The message is murder : substrates of computational capital / Jonathan Beller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Beller, Jonathan, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Violence in mass media.

Digital media--Social aspects.

Digital media.

Capitalism--Social aspects.

Capitalism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (225 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

London : Pluto Press, 2018.

Summary:

The Message is Murder analyses the violence bound up in the everyday functions of digital media. At its core is the concept of 'computational capital' - the idea that capitalism itself is a computer, turning qualities into quantities, and that the rise of digital culture and technologies under capitalism should be seen as an extension of capitalism's bloody logic. Engaging with Borges, Turing, Claude Shannon, Hitchcock and Marx, this book tracks computational capital to reveal the lineages of capitalised power as it has restructured representation, consciousness and survival in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ultimately The Message is Murder makes the case for recognising media communications across all platforms - books, films, videos, photographs and even language itself - as technologies of political economy, entangled with the social contexts of a capitalism that is inherently racial, gendered and genocidal.

Contents:

PART I: Informatics of inscription / inscription of informatics. Gramsci's press: predictions and programs

A message from Borges: the informatic labyrinth

Alan Turing's self-defense: on not castrating the machines

Shannon/Hitchcock: "another method for the letters"

The internet of value, by Karl Marx: information as cosmically distributed alienation

PART II: Photo-graphology, psychotic calculus and informatic labor. Camera obscura after all: the racist writing with light

Pathologistics of attention

Prosthetics of whiteness: drone psychosis

The capital of information: fascism, informatic labor and M-I-M'

Appendix: From the cinematic mode of production to computational capital

An interview conducted by Ante Jeric and Diana Meheik for Kulturpunk.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

CC BY-NC-ND

Description based on: online resource; title from pdf title page (JSTOR, viewed June 25, 2020).

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781786801791

1786801795

9781786801784

1786801787

OCLC:

1024051104

Access Restriction:

Open Access Unrestricted online access