The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital

Description

Written as a wake-up call to the field of media studies, 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. It argues that the global intensification of inequality relies on the discursive, informatic and screen-mediated production of social difference. 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. Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 10 Introduction......Page 12 Part I: Informatics of Inscription/Inscription of Informatics......Page 28 1. Gramsci's Press: Why We Game......Page 30 2. A Message from Borges: The Informatic Labyrinth......Page 43 3. Alan Turing's Self-Defense: On Not Castrating the Machines......Page 55 4. Shannon/Hitchcock: Another Method for the Letters......Page 68 5. The Internet of Value, by Karl Marx: Information as Cosmically Distributed Alienation......Page 87 Part II: Photo-graphology, Psychotic Calculus, Informatic Labor......Page 108 6. Camera Obscura After All: The Racist Writing with Light......Page 110 7. Pathologistics of Attention......Page 126 8. Prosthetics of Whiteness: Drone Psychosis......Page 148 9. The Capital of Information: Fractal Fascism, Informatic Labor, and M-I-M......Page 169 Appendix: From the Cinematic Mode of Production to Computational Capital: An Interview conducted by Ante Jeric and Diana Meheik for Kulturpunk......Page 186 Notes......Page 201 Index......Page 214