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The World Computer

The World Computer

Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism

by Jonathan Beller
Paperback
Publication Date: 26/02/2021

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In The World Computer Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression-language, image, music, communication-into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle.
ISBN:
9781478011163
9781478011163
Category:
Social & political philosophy
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
26-02-2021
Language:
English
Publisher:
Duke University Press
Country of origin:
United States
Dimensions (mm):
228.6x152.4x19.05mm
Weight:
0.5kg

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