[liberationtech] New Book: Critical Theory and the Digital

Tue Feb 25 13:32:02 PST 2014

And what I mean here, for example, is that I cannot in good faith ask
US Dreamers (http://unitedwedream.org, http://drmactioncoalition.org,
etc), other advocates for the US undocumented (2Million+ deportations
during Obama's supposedly "liberal" administration - http://ndlon.org
and many others), and how about the "low pay is not OK" people
(Walmart, etc..), to dish out $100+ for a book that I nevertheless
know could be quite useful to fine-tune their fight, since they are
heavy users of  "the digital", Facebook and Twitter inclusive or
predominantly, to fight.

Best Regards | Cordiales Saludos | Grato,

Andrés L. Pacheco Sanfuentes
<alps at acm.org>
+1 (817) 271-9619

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 3:25 PM, Andrés Leopoldo Pacheco Sanfuentes
<alps6085 at gmail.com> wrote:
> salad is VERY GOOD FOOD. BETTER THAN BBQ or EMPIRICISM
>
> Best Regards | Cordiales Saludos | Grato,
>
> Andrés L. Pacheco Sanfuentes
> <alps at acm.org>
> +1 (817) 271-9619
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 3:24 PM, Andrés Leopoldo Pacheco Sanfuentes
> <alps6085 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> David,
>>
>> It is just so ironic that your book on what I gather is a perspective
>> inspired on the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory to the modern
>> digital world is published primarily by print media, and at a cost
>> that makes it prohibitive to the very people that can benefit "through
>> its discussion of how the digital can be transformed by political
>> action and the organisation of digital resistance." -  Christian De
>> Cock, University of Essex, UK
>>
>> Best Regards | Cordiales Saludos | Grato,
>>
>> Andrés L. Pacheco Sanfuentes
>> <alps at acm.org>
>> +1 (817) 271-9619
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 10:37 AM, David Berry <dmberry at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I apologise in advance for my use of words. The publishers are very tiresome
>>> in requiring not only words, but also sentences, paragraphs and so forth.
>>> There is also an argument in the book. Made up of words. That are actually
>>> connected together. At least I hope so. One never knows after having been
>>> though the copyediting/proofing process.
>>>
>>> For those who prefer books in hexadecimal, I plan a forthcoming version,
>>> Critical Theory and the Hexadecimal, which will be encrypted using the NSA
>>> backdoored random number generator (Dual_EC_DRBG), weak public key
>>> cryptography (896bit RSA, no padding, no signatures, no authenticity), the
>>> worst cryptographic hash function possible as a KDF (MD2), and XOR as a
>>> cipher.* This will be an ironic gesture.
>>>
>>> :-)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> * Thanks to Moxie Marlinspike for the text inspiration.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue Feb 25 07:25:53 PST 2014, Reed Black reed at unsafeword.org wrote:
>>>
>>> word salad and the digital
>>>
>>> On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 4:05 AM, David Berry <dmberry at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hi
>>>>
>>>> I hope you don't mind my announcing my new book *Critical Theory and the
>>>> Digital* which explores the contemporary landscape related to
>>>> computational technology and argues for an approach that revitalises
>>>> critical theory in light of current questions over cryptography, critical
>>>> technical practice and related notions of critical digital humanities and
>>>> code work. I think that some of the subscribers to this list might find
>>>> the
>>>> arguments articulated in the book of some interest.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/critical-theory-and-the-digital-9781441166395/
>>>>
>>>> This Critical Theory and Contemporary Society volume offers an original
>>>> analysis of the role of the digital in today's society. It rearticulates
>>>> critical theory by engaging it with the challenges of the digital
>>>> revolution to show how the digital is changing the ways in which we lead
>>>> our politics, societies, economies, media, and even private lives. In
>>>> particular, the work examines how the enlightenment values embedded within
>>>> the culture and materiality of digital technology can be used to explain
>>>> the changes that are occurring across society.
>>>>
>>>> Critical Theory and the Digital draws from the critical concepts developed
>>>> by critical theorists to demonstrate how the digital needs to be
>>>> understood
>>>> within a dialectic of potentially democratizing and totalizing technical
>>>> power. By relating critical theory to aspects of a code-based digital
>>>> world
>>>> and the political economy that it leads to, the book introduces the
>>>> importance of the digital code in the contemporary world to researchers in
>>>> the field of politics, sociology, globalization and media studies.
>>>>
>>>> Some blurb:
>>>>
>>>> "'Adorno will not be your Facebook friend.' Instead of lamenting the
>>>> cultural elitism of the Frankfurt School, David Berry reopens critical
>>>> theory's conceptual toolbox with a renewed curiosity. These days the
>>>> theorist is no longer a prophet who ponders the world divorced from the
>>>> materiality of communication. It is not enough to merely explore the
>>>> technosphere, there is an urgency to radically question digital
>>>> technologies. In this age of conflict, the neoliberal consensus culture is
>>>> taken to task by critical theory David-Berry-style. In line with the
>>>> info-activism of Wikileaks and Snowden, Berry instructs us how to read the
>>>> black box that dominates our everyday lives and helps us to develop a new
>>>> vocabulary amidst all the crazes, from speculative realism to digital
>>>> humanities." -  Geert Lovink, Media Theorist, Amsterdam
>>>>
>>>> "Berry's timely book engages with a broad range of topics that define our
>>>> digital culture. It guides us to the political materiality of software
>>>> culture with excellent insights. Importantly, this book updates critical
>>>> theory for the digital age." -  Dr Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of
>>>> Art,
>>>> author of What is Media Archaeology? (2012)
>>>>
>>>> "In this lucid, learned and highly original book Berry confronts the
>>>> nature of digital knowledge in society through the re-invigorated lens of
>>>> Critical Theory asking how we can regain control of the knowledge
>>>> structures embedded in the digital technologies that we increasingly rely
>>>> upon in daily life." -  Michael Bull, author of Sound Moves: iPod Culture
>>>> and Urban Experience
>>>>
>>>> "Critical Theory and the Digital offers an important new addition to
>>>> critical theory that explores questions raised by the digital in light of
>>>> the work of the Frankfurt school. Providing an accessible and critical
>>>> appraisal of the digital world we live in today, the book argues that
>>>> critical praxis must today be rethought in light of digital technologies
>>>> and the affordances that are made available to state, corporate and civil
>>>> society actors. The book offers both a theoretical and a political
>>>> contribution: the former through its exploration of how the digital can be
>>>> read, written, and hacked critically; the latter through its discussion of
>>>> how the digital can be transformed by political action and the
>>>> organisation
>>>> of digital resistance." -  Christian De Cock, University of Essex, UK
>>>>
>>>> "Unlike many media studies scholars who refer to the Frankfurt School's
>>>> critique of the cultural industries only to show its inapplicability to
>>>> the
>>>> open source world of the digital age, David Berry accomplishes the
>>>> remarkable feat of re-instating that critique for the new brave world that
>>>> is afforded by digital technology. Easily moving between Heidegger, Adorno
>>>> and Stiegler, Berry mobilizes a formidable array of theoretical resources
>>>> in aid of what he calls 'iteracy', an emerging competence in tracking the
>>>> contexts in which 'being digital' is continually formed and re-formed. The
>>>> result is a milestone in both critical theory and the digital humanities."
>>>> -  Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, Department of
>>>> Sociology, University of Warwick, UK
>>>>
>>>> "Bringing dialectical critique to digital culture, David Berry replenishes
>>>> the legacy of the Frankfurt School in order to devise strategies to live
>>>> within and against the real-time streams of computational capitalism.
>>>> Fusing critical theory with the political economy of social media (think
>>>> Facebook and Twitter), the surveillance paranoia of NSA, the wild party of
>>>> Hacklabs, the secret autonomy of cryptography, and the accelerated economy
>>>> of algorithmic trading, Berry registers the contours of the black box that
>>>> defines digital labour and life." -  Ned Rossiter, Institute for Culture
>>>> and Society, University of Western Sydney, Australia
>>>>
>>>> Best
>>>>
>>>> David
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ---
>>>>
>>>> Dr. David M. Berry
>>>> Reader
>>>>
>>>> Silverstone 316
>>>>
>>>> School of Media, Film and Music
>>>> University of Sussex,
>>>> Falmer,
>>>> East Sussex. BN1 8PP
>>>>
>>>> http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/125219
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ---
>>>
>>> Dr. David M. Berry
>>> Reader
>>>
>>> Silverstone 316
>>>
>>> School of Media, Film and Music
>>> University of Sussex,
>>> Falmer,
>>> East Sussex. BN1 8PP
>>>
>>> http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/125219
>>>
>>>
>>> --
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