Psychopower and Ordinary Madness: Reticulated Dividuals in Cognitive Capitalism

Despite the seemingly neutral vantage of using nature for widely-distributed computational purposes, neither post-biological nor post-humanist teleology simply concludes with the real "end of nature" as entailed in the loss of the specific ontological status embedded in the identifier "natural." As evinced by the ecological crises of the Anthropocene—of which the 2019 Brazil Amazon rainforest fires are only the most recent—our epoch has transfixed the “natural order" and imposed entropic artificial integration, producing living species that become “anoetic,” made to serve as automated exosomatic residues, or digital flecks. I further develop Gilles Deleuze’s description of control societies to upturn Foucauldian biopower, replacing its spacio-temporal bounds with the exographic excesses in psycho-power; culling and further detailing Bernard Stiegler’s framework of transindividuation and hyper-control, I examine how becoming-subject is predictively facilitated within cognitive capitalism and what Alexander Galloway terms “deep digitality.” Despite the loss of material vestiges qua virtualization—which I seek to trace in an historical review of industrialization to postindustrialization—the drive-based and reticulated "internet of things" facilitates a closed loop from within the brain to the outside environment, such that the aperture of thought is mediated and compressed. The human brain, understood through its material constitution, is susceptible to total datafication’s laminated process of “becoming-mnemotechnical,” and, as neuroplasticity is now a valid description for deep-learning and neural nets, we are privy to the rebirth of the once-discounted metaphor of the “cybernetic brain.” Probing algorithmic governmentality while posing noetic dreaming as both technical and pharmacological, I seek to analyze how spirit is blithely confounded with machine-thinking’s gelatinous cognition, as prosthetic organ-adaptation becomes probabilistically molded, networked, and agentially inflected (rather than simply externalized)

Intelligent Management and Efficient Operation of Big Data

This chapter details how Big Data can be used and implemented in networking and computing infrastructures. Specifically, it addresses three main aspects: the timely extraction of relevant knowledge from heterogeneous, and very often unstructured large data sources, the enhancement on the performance of processing and networking (cloud) infrastructures that are the most important foundational pillars of Big Data applications or services, and novel ways to efficiently manage network infrastructures with high-level composed policies for supporting the transmission of large amounts of data with distinct requisites (video vs. non-video). A case study involving an intelligent management solution to route data traffic with diverse requirements in a wide area Internet Exchange Point is presented, discussed in the context of Big Data, and evaluated.Comment: In book Handbook of Research on Trends and Future Directions in Big Data and Web Intelligence, IGI Global, 201

Rethinking affordance

n/a – Critical survey essay retheorising the concept of 'affordance' in digital media context. Lead article in a special issue on the topic, co-edited by the authors for the journal Media Theory

The University as Publisher: Summary of a Meeting Held at UC Berkeley on November 1, 2007

With the advent of electronic publishing, the scholarly communication landscape at universities has become increasingly diverse. Multiple stakeholders including university presses, libraries, and central IT departments are challenged by the increasing volume and the rapidity of production of these new forms of publication in an environment of economic uncertainties. As a response to these increasing pressures, as well as the recent publication of important reports and papers on the topic, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) convened a meeting of experts titled, The University as Publisher. The event was sponsored as part of the A.W. Mellon Foundation-funded Future of Scholarly Communication project at CSHE.Our goal was to explore among stakeholders -- faculty, publishers, CIOs, librarians, and researchers -- the implications of the academic community, in some structure, taking over many, if not all, aspects of scholarly publishing. Two themes were the focus of the public panels: Institutional Roles in Evaluation, Quality Assessment, and Selection and Structuring and Budgeting Models for Publishing within the University Community. Our discussions included the importance of distinguishing between informal dissemination and formal publishing and the challenges that each presents to the university community. The harsh economic realities of high-quality formal scholarly publication, not least of which are managing peer review and editorial processes, were emphasized. Understanding disciplinary needs was cited as paramount throughout the discussions; the needs and traditions of scholars in the sciences and humanities, as well as among myriad disciplines, will likely demand different dissemination and publishing models and solutions. An additional theme that emerged was acknowledging the diverse forms electronic dissemination takes in the academy and the need to foster a spectrum of alternatives in publication forms, business models, and the peer review process. Budgetary and academic freedom concerns were explored as well. Regarding the expensive infrastructure required for electronic dissemination and publishing, it was agreed that there is enormous duplication among the university press, IT, and the library