How is contagion designed? How do labour, migration, habits and data configure contagion? Analyzing the current conjuncture through these vectors, this book critically addresses issues of rising unemployment, restricted movement, increasing governance of populations through data systems and the compulsory redesign of habits. Design logics underscore both biological contagion and political technologies. Contagion is redesigning how labour and migration are differentially governed, experienced and indeed produced. Habits generate modes of exposure and protection from contagion and become a resource for managing biological and social life. Data turns contagion into models that make a virus actionable and calculable. New modes of ...

What is at stake in naming data centers as data farms? These installations are essentially hangars packed with computers. They congregate servers, switches and wires that facilitate the storage, processing and transmission of data in high volumes and at fast speeds. Data centers present a scale of operations, potentially planetary in scope, that intensifies and multiplies the productive and extractive capacities of digital technologies. The economic advantages that accrue to parties with servers in these installations derive not only from opportunities for peering and networking but also from inputs to client machines that may be situated at vast distance. Yet ...

Depletion Design suggests that ideas of exhaustion cut across cultural, environmentalist, and political idioms and offers ways to explore the emergence of new material assemblages. We, or so we are told, are running out of time, of time to develop alternatives to a new politics of emergency, as constant crisis has exhausted the means of a politics of representation too slow for the state of exception, too ignorant of the distribution of political agency, too focused on the governability of financial architectures. But new forms of individual and collective agency already emerge, as we learn to live, love, work within the ...

The publication of this pamphlet signals the beginning of a new program of collective research that extends our interest in logistical operations along global lines of influence and connection marked by Chinese infrastructural expansion. Dubbed Logistical Worlds: Infrastructure, Software, Labour (2013-2016), this project moves between Athens, Kolkata and Valparáiso, investigating regimes of circulation and containment that connect China’s manufacturing industries to different corners of the world. Although these regimes are central to our interest, logistics applies not merely to circulation or transport, which is to say that it troubles the heuristic division between production and distribution. This is particularly evident ...

Moving through the Burrabazar district along Kolkata’s Strand, the immediate buzz of hustling and trade obscures the crumbling warehouses that line the thoroughfare. According to a popular saying, “Everything is available in Burrabazar.” This ethos of ready supply, at least for those who are prepared to haggle (and almost everyone is), comes with an infrastructural and informational layer. “Everyone wants to buy cheap and sell dear,” writes Clifford Geertz in a classic article on the bazaar economy from the 1970s. “In the bazaar information is poor, scarce, maldistributed, inefficiently communicated, and intensely valued.” What are the material conduits that support ...

Known in Chile as los hombres verdes, the green men of Ventanas are former copper smelter workers whose skin is scarred with green lesions produced by chemical reactions. Located some sixty kilometres north of the port of Valparaíso, Ventanas has been declared una zona de sacrificio due to pollution from heavy industry. The area’s general toxicity mirrors the purity of its copper exports, which travel primarily to China. Copper is essential to today’s digital capitalism and logistical technologies. Yet the reputed purity of the copper refined at Ventanas cannot fix the price of this commodity, which rather follows trading fluctuations on metal exchange ...