Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism

In this highly readable and thought-provoking work, Nick Dyer-Witheford assesses the relevance of Marxism in our time and demonstrates how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict between capital and its laboring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter. Dyer-Witheford maps the dynamics of modern capitalism, showing how capital depends for its operations not just on exploitation in the immediate workplace, but on the continuous integration of a whole series of social sites and activities, from public health and maternity to natural resource allocation and the geographical reorganization of labor power. He also shows how these sites and activities may become focal points of subversion and insurgency, as new means of communication vital for the smooth flow of capital also permit otherwise isolated and dispersed points of resistance to connect and combine with one another.Cutting through the smokescreen of high-tech propaganda, Dyer-Witheford predicts the advent of a reinvented, "autonomist" Marxism that will rediscover the possibility of a collective, communist transformation of society. Refuting the utopian promises of the information revolution, he discloses the real potentialities for a new social order in the form of a twenty-first-century communism based on the common sharing of wealth.

Business & Money

Dyer-Witheford, Nick

Economics

University of Illinois Press

In this highly readable and thought-provoking work, Nick Dyer-Witheford assesses the relevance of Marxism in our time and demonstrates how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict between capital and its laboring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter. Dyer-Witheford maps the dynamics of modern capitalism, showing how capital depends for its operations not just on exploitation in the immediate workplace, but on the continuous integration of a whole series of social sites and activities, from public health and maternity to natural resource allocation and the geographical reorganization of labor power. He also shows how these sites and activities may become focal points of subversion and insurgency, as new means of communication vital for the smooth flow of capital also permit otherwise isolated and dispersed points of resistance to connect and combine with one another. Cutting through the smokescreen of high-tech propaganda, Dyer-Witheford predicts the advent of a reinvented, "autonomist" Marxism that will rediscover the possibility of a collective, communist transformation of society. Refuting the utopian promises of the information revolution, he discloses the real potentialities for a new social order in the form of a twenty-first-century communism based on the common sharing of wealth.

Coltan mines in the Congo; electronics factories in China; devastated neighbourhoods in Detroit. Cyber-Proletariat shows us the dark-side of the information revolution; an unsparing analysis of class power and computerisation. Nick Dyer-Witheford reveals how technology facilitates growing polarisation between wealthy elites and precarious workers. He reveals the class domination behind everything from expanding online surveillance to intensifying robotisation. At the same time he looks at possibilities for information technology within radical movements; contemporary struggles are cast in the blue glow of the computer screen. Cyber-Proletariat brings heterodox Marxist analysis to bear on modern technological developments. The result will be indispensable to social theorists and hacktivists alike and essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how Silicon Valley shapes the way we live today.

Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (Digitial Barricades: Interventions in Digital Cutlure and Politics)

Computers & Technology

Pluto Press

The utopian promise of the internet, much talked about even a few years ago, has given way to the information highway’s brutal realities: coltan mines in the Congo, electronics factories in China, devastated neighborhoods in Detroit. In Cyber-Proletariat, Nick Dyer-Witheford shows the dark side of the information revolution through an unsparing analysis of class power and computerization. He reveals how technology facilitates growing polarization between wealthy elites and precarious workers and how class dominates everything from expanding online surveillance to intensifying robotization. At the same time he looks at possibilities for information technology within radical movements, casting contemporary economic and social struggles in the blue glow of the computer screen. Cyber-Proletariat brings Marxist analysis to bear on a range of modern informational technologies. The result is a book indispensable to social theorists and hacktivists alike and essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how Silicon Valley shapes the way we live today.

Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex

The past several years have brought staggering advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence. And Marxist analysis has to keep up: while machines were always central to Marxist analysis, modern AI is a new kind of machine that Marx could not have anticipated.            Inhuman Power explores the relationship between Marxist theory and AI through three approaches, each using the lens of a different Marxist theoretical concept. While the idea of widespread AI tends to be celebrated as much as questioned, a deeper analysis of its reach and potential produces a more complex and disturbing picture than has been identified. Inhuman Power argues that on its current trajectory, AI is likely to render humanity obsolete and that the only way to prevent it is a communist revolution.  

Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (Digital Barricades)

Kjosen, Atle Mikkola

Steinhoff, James

The past several years have brought staggering advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence. And Marxist analysis has to keep up: while machines were always central to Marxist analysis, modern AI is a new kind of machine that Marx could not have anticipated.             Inhuman Power explores the relationship between Marxist theory and AI through three approaches, each using the lens of a different Marxist theoretical concept. While the idea of widespread AI tends to be celebrated as much as questioned, a deeper analysis of its reach and potential produces a more complex and disturbing picture than has been identified. Inhuman Power argues that on its current trajectory, AI is likely to render humanity obsolete and that the only way to prevent it is a communist revolution.  

Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (Digital Barricades: Interventions in Digital Culture and Politics)

In a marketplace that demands perpetual upgrades, the survival of interactive play ultimately depends on the adroit management of negotiations between game producers and youthful consumers of this new medium. The authors suggest a model of expansion that encompasses technological innovation, game design, and marketing practices. Their case study of video gaming exposes fundamental tensions between the opposing forces of continuity and change in the information economy: between the play culture of gaming and the spectator culture of television, the dynamism of interactive media and the increasingly homogeneous mass-mediated cultural marketplace, and emerging flexible post-Fordist management strategies and the surviving techniques of mass-mediated marketing. Digital Play suggests a future not of democratizing wired capitalism but instead of continuing tensions between "access to" and "enclosure in" technological innovation, between inertia and diversity in popular culture markets, and between commodification and free play in the cultural industries.

Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing

Science & Math

de Peuter, Greig

Kline, Stephen

Technology

McGill-Queen's University Press

Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Volume 29) (Electronic Mediations)

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, video games are an integral part of global media culture, rivaling Hollywood in revenue and influence. No longer confined to a subculture of adolescent males, video games today are played by adults around the world. At the same time, video games have become major sites of corporate exploitation and military recruitment.
In Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter offer a radical political critique of such video games and virtual environments as Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Grand Theft Auto, analyzing them as the exemplary media of Empire, the twenty-first-century hypercapitalist complex theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The authors trace the ascent of virtual gaming, assess its impact on creators and players alike, and delineate the relationships between games and reality, body and avatar, screen and street.
Games of Empire forcefully connects video games to real-world concerns about globalization, militarism, and exploitation, from the horrors of African mines and Indian e-waste sites that underlie the entire industry, the role of labor in commercial game development, and the synergy between military simulation software and the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan exemplified by Full Spectrum Warrior to the substantial virtual economies surrounding World of Warcraft, the urban neoliberalism made playable in Grand Theft Auto, and the emergence of an alternative game culture through activist games and open-source game development.
Rejecting both moral panic and glib enthusiasm, Games of Empire demonstrates how virtual games crystallize the cultural, political, and economic forces of global capital, while also providing a means of resisting them.

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Univ. of Minnesota Press

Games & Strategy Guides

Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism

Uncovering the class conflicts, geopolitical dynamics, and aggressive capitalism propelling the militarization of the internet
 Global surveillance, computational propaganda, online espionage, virtual recruiting, massive data breaches, hacked nuclear centrifuges and power grids—concerns about cyberwar have been mounting, rising to a fever pitch after the alleged Russian hacking of the U.S. presidential election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Although cyberwar is widely discussed, few accounts undertake a deep, critical view of its roots and consequences. 
Analyzing the new militarization of the internet, Cyberwar and Revolution argues that digital warfare is not a bug in the logic of global capitalism but rather a feature of its chaotic, disorderly unconscious. Urgently confronting the concept of cyberwar through the lens of both Marxist critical theory and psychoanalysis, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Svitlana Matviyenko provide a wide-ranging examination of the class conflicts and geopolitical dynamics propelling war across digital networks.
Investigating the subjectivities that cyberwar mobilizes, exploits, and bewilders, and revealing how it permeates the fabric of everyday life and implicates us all in its design, this book also highlights the critical importance of the emergent resistance to this digital militarism—hacktivism, digital worker dissent, and off-the-grid activism—for effecting different, better futures.

Matviyenko, Svitlana

Networking & Cloud Computing

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dyer-Witheford, Nick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dyer-Witheford, Nick

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dyer-Witheford, Nick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism

Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism

Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (Digitial Barricades: Interventions in Digital Cutlure and Politics)

Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex

Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (Digital Barricades)

Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (Digital Barricades: Interventions in Digital Culture and Politics)

Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing

Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Volume 29) (Electronic Mediations)

Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Volume 29) (Electronic Mediations)

Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism