[Environment-readinggroup] Suggestions for the next reads

[maxigas at criticalinfralab.net]

On Tue, Jan 16 2024, Fieke wrote:

> We are almost at the end of our discard studies book and I have some 
> suggestions for the next reads.
>
>   * Paper: An alternative planetary future? Digital sovereignty
>     frameworks and the decolonial option
>     <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/20539517231221778> by
>     Sebastián Lehuedé
>   * Book: The Solutions are Already Here; Strategies for Ecological
>     Revolution from Below
>     <https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745345116/the-solutions-are-already-here/>
>     by Peter Gelderloos
>   * Book: Mushroom at the end of the world; On the Possibility of Life
>     <https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691220550/the-mushroom-at-the-end-of-the-world>
>     in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (maybe people have
>     already read this one)
> 
> Let me know if people have other suggestions. I'm also interested in 
> reading more about regenerative infrastructures or post silicon 
> computing, if people have ideas, please share!

    * Book:  Truscello, Michael. 2020. *Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the
Necropolitics of Infrastructure*. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. <https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10905.001.0001>.

^^^--- This book explores and promotes "internet abolitionism" and "brisantic
politics" as an answer to the necropolitics of infrastructure that is basically
what the author calls infrastructural brutalism.  It also references this book
from the author of "24/7: Sleep". ---vvvv

    * Book: Crary, Jonathan. 2022. *Scorched Earth: Beyond the digital age to a
      post-capitalist world". Verso, London.

There is a review article of Crary by Truscello that I read and liked a lot:

    * Paper: Truscello, Michael. 2023. "The Internet Shutdown and Revolutionary
Politics: Defining the Infrastructural Power of the Internet." *The South
Atlantic Quarterly* 122 (4): 811--26.
<https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10747811>.

Both authors discuss the ecological aspect and it is their motivation -- for
Truscello it is the primary reason to abolish the Internet.  I looked into the
books and liked them, but Truscello has quite some "film critique" passages
where it is about how ecological sabotage is depicted in movies, for instance.
Crary is more philosophical and that's an artist.  I am afraid they are both
white males... :/

About biological computing I only found now a book that is potentially
interesting but I did not look into it at all:

    * Book: Griffin, James. 2023. The State of Cultural Biology: Regulating
      Biological Computing. Elgar, London. https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/the-state-of-cultural-biology-9781800376885.html

I would go for the Truscello book as the next one!  I read the Mushroom book,
which is inspiring but quite abstract.  The Solutions book looks a bit too
concrete.  But happy to read any of those.

In solidarity,

-- 
Maxigas
co-pi critical infrastructure lab
https://criticalinfralab.net/
Assistant Professor of Computational Methods
Department of Media and Culture Studies
University of Utrecht

PAPER => Geopolitics in the infrastructural ideology of 5G
          by Maxigas and Niels ten Oever
          Open access: doi.org/10.1177/20594364231193950

BOOK ==> Resistance to the Current: The Dialectics of Hacking
          by Johan Söderberg and Maxigas, foreword by Richard Barbrook
          Catalog: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544566/

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