Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What’s not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it’s hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon workers or Uber drivers. It’s becoming clear that the tech industry’s promised “innovation” is neither sustainable nor always desirable. Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality of Silicon Valley, and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo. Going beyond ...

Robotics and soft AI are bringing everyday changes both to the work field and to our free time. How does this condition reflect itself on the artistic practice? Can we humans liberate ourselves from our anthropocentric viewpoint and accept the intellective superiority of machines? Will we be able to overcome our fear of automation? In the utopian view of a fully automated production, not only work ethics should be re-thought, but also our certainties about aesthetics.

The public discourse around AI is oscillating between salvation and the apocalyptic, often referring to images from Science Fiction. Meanwhile, in our smartphones, in search engines or in automatic translation, forms of artificial intelligence are already part of our everyday life. An ongoing artistic research on the topic brought Geneva-based artist Lauren Huret to California, where she conducted interviews with four protagonists of the discourse: Computer scientist and entrepreneur Monica Anderson (Artificial Intuition), computer historian Dag Spicer (Computer History Museum), writer and editor R.U. Sirius (MONDO 2000) and writer Erik Davis (TechGnosis. Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of ...

Assembling a Black Counter Culture is a general history of techno and adjacent electronic music with a focus on Black experiences in industrialized labor systems, and explores the development of on-the-ground culture in relation to a unique American art form. Revisiting Detroit’s techno roots through the 1980s, writer and musician DeForrest Brown, Jr. follows the extended thinking and techniques behind key early players and places them in conversation with the African American working class in the historically emblematic Motor City. From The Belleville Three to today’s international club floor, Assembling a Black Counter Culture illuminates the mechanics of American mainstream cultural ...

The etymology of the word author refers to an act of creation, an act of augmentation, from the Latin verb augere. Author instantiates creation, the expansion of the pre-existing. In 1967 Roland Barthes declared the death of the author in his famous essay to state once more that the crisis is that of the author as a single subjectivity and as a term that condenses prestige, undermined by the de-subjectivation strategies of automatism, fortuity and fragmentation of the historical avant-gardes, as well as by the machinic act and by the reproducibility of the second avant-gardes. Fifty years after Barthes’ paradigmatic formula, this lack of ...

For the eighth issue of How to Sleep Faster, Arcadia Missa has brought together work—in a variety of forms—responding to the theme of Autonomy and Automation. The increased use of automated processes has often been considered a threat to personal and political autonomy, yet traditional notions of automation are changing, with movements such as Accelerationism (and its right-wing variant espoused by neo-reactionary thinkers like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin) and Fully Automated Luxury Communism becoming an increasing part of mainstream debate. But does the popularization of this discourse around autonomy—and the increased use (in art and in everyday life) of ...

What have Lumière in common with Wachowski? More than one hundred years separate these two pairs of brothers who astonished, quite similarly, the film spectator of their respective time with special effects of movement: a train rushing into the audience and a bullet flying in slow motion. Do they belong to the same family of “cinema of attractions”? Twenty years ago, Tom Gunning introduced the phrase “cinema of attractions” to define the essence of the earliest films made between 1895 and 1906. His term scored an immediate success, even outside the field of early cinema. The present anthology questions the ...

Class and Redistribution is the third in a series of e-publications edited by L’Internationale Online looking at concepts of political economy. Following the previous publications Austerity and Utopia and Degrowth and Progress, the present issue complicates two contested economic terms: class and redistribution. By inviting contributions from sociologists, political philosophers and artists, we seek to understand how these terms are utilised in institutional contexts and artistic practices. Our approach challenges orthodox definitions of economic categories. Since the universal, ahistorical use of these categories is debatable, we accept, following historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘the[ir] dual nature’, and interrogate their ‘intellectual and social ...

Anything that can be automated, will be. The “magic” that digital technology has brought us — self-driving cars, Bitcoin, high frequency trading, internet of things, social networking, mass surveillance, the 2009 housing bubble — has not been considered ideologically. The Critique of Digital Capitalism identifies how digital technology has captured contemporary society in a reification of capitalist priorities. The theory proposed in this book is the description of how digital capitalism as an ideologically “invisible” framework is realized in technology. Written as a series of articles between 2003 and 2015, it provides a broad critical scope for understanding the inherent demands of capitalist ...

A TECHNO Conversation between DeForrest Brown, Jr. & Katia Mullova DeForrest Brown, Jr. is a producer, media theorist, and curator. Brown has released music both under his own name and with the Speaker Music moniker and he’s a representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. For this episode, he discussed with DJ and radio host Katia Mulluova some of the themes of Assembling a Black Counter Culture, to be released in 2021 by Primary Information Press. The book traces techno roots with a focus on Black experiences in industrialized labor, revisiting thinking and techniques behind key early players and placing ...

In the first e-flux journal issue of 2022, Bifo points out a recent social protest movement in China known as tangping (躺平, “lying flat”), in which young people increasingly opt out of the pressure to overwork by taking low-paying jobs or not working at all. In the US, “the Great Resignation” has been the name for four and a half million American workers who left their jobs at the end of 2020. But Bifo reminds us that “resignation” also means re-signification—a new meaning given to pleasure, richness, activity, and cooperation that may unveil a previously hidden egalitarian and frugal sensitivity ...

The word “data” comes from the Latin dare, which means “give.” This evolves into datum, which signifies something given. Data is what is given; Big Data, many given somethings. Gifts are given, too, but it’s hard to think of data as a gift—and nearly impossible to think of Big Data as a Big Gift, though it certainly appears that way to some… Editorial Editors A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-)Recognition Hito Steyerl Drone Form: Word and Image at the End of Empire Nathan K. Hensley Method without Methodology: Data and the Digital Humanities Lindsay Caplan Connoisseurship and Critique Ben Davis Enantiomorphs in Hyperspace: Living and Dying on the ...