The (political) power of memes has moved beyond virtual images. The distinction between the virtual and ‘real life’ no longer applies, or perhaps was never really there. Their effects (or should we say affects?) are moving through digital infrastructures, policy, regulations and bodies. If memes are used as a tool by the alt-right to mobilize people to storm the Capitol and play a substantial role in the Ukrainian war, can they also be used by the left to spark a revolution, as memetic warfare is more immediate and accessible than real-life demonstrations? What kind of labor would that require? What ...

Memes are bastards, and we love them for it. But memes are bastards in the sense that they are born from two seemingly incompatible ontological registers: an unholy matrimony of semiosis and virality, sense and nonsense, signification and circulation. More on that later. First, let’s acknowledge that the meme is also an infantile and laughable term, as are all words that repeat themselves. Yet—encountering its own stupidity, and making this into its generative principle—it is not ashamed; like any self-respecting idiot savant, it never ceases to persist in its own convoluted wisdoms. ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and ...

Lives of Data maps the historical and emergent dynamics of big data, computing, and society in India. Data infrastructures are now more global than ever before. In much of the world, new sociotechnical possibilities of big data and artificial intelligence are unfolding under the long shadows cast by infra/structural inequalities, colonialism, modernization, and national sovereignty. This book offers critical vantage points for looking at big data and its shadows, as they play out in uneven encounters of machinic and cultural relationalities of data in India’s socio-politically disparate and diverse contexts. Lives of Data emerged from research projects and workshops at the ...

As the screenshot travels through networks and is stored away safely in the depths of our hard drives or cloud depositories, a collection of written and visual works of PrtScn: The Lazy Art of Screenshot unpacks these digital movements, freezes and many points (and pixels) in between. Some of the perspectives such as personal, artistic, communal, surveillant, archival, disruptive, theoretical and political can be delineated within the contributions, but their overlaps are so evident that clustering them under different sections seemed reductive and redundant…

Once we’ve left the jargon there is a sense of freedom out there. What the world needs now is unruly thinking that leaves behind academic formalism and identitarian policing. The theory vibe on display here offers the best of European continental thinking that has freed itself from the contemporary fragmentation and marketing hypes. The essay form and related visual materials presented open up a speculative space where literary texts feed off artistic investigations. Let’s foster dark knowledge for the multitudes.