Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us. All the while, a more immediate dilemma flies under the radar. Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that's increasingly making us behave like simple machines? In this wide-reaching, interdisciplinary book, Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger examine what's happening to our lives as society embraces big data, predictive analytics, and smart environments. They explain how the goal of designing programmable worlds goes hand in (...) hand with engineering predictable and programmable people. Detailing new frameworks, provocative case studies, and mind-blowing thought experiments, Frischmann and Selinger reveal hidden connections between fitness trackers, electronic contracts, social media platforms, robotic companions, fake news, autonomous cars, and more. This powerful analysis should be read by anyone interested in understanding exactly how technology threatens the future of our society, and what we can do now to build something better. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide an overview of surveillance theories and concepts that can help to understand and debate surveillance in its many forms. As scholars from an increasingly wide range of disciplines are discussing surveillance, this literature review can offer much-needed common ground for the debate. We structure surveillance theory in three roughly chronological/thematic phases. The first two conceptualise surveillance through comprehensive theoretical frameworks which are elaborated in the third phase. The first phase, featuring Bentham and Foucault, offers architectural (...) theories of surveillance, where surveillance is often physical and spatial, involving centralised mechanisms of watching over subjects. Panoptic structures function as architectures of power, not only directly but also through disciplining of the watched subjects. The second phase offers infrastructural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is networked and relies primarily on digital rather than physical technologies. It involves distributed forms of watching over people, with increasing distance to the watched and often dealing with data doubles rather than physical persons. Deleuze, Haggerty and Ericson, and Zuboff develop different theoretical frameworks than panopticism to conceptualise the power play involved in networked surveillance. The third phase of scholarship refines, combines or extends the main conceptual frameworks developed earlier. Surveillance theory branches out to conceptualise surveillance through concepts such as dataveillance, access control, social sorting, peer-to-peer surveillance and resistance. With the datafication of society, surveillance combines the physical with the digital, government with corporate surveillance and top-down with self-surveillance. (shrink)

A translation of the essay ‘On Promethean Shame’ by Günther Anders with a comprehensive introduction and analysis of his work.

Die 'Beiträge zur Philosophie. Vom Ereignis' dürfen mit Fug und Recht nach 'Sein und Zeit' als das zweite Hauptwerk Heideggers bezeichnet werden. Denn sie enthalten nach der fundamentalontologischen Ausarbeitung der Seinsfrage in 'Sein und Zeit' die erste Durchgestaltung des seinsgeschichtlichen Weges derselben Frage. Das seinsgeschichtliche Denken entfaltet das Wesen des Seins nicht mehr im Überstieg (Transzendenz) über das Seiende auf dessen Wahrheit hin (Horizont), sondern im Vollzug des ereigneten Entwurfs aus dem ereignenden Zuwurf der Wahrheit des Seins. 'Ereignis' ist der (...) Name für die Zusammengehörigkeit der ereignend sich zuwerfenden Wahrheit und des ereigneten Seinsentwurfes das Da-seins. Die 'Beiträge zur Philosophie' sind das Werk, in dem sich das Denken der im 'Brief über den Humanismus' genannten 'Kehre' vollzieht. (shrink)

Adorno’s phenomenological study of radio offers a sociology of music in a political and cultural context. Situating that phenomenology in the context of Adorno’s philosophical background and the world political circumstances of Adorno’s collaboration with Paul Lazarsfeld on the Princeton Radio Project, illuminates both Adorno’s Current of Music and the Dialectic of Enlightenment with Max Horkheimer and the ‘Culture Industry’. Together with an analysis of popular music in social practice/culture, this article also explores Adorno’s spatial reflections on Paul Bekker’s notion (...) of the community-building power of the symphony, including his reflection on the radio face which he elaborated in terms of both time and the physiognomics of the time-space of sound, private and communal, and adds connections with today’s Internet and related media. (shrink)

Günther Anders was a philosopher concerned with the political and social implications of power, both as expressed in the media and its tendency to elide the citizenry and thus the very possibility of democracy and the political implications of our participation in our own subjugation in the image of modern social media beginning with radio and television. Anders was particularly concerned with two bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II, and he was just as concerned with (...) the so-called ‘peaceful’ uses of nuclear power, what he named our apocalypse-blindness and the urgency of violence. To make this case I draw on Baudrillard on ‘speech without response’ and Gadamer on conversation. (shrink)

Dieses Handbuch bietet einen Überblick über Sound in den Kultur-, Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. Ausgehend von der Beobachtung, dass Sound ein soziales und damit auch ein historisches Phänomen ist, greifen die Autorinnen und Autoren die Vielfalt von Sound in unterschiedlichen Erscheinungs- und Darstellungsformen auf und verfolgen ihre Spuren in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Sie skizzieren methodisch-theoretische Zugänge und Begriffe der Soundforschung und gehen auf disziplinäre Perspektiven und Traditionen ebenso ein wie auf einzelne akustische Phänomene. Dabei werden spezifische Räumlichkeiten genauso berücksichtigt wie die (...) medialen und politischen Kontexte, in denen Sound produziert und erfasst, angeeignet und genutzt wird. Das Handbuch gibt damit nicht nur eine breite Übersicht über die aktuelle Diskussion zu Sound, sondern liefert auch vielfältige Anregungen für zukünftige Forschungen. (shrink)