In between bubble and burst, e-commerce drew much of its content from donated labor. Tiziana Terranova questions just how “free” such labor has proved in practice.
(Source: EBR)
Steve Shaviro reviews Tomorrow Now by Bruce Sterling, a book that (for an eminent cyberpunk novelist) is perhaps too sane and sensible.
(Source: EBR)
On posthumanism potentially worthy of the name.
Sven Philipp on Cosmopolis and what seems to be a new stage in the critical reception of DeLillo.
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
Kiki Benzon on narrative ecology and the “fradulence paradox” of Oblivion.
Cary Wolfe reviews Luc Ferry’s The New Ecological Order.
Early on in The New Ecological Order, French philosopher Luc Ferry characterizes the allure and the danger of ecology in the postmodern moment. What separates it from various other issues in the intellectual and political field, he writes, is that it can call itself a true “world vision,” whereas the decline of political utopias, but also the parcelization of knowledge and the growing “jargonization” of individual scientific disciplines, seemed to forever prohibit any plan for the globalization of thought… At a time when ethical guide marks are more than ever floating and undetermined, it allows the unhoped-for promise of rootedness to form, an objective rootedness, certain of a new moral ideal (xx).
As we shall see, for Ferry – a staunch liberal humanist in the Kantian if not Cartesian tradition – this vision conceals a danger to which contemporary European intellectuals are especially sensitive: not holism, nor even moralism, exactly, but that far more charged and historically freighted thing, totalitarianism.
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)
In one half of a pair of critical reviews looking at recent titles in animal studies, Karl Steel examines Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital (Shukin reviews Steel in the other half). In particular, Steel looks at Shukin’s biopolitical framework, and considers how that framework challenges not only our conception of what constitutes the animal, but also–and more to the bone–our conception of the capacity of fields like animal studies.
(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/animal_capital)
In this review of The Power at the End of the Economy, Lestón delineates the theoretical apparatus of Massumi’s book and its possible implications.
(Source: EBR)