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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Every December, dictionaries and language societies across the globe identify the “words of the year”—words that resonated widely during the previous twelve months. In the mid-2000s, these lists were populated with words like “contempt” and “quagmire,” “ambivalence” and “conundrum.” A few years later, dominant words included “trepidation” and “precipice” and “fail,” “vitriol” and “insidious” and “bigot.” The OED’s word of the year for 2012 was “omnishambles.” 2016, however, was for OED the year of “post-truth.” Merriam-Webster selected the word “surreal.” In the wake of Brexit and the US elections, Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and Turkey’s disregard for journalistic freedom, ...

Imagine a big roll call. Names of nations, creeds, and genders are called out. Everyone is supposed to join their kin. Several hours later the crowd is all divided up into groups and subgroups, all neatly arranged on a large grid. There is just one person left. And this person says, “Sorry guys, I’m with the universe. Where do I go?”… Editorial—“Strange Universalism” Hito Steyerl, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Stephen Squibb, and Anton Vidokle Only Intelligent Planning Can Save Us Boris Buden and Darko Suvin The Color of Women: An Interview with YPJ Commanders Dilovan Kobani, Nirvana, Ruken, and Zerin Hito Steyerl and Rojava Film ...

If the hype is to be believed then the next big thing is the Internet of Things. But is it what you think it is? Because the Internet of Things is not about things on the internet. A world in which all our household gadgets can communicate with each other may sound vaguely useful, but it’s not really for us consumers. The Internet of Things serves the interests of the technology giants, in their epic wrangles with each other. And it is they who will turn the jargon of “smart cities” and “smart homes” into a self-fulfilling prophesy. In this ...