Mark Amerika on establishing an electronic publishing network in the no-man’s land between the commercial, the academic, and the underground.
(Source: EBR)
Excerpted from Water Writing - an essay; presented as part of the ebr Critical Ecologies thread; concurrent with a literary Festschrift in honor of Joseph McElroy’s lifework
Technocapitalism began as a set of essays collected in 2002 to be the first in a series of Alt-X Critical E-books.
Under the "technocapitalism" thread, ebr authors regard technology as neither utopian nor neutral, but as capital. As everyday life becomes further defined by communications, automations, and informatics, technology shapes our languages, animates our environments, and fosters our relationships. Techno-logic assures us that it applies scientific knowledge to the practical aims of human life, bringing planning, design, and growth. Yet, this is a conservative philosophy that serves to reign in technologies. The essays gathered in this thread (circa 2003) by Marc Bousquet and Katherine Wills fleshed out some of the social relations of exploitation created by this harnessing of information technologies, especially in the university and through the web. A decade later, the essays assembled by Aron Pease explore our current era of technocapitalism more broadly. As the techno club prepares its citizens for permanent war in the global state, we can also observe a technocapitalist imaginary, exemplified in the wildest fantasies of postmodern fiction and transdisciplinary discourse, pointing a way through.
(Source: EBR)
Speculation is an alternate reality game that explores the culture of Wall Street investment banks in the context of the 2008 global economic crisis. From cryptographic puzzles and online simulations to live performances and geocaching, Speculation incorporates a wide range of media to build a transmedia world in which the logic of capital has accelerated beyond control. In the process of discovering, decoding, reconfiguring, and remixing Speculation, thousands of players transformed the game into a collaborative platform for speculating on the future of finance capital. (Source: GalleryDDDL description)
