This book explores the cultural importance of cybernetic technologies and their relationship to human experience through a critical theoretical lens. Bringing several often-marginalized histories of cybernetics, psychology, and mental health into dialogue with one another, Beck questions common assumptions about human life such as that our minds operate as information processing machines and our neurons communicate with one another. Rather than suggest that such ideas are either right or wrong, however, this book analyzes how and why we have come to frame questions about ourselves in these ways, as if our brains were our own personal computers. Here, the rationality underlying information theories in psychology is followed to its logical conclusion, only to find it circles back to where it began: engineered methods of human control. After tracing a series of recent developments in this vein across fields related to mental health, Beck highlights emerging psychosocial alternatives by incorporating recent work of scholars and activists who have already begun creating collective support networks in radical ways. Their work overlaps fruitfully with ideas from those, including Gilbert Simondon and Fernand Deligny, who foresaw many of the current problems with how information theories have been coupled with psychology and mental health care. This book is fascinating reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students across psychology, mental health programs, and digital media studies, and academics and researchers with a theoretical interest in the philosophy of technology. It's also an interesting resource for professionals with a practical interest in organizing care services under the data-driven imperatives of contemporary capitalism.

This book explores the cultural importance of cybernetic technologies and their relationship to human experience through a critical theoretical lens. Bringing several often-marginalized histories of cybernetics, psychology, and mental health into dialogue with one another, Beck questions common assumptions about human life such as that our minds operate as information processing machines and our neurons communicate with one another. Rather than suggest that such ideas are either right or wrong, however, this book analyzes how and why we have come to frame questions about ourselves in these ways, as if our brains were our own personal computers. Here, the rationality underlying information theories in psychology is followed to its logical conclusion, only to find it circles back to where it began: engineered methods of human control. After tracing a series of recent developments in this vein across fields related to mental health, Beck highlights emerging psychosocial alternatives by incorporating recent work of scholars and activists who have already begun creating collective support networks in radical ways. Their work overlaps fruitfully with ideas from those, including Gilbert Simondon and Fernand Deligny, who foresaw many of the current problems with how information theories have been coupled with psychology and mental health care. This book is fascinating reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students across psychology, mental health programs, and digital media studies, and academics and researchers with a theoretical interest in the philosophy of technology. It's also an interesting resource for professionals with a practical interest in organizing care services under the data-driven imperatives of contemporary capitalism.

Being Invisible Is Nick Dunill's M.O.

For nineteen years, he's been "the one who disappears" to his disapproving, Midwestern family. And now in New York City, a metropolis of anonymity built on not making eye contact, he feels right at home. Walking the streets of the Village, sneaking into dive bars, cleaning apartments, and trying to co-exist in a cramped apartment with his three roommates, Nick's trying to find his way without doing anything to put his wounded heart at risk, all the while wondering, "Does anything last?"

But Nick's vanishing act is about to be challenged in ways he never dreamed. Little by little, he's being forced into the land of the living--into relationships and opportunities, love and sex, truth and acceptance, into the heartbreaking secrets of his past and the hopeful chances of his future. And the more visible Nick becomes, the more he realizes that in life and love, disappearing is not an option. . .

"A book to get lost in."-"Bay Area Reporter" on "Someone Like You"

"Funny and touching with wonderful characters."-"The Texas Triangle" on "He's The One"

"A charming, humorously appealing tale."-"Publishers Weekly" on "It Had To Be You"

Timothy James Beck is the author of "Someone Like You, I'm Your Man, He's the One, " and "It Had to Be You." He divides his time between California, Texas, and New York, where he's hard at work on his next novel.