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."

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.