anyone pumped for jon beller- the message is murder

Let's talk Aguachile Alley

Postby jca » Thu Aug 10, 2017 7:35 pm

More than fifty years ago, Marshall McLuhan proclaimed that “the medium is the message,” profoundly influencing future generations of media theorists. A long-overdue wakeup call for the field of media studies, The Message is Murder analyzes the formations of violence still imbued in the everyday functions of the media. Jonathan Beller introduces the concept of computational capital to argue that contemporary media are not neutral, but rather they are technologies of political economy that became entangled with gendered and racialized capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Engaging with Borges, Turing, Hitchcock, and Marx, Beller offers an ambitious and provocative critique of contemporary media studies.

out in september

http://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/informatic-labor-computational-capital-beller/
Both program and archive, as money, commodity, screen-image, interface, derivative, and data visualization, cryptocurrency is thus far an exploit that churns and swarms in, through, and as our money, our code, our images, our words. In this respect it is paradigmatic—shifting the computational ecology and infiltrating it by introducing new levels of functionality and absorption to the already existing world-historical program of computational capital. As exhibit A of what is being called “the programmable economy,” Bitcoin, and the blockchain technology on which it is built, was perhaps the paradigmatic incarnation of computational capital. Ethereum, which is developing partnerships with Microsoft and numerous banks, as well as spurring a whole new spate of start-ups, today takes computational capital to the next level with “programmable money.” As the cryptocurrency exploits the intimate, we inhabit a media-environment where capital circulation is grasped and abstracted as encryption and data visualization, and can therefore be consciously developed as production via the extraction of informatic labor from historically produced needs. But as it turns out, on a planet that has been completely transformed by computational finance, computational colonialism, and the programmable image, everything else in circulation may have its informatic vectors, its media, its enumeration, including History’s dispossessions, enslavements, genocides, and massive accumulations of violence, violation, and presently innumerable sufferings. Despite the hostile, rampant practices of dismediation, perhaps everything that ever was leaves its informatic trace. Today we must ask: What are the anti-capitalist data-visualizations to which we might affix our energies? What non- and anti-capitalist resources remain ambient?
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