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How do cables and data centers think? This book investigates how
information infrastructures enact particular forms of knowledge. It
juxtaposes the pervasive logics of speed, efficiency, and
resilience with more communal and ecological ways of thinking and
being, turning technical "solutions" back into open questions about
what society wants and what infrastructures should do. Moving from
data centers in Hong Kong to undersea cables in Singapore and
server clusters in China, Munn combines rich empirical material
with insights drawn from media and cultural studies, sociology, and
philosophy. This critical analysis stresses that infrastructures
are not just technical but deeply epistemological, privileging some
actions and actors while sidelining others. This innovative
exploration of the values and visions at the heart of our
technologies will interest students, scholars, and researchers in
the areas of communication studies, digital media, technology
studies, sociology, philosophy of technology, information studies,
and geography.
For some, automation will usher in a labor-free utopia; for others,
it signals a disastrous age-to-come. Yet whether seen as dream or
nightmare, automation, argues Munn, is ultimately a fable that
rests on a set of triple fictions. There is the myth of full
autonomy, claiming that machines will take over production and
supplant humans. But far from being self-acting, technical
solutions are piecemeal; their support and maintenance reveals the
immense human labor behind "autonomous" processes. There is the
myth of universal automation, with technologies framed as a
desituated force sweeping the globe. But this fiction ignores the
social, cultural, and geographical forces that shape technologies
at a local level. And, there is the myth of automating everyone,
the generic figure of "the human" at the heart of automation
claims. But labor is socially stratified and so automation's
fallout will be highly uneven, falling heavier on some (immigrants,
people of color, women) than others. Munn moves from machine
minders in China to warehouse pickers in the United States to
explore the ways that new technologies do (and don't) reconfigure
labor. Combining this rich array of human stories with insights
from media and cultural studies, Munn points to a more nuanced,
localized, and racialized understanding of the "future of work."
Territory is shifting. No longer defined by the dotted line of the
border or the national footprint of soil, today’s territories are
enacted through data infrastructures. From subsea cables to server
halls, these infrastructures underpin new forms of governance,
shaping subjects and their everyday lives. Technical Territories
moves from masked protestors in Hong Kong through to sand miners in
Singapore and asylum-seekers in Christmas Island, exploring how
these territories are both political and visceral, altering the
experience of their inhabitants. Infrastructures have now become
geopolitical, strategic investments that advance national visions,
extend influence, and trigger trade wars. Yet at the same time,
these technologies also challenge sovereignty as a bounded
container, enacting a more distributed and decoupled form of
governance. Such “technical territories” construct new zones
where subjects are assembled, rights are undermined, labor is
coordinated, and capital is extracted. The stable line of the
border is replaced by more fluid configurations of power. Luke Munn
stages an interdisciplinary intervention over six chapters, drawing
upon a wide range of literature from technical documents and
activist accounts, and bringing insights from media studies,
migration studies, political theory, and cultural and social
studies to bear on these new sociotechnical conditions.
For some, automation will usher in a labor-free utopia; for others,
it signals a disastrous age-to-come. Yet whether seen as dream or
nightmare, automation, argues Munn, is ultimately a fable that
rests on a set of triple fictions. There is the myth of full
autonomy, claiming that machines will take over production and
supplant humans. But far from being self-acting, technical
solutions are piecemeal; their support and maintenance reveals the
immense human labor behind "autonomous" processes. There is the
myth of universal automation, with technologies framed as a
desituated force sweeping the globe. But this fiction ignores the
social, cultural, and geographical forces that shape technologies
at a local level. And, there is the myth of automating everyone,
the generic figure of "the human" at the heart of automation
claims. But labor is socially stratified and so automation's
fallout will be highly uneven, falling heavier on some (immigrants,
people of color, women) than others. Munn moves from machine
minders in China to warehouse pickers in the United States to
explore the ways that new technologies do (and don't) reconfigure
labor. Combining this rich array of human stories with insights
from media and cultural studies, Munn points to a more nuanced,
localized, and racialized understanding of the "future of work."
From the virulence of fake news to the rise of psychographic
profiling, emotion has become ascendant. The new frontier of
capitalization is not outward, but inward-the inner life of affect
and emotion, desire and disposition. This book lays that new
reality out with a series of close case studies. A new set of
technologies are emerging, from facial coding to affective
computing, that attempt to render the emotional into the
machine-readable. At the same time, social media and smart home
devices are becoming empathic, attempting to draw out our affective
participation and elicit our emotional expression. In these
encounters with the medial and the technical, the emotional is
remade. Combining a close analysis of contemporary technologies
such as Affectiva, Facebook, and Alexa with critical media theory,
Logic of Feeling: Technology's Quest to Capitalize Emotion examines
how the quest to operationalize this inner life begins to
reconfigure feeling itself.
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