As the revolutions across the Arab world that came to a head in 2011 devolved into civil war and military coup, representation and history acquired a renewed and contested urgency. The capacities of the internet have enabled sharing and archiving in an unprecedented fashion. Yet, at the same time, these facilities institute a globally dispersed reinforcement and recalibration of power, turning memory and knowledge into commodified and copyrighted goods. In The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, activists, artists, filmmakers, producers, and scholars examine which images of struggle have been created, bought, sold, repurposed, denounced, and expunged. As a ...

In the first pandemic of the datafied society, the disempowered were denied a voice in the heavily quantified mainstream narrative. Featuring stories of invisibility, injustice, hope and resistance, this book gives voice to communities at the margins in the Global South and beyond. The multilingual, polycentric and pluriversal narration invites the reader to enact and experience “Big Data from the South(s)” as a decolonial lens to read the pandemic.

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 ...

Extinction Internet is not merely an end-of-the-world phantasy of digital technology that one day will be wiped out by an electromagnetic pulse or the cutting of cables. Rather, Extinction Internet marks the end of an era of possibilities and speculations, when adaptation is no longer an option. During the internet’s Lost Decade, we’ve been rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic under the inspirational guidance of the consultancy class. What’s to be done to uphold the inevitable? We need tools that decolonize, redistribute value, conspire and organize. Join the platform exodus. It’s time for a strike on optimization. There is ...

This book locates India’s flourishing internet within a complex 24-year history that has seen an unprecedented re-organization of social and political life. Three essays provide independent perspectives on a common area of inquiry, an era that witnessed a fundamental mutation of the State, its mechanisms of planning and governance, the public domain and the everyday, all mediated by digital technology, all impacting its internet. Bringing the essays together is a common timeline, which begins in the late 1970s, includes such landmarks as the Information Technology Act, the much-discussed Aadhaar biometric identification programme, the chequered career of social media, and the ...

What is platformization and why is it a relevant category in the contemporary political landscape? How is it related to cybernetics and the history of computation? This book tries to answer such questions by engaging in multidisciplinary dialogues about the first ten years of the emerging fields of platform studies and platform theory. It deploys a narrative and playful approach that makes use of anecdotes, personal histories, etymologies, and futurable speculations to investigate both the fragmented genealogy that led to platformization and the organizational and economic trends that guide nowadays platform sociotechnical imaginaries. The dialogues cover fields such as media studies, software ...

Times have changed. The art world and the creative economy are no longer the ones we used to know. The digital economy, the pandemic, and the cuts within the cultural field are some of the many factors that influence our practices and the way artists live nowadays. While some claim that the golden eras are gone, and maybe they are, a community of young artists and thinkers meets to discuss the ways in which the narrative around art and its practices has changed and can be geared towards the future. What does it mean to be an artist today? How to ...

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…

Housing space is a crucial locus of social reproduction, as it is a place where countless acts of care that sustain our lives take place. Yet, capital has forced its way into our homes, making them a battleground. Art is embedded and intermeshed in housing struggles in multiple ways. The essays and stage scripts in this collection engage with difficult questions around battles for home, the role of the arts, and the aesthetics of struggle. What connects the contributions is that the authors think of housing struggles from both the internal and the external margins and from global and local ...

README.first is a bilingual collection of mini-essays, published in the run up to the Plokta film festival. We’ve asked writers, researchers, theorists, artists, programmers, and others to pick an online video that functions as a stepping stone for their thought and practice and to comment shortly on why they find the video so significant, funny, or outright disturbing. The resulting reflections speak about Silicon Valley obsessions, our mediated social lives, the impact of technology on centuries old games, and more.