We are well aware of the limited strength of the left today. Trade unions have been decimated, working class solidarity torn apart, political parties mutated into neoliberal puppets, and social movements channelled into innocuous forms. An entire battery of tactics has been employed to put the left in this position of weakness: legal alterations, increased precarity, global competition, and so on. Yet class power can come from a variety of sources, and a main argument of this paper is that the current weakness of the left is not simply due to a lack of class consciousness, a breakdown of solidarity, or ...

Nick Srnicek is a lecturer in Digital Economy at King’s College London. He is the author of Platform Capitalism (2016) and Inventing the Future (2015) with co-author Alex Williams.

This series of interventions on the ramifications of Speculative Realism for aesthetics ranges from contemporary art’s relation to the aesthetic, to accelerationism and abstraction, logic and design. From varied perspectives of philosophy, art and design, participants examine the new technological mediations between the human sensorium and the massive planetary media network within which it now exists, and consider how the aesthetic enables new modes of knowledge by processing sensory data through symbolic formalisms and technological devices. Speculative Aesthetics anticipates the possibility of a theory and practice no longer invested in the otherworldly promise of the aesthetic, but acknowledging the real force and ...

Time is changing. Human agency and experience lose their primacy in the complexity and scale of social organization today. The leading actors are instead complex systems, infrastructures and networks in which the future replaces the present as the structuring condition of time. As the political Left and Right struggle to deal with this new situation, we are increasingly wholly pre-empted and post-everything. The contributions in The Time Complex” Post-Contemporary re-localize the present as part of a changed, speculative time complex and draw a precise diagnosis of the situation in order to negotiate speculative predictions of a future presence. The Speculative Time ...

Continental philosophy has entered a new period of ferment. The long deconstructionist era was followed with a period dominated by Deleuze, which has in turn evolved into a new situation still difficult to define. However, one common thread running through the new brand of continental positions is a renewed attention to materialist and realist options in philosophy. Among the leaders of the established generation, this new focus takes numerous forms. It might be hard to find many shared positions in the writings of Badiou, DeLanda, Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, and Žižek, but what is missing from their positions is an obsession ...

Nick Srnicek is a Canadian writer, academic, lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London, and The Terraforming expert at Strelka. He is the author of Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2016) and co-author of Inventing the Future (Verso, 2015 with Alex Williams). In this episode, Nick is interviewed by Valentin Diaconov, a Moscow-based curator and art critic. They sit down to talk about the future of work, wage labor, and the most successful experiments with basic income.