Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen major advances in recent years. While machines were always central to the Marxist analysis of capitalism, AI is a new kind of machine that Marx could not have anticipated. Contemporary machine-learning AI allows machines to increasingly approach human capacities for perception and reasoning in narrow domains.This book explores the relationship between Marxist theory and AI through the lenses of different theoretical concepts, including surplus-...

Democratic planning allows us to effectively address the multiple crises of our time through cooperative modes of collective coordination. Given the destructive consequences of contemporary capitalism, such a structural alternative to market economies is needed more than ever.This accessible work examines various approaches that theorise, practise and nurture a creative construction towards varieties of democratic planning. Drawing from current socio-economic and ecological movemen...

The utopian promise of the internet, much talked about even a few years ago, has given way to brutal realities: coltan mines in the Congo, electronics factories in China, devastated neighborhoods in Detroit. Cyber-Proletariat shows us the dark-side of the information revolution through an unsparing analysis of class power and computerization.Dyer-Witheford investigates how technology facilitates growing polarization between wealthy elites and precarious workers. He reveals...

An anti-capitalist guide to breaking the power of Big TechBig Tech firms dominate the global economy. But what value do they actually produce? In this brilliant survey of global tech economy, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Alessandra Mularoni argue that the role of firms like Amazon and Google, Palantir and Uber, is in the automation of circulation.By applying digital technologies to processes of market exchange—everything from advertising and shopping, to logisti...

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 vide...

Few books have attempted to contextualize the importance of video game play with a critical social, cultural and political perspective that raises the question of the significance of work, pleasure, fantasy and play in the modern world. The study of why video game play is "fun" has often been relegated to psychology, or the disciplines of cultural anthropology, literary and media studies, communications and other assorted humanistic and social science disciplines. In Utopic Dreams and ...

Uncovering the class conflicts, geopolitical dynamics, and aggressive capitalism propelling the militarization of the internetGlobal 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 i...

Struggles for equality happen in all corners of the world. While social and economic justice movements are specific to their different national contexts, identities, and forms of oppression, collaboration and coalition building are required if we are to attain sustainable equality and healing justice.Organizing Equality engages activist and scholarly debates about the organization of social and economic equality movements around the globe. The collection covers a myriad of...

A World Without Work: A Visionary Account of How AI Will Transform the World of WorkFrom mechanical looms to computers, new technologies have always provoked panic about workers being replaced by machines. For centuries, such fears have been misplaced, but as Daniel Susskind demonstrates in A World Without Work, this time is different. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence mean that all kinds of jobs are increasingly at risk.Drawing on ...

What are we to make of the information society? Many prominent theorists have argued it to be the most profound and comprehensive transformation of economy, culture and politics since the rise of the industrial way of life in the 18th century. Some saw its arrival in a positive light, where the dreams of democracy, of ‘connectivity’ and ‘efficiency’ constituted a break with the old ways. But other thinkers viewed it more in terms of the recurrent nightmare of capitalism, where the processe...

Social Media Abyss plunges into the paradoxical condition of the new digital normal versus a lived state of emergency. There is a heightened, post-Snowden awareness; we know we are under surveillance but we click, share, rank and remix with a perverse indifference to technologies of capture and cultures of fear. Despite the incursion into privacy by companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon, social media use continues to be a daily habit with shrinking gadgets now an integral par...

This is not simply a book about ‘internet studies’.It is a book that considers many wider forms of digital culture, including mobile technologies, surveillance, algorithms, ambient intelligence, gaming, big data and technological bodies (to name a few) in order to explore how digital technology - in a broad sense - is used within the wider contexts of our everyday lives."The first edition of Understanding Digital Culture set a new benchmark as the most comprehensive, schola...