Anti-Computing

The computerization of culture appears relentless and unstoppable. In response Anti-Computing deals in dissent. Engaging with critical theory and media archaeology, working with rich and varied materials, it explores key moments when computer technologies, logics, techniques, imaginaries, utopias have been questioned, disputed, or refused.

How are we to understand the current moment of computational dissent; that feeling that the digital, which promised so much, has instead produced toxic forms of culture, politics, and even selfhood?

This book responds by exploring computational dissent, unease, and hostility across a broad spectrum; in different times and places and in different forms.

Anti-computing explores forgotten histories of dissent – moments when the imposition of computational technologies, logics, techniques, imaginaries, and utopias have been questioned, disputed, or refused. It also asks why these moments tend to be forgotten. What is it about computational capitalism that means we live so much in the present? What has this to do with computational logics and practices themselves?

This book addresses these issues through critical engagement with media archaeology/medium theory and by way of a series of original studies exploring Arendt and early automation anxiety, witnessing and the database, looking at the two cultures from the inside out, at Bot fear and at singularity and/as science fiction. Finally, it returns to map long-standing concerns onto a distant reading of contemporary hostility.

At once an acute response to urgent concerns around toxic digital cultures, an accounting with media archaeology as a mode of medium theory, and a series of original and methodologically fluid case studies, this book will be compelling reading across an inter-disciplinary research field including cultural studies, media studies, medium studies, critical theory, literary and SF studies, media archaeology, medium theory, cultural history, and technology history.

We live in a moment of high anxiety around digital transformation. Computers are blamed for generating toxic forms of culture and ways of life. Once part of future imaginaries that were optimistic or even utopian, today there is a sense that things have turned out very differently. Anti-computing is widespread. This book seeks to understand its cultural and material logics, its forms, and its operations.

Anti-Computing critically investigates forgotten histories of dissent – moments when the imposition of computational technologies, logics, techniques, imaginaries, utopias have been questioned, disputed, or refused. It asks why dissent is forgotten and how - under what circumstances - it revives. Constituting an engagement with media archaeology/medium theory and working through a series of case studies, this book is compelling reading for scholars in digital media, literary, cultural history, digital humanities and associated fields at all levels.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.