Virtuosity, Processual Democracy and Organised Networks

I start with the premise that the decoupling of the state from civil society and the reassertion of the multitudes over the unitary figure of ‘the people’ coincides with a vacuum in political institutions of the state. Against Chantal Mouffe’s promotion of an ‘agonistic democracy’, I argue that the emergent idiom of democracy within networked, informational settings is a non- or post-representative one that can be understood in terms of processuality. I maintain that a non-representative, processual democracy corresponds with new institutional formations peculiar to organised networks that subsist within informationality

Logistical Worlds

As the managerial art and science of coordinating the movement of people, finance and things, logistical operations are central to contemporary capital. Despite its materiality in the form of communications and transport infrastructure, logistics remains an abstract machine for many. This is largely due to the compartmental structure of global supply chains and the invisibility of code. In registering the mediating force of logistics, the essay considers parametric politics as an architecture of intervention for both game design and software development. There are implications here not only for gameplay, but also the invention of method and governance of labour. How, for instance, might game design facilitate the production of a political knowledge of logistics? This becomes a matter to address for labour power vis-à-vis collective research on infrastructure, software and global supply chains

Modelling data

For many years computational systems have been accompanied by the cultural imaginary and technical unleashing of viruses hellbent on destruction. Bugs, worms, trojan horses – these are just some of the common names of malicious code designed to infect and replicate across computers and networks. With discursive attributes derived from the biological sciences, digital viruses obtain an anthropomorphic status that draws a line of equivalence between humans and machines. Both can be treated with sufficient intervention by experts in concert with a general cultural atmosphere alive to security, risk and parasitical capitalism. If viruses distributed across communication networks and through shared devices condition the ontology of the digital, what possibilities emerge for building media-theoretical concepts attentive to technical propensities and social practices of infection? Does data contagion, specifically, alert us to new circuits of distribution and modes of attack

Dreamful Computing

Not Reviewe

Platform politics and a world beyond catastrophe

In this chapter the authors set out some of the stakes of platform politics at the current conjuncture. Data governance issues concerning the social production of value, data rights in automated markets, data surveillance motivated by pervasive paranoia and a general ideological intolerance against off-message articulations of disaffection. These are just some of the prevailing discursive and governmental tendencies that define the horizon of our platform present. Yet there is more, and the authors write their way through crisis to find some bearing and orientation in a world of real-time updates and automated injunctions. The machinic signalling of pervasive despair is wrought by contagion, climate and a future at once forestalled and bearing down upon us

Narratives of Emergence: Landscape photography in Late Nineteenth century Western Australia

A discussion of photography in Western Australia in the last decades of the nineteenth century

From flows of culture to the circuits of logistics : borders, regions, labour in transit

In Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders. No. 2 (Dec. 2010). When jurisdiction can no longer be aligned with territory and governance does not necessarily assume liberalism, there is a need to rethink the relations between labour, mobility and space. Bringing together researchers from different parts of the world to discuss and pursue various paths of investigation and collaboration, the Shanghai Transit Labour Research Platform moved between online and offline worlds. Sometimes sequestered in seminar spaces and at other times negotiating the city and the regulatory environment, the participants drifted toward a collective enunciation. We could say this was about the production of new kinds of labouring subjectivities that build connections between domains which are at once becoming more irreconcilable and more indistinct: life and work, public and private, political and economic, natural and cultural

Contagion Design: Labour, Economy, Habits, Data

How is contagion designed? How do labour, migration, habits and data configure contagion? Analyzing the current conjuncture through these vectors, this book critically addresses issues of rising unemployment, restricted movement, increasing governance of populations through data systems and the compulsory redesign of habits. Design logics underscore both biological contagion and political technologies. Contagion is redesigning how labour and migration are differentially governed, experienced and indeed produced. Habits generate modes of exposure and protection from contagion and become a resource for managing biological and social life. Data turns contagion into models that make a virus actionable and calculable. New modes of sociality and collaboration provoke forms of contagious mutuality. But can the logic of pre-emption and prediction ever accommodate and control the contingencies of a virus? Taken as a whole, the essays in this small book explore these issues and their implications for cultural, social and political research of biotechnical conditions. If contagion never abandons the scene of the present, if it persists as a constitutive force in the production of social life, how might we redesign the viral as the friend we love to hate

Introducing contagion design

How is contagion designed? How do labour, migration, economies, habits and data configure contagion? Across a program of four weeks of discussion and debate from October to November 2020, the international symposium Contagion Design: Labour, Economy, Habits, Data explored the current conjuncture through these vectors to critically address issues of rising unemployment, restricted movement, increasing governance of populations through data systems and the compulsory redesign of habits. Design logics underscore both biological contagion and political technologies. Contagion is redesigning how labour and migration are differentially governed, experienced and indeed produced. Habits generate modes of exposure and protection from contagion and become a resource for managing biological and social life. Data turns contagion into models that make a virus actionable and calculable. New modes of sociality and collaboration provoke forms of contagious mutuality. But can the logic of pre-emption and prediction ever accommodate and control the contingencies of a virus? The essays in this small book explore these issues and their implications for cultural, social and political research of biotechnological conditions. If contagion never abandons the scene of the present, if it persists as a constitutive force in the production of social life, how might we redesign the viral as the friend we love to hate

Automating labour and the spatial politics of data centre technologies

Data politics traffics through data centres. A primary function of data centres over the next decades will consist of supporting the transition to automated economies with the integration of artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics into processes of capital valorisation and accumulation. Stemming from a project that investigates data centres in Asia, this contribution positions the age of automation in terms of the spatial politics of data infrastructures. Singapore is renowned as a growth centre for data storage facilities in Asia. Yet the policy literature on smart nations lacks narratives that address the political and social problem of job loss precipitated by automated futures. Because data centres are themselves automated environments and provide infrastructure that enables automation in workplaces spread across geographical scales, they offer a strategic object for research on the varied implications of automation for labour. The extent to which data centres make worlds and reconfigure regions bears upon conceptualisations of sovereign power harnessed to the state. This contribution maintains that an emergent sovereign form registers in the operational logic of computational machines special to data centres