wildest imagination; and the Space Barons, who mine new frontiers for precious resources. Then came the gig-economy, another supposed digital equalizer, where everybody was his or her own boss, but it was just another illusion. Tech pioneers like Google, Facebook, Apple, Uber, and Microsoft never had any intention of spreading democracy. Those who control and own the technology are the absolute masters. As artificial intelligence enters the labor market, companies like Uber are able to cut labor costs to the barest of minimums, by squeezing workers’ privileges and rights. In Technocapitalism, Napoleoni describes these phenomena as the genesis of a new paradigm, born in a period of extraordinary change in which the acceleration of transformational change has caused a dizzying, anxiety-induced paralysis from the FTX collapse to AI, private space companies to the war in Ukraine, from inflation to the dirty environmental truth of EV car batteries. Technological transformation is occurring at a speed that is existentially unbearable for most of us. We must fight for our common good to address today’s real challenges of global warming and militarism and the soulessness of capitalist endeavor. Napoleoni shows us how.
Download or read book The Imperial Mode of Living written by Ulrich Brand and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our Unsustainable Life: Why We Can't Have Everything We Want With the concept of the Imperial Mode of Living, Brand and Wissen highlight the fact that capitalism implies uneven development as well as a constant and accelerating universalisation of a Western mode of production and living. The logic of liberal markets since the 19thCentury, and especially since World War II, has been inscribed into everyday practices that are usually unconsciously reproduced. The authors show that they are a main driver of the ecological crisis and economic and political instability. The Imperial Mode of Living implies that people's everyday practices, including individual and societal orientations, as well as identities, rely heavily on the unlimited appropriation of resources; a disproportionate claim on global and local ecosystems and sinks; and cheap labour from elsewhere. This availability of commodities is largely organised through the world market, backed by military force and/or the asymmetric relations of forces as they have been inscribed in international institutions. Moreover, the Imperial Mode of Living implies asymmetrical social relations along class, gender and race within the respective countries. Here too, it is driven by the capitalist accumulation imperative, growth-oriented state policies and status consumption. The concrete production conditions of commodities are rendered invisible in the places where the commodities are consumed. The imperialist world order is normalized through the mode of production and living.
