New Books in Technology

In Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa (Duke University Press, 2020) Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh’s Ta’abir Al-Zaar (1944), and Souleymane Cissé's 1987 film, Yeelen, to contemporary digital art, Collier argues that African media must be understood in relation to other modes of transfer and transmutation that have significant colonial and postcolonial histories, such as extractive mining and electricity. Collier reorients modern African art within a larger constellation of philosophies of aesthetics and technology, demonstrating how pivotal artworks transcend the distinctions between the constructed and the elemental, thereby expanding ideas about mediation and about what African art can do.

Holiday Powers is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies.

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In Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites are Right About Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021), Gavin Mueller provides a bracing and wide-ranging study of the fractious relationship between workers and technology under capitalism. Mueller traces the thought and actions of ordinary people past and present – including hackers, dockers, musicians and the titular textile workers - who have recognised that technological ‘progress’ too often comes at the expense of their autonomy and dignity. The book pushes back against visions of machine-driven utopia that have continually re-emerged on both the right and the left, arguing instead that resistance to technology is a key site of struggle throughout modernity, and that a Marxist neo-Luddism is crucial to understanding, and changing, the world today.

Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds.

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In Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil (MIT Press, 2022), David Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in community technology centers and in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed by technology don’t just reject it, but consciously resist and appropriate it, and how their experiences with digital technologies enable them to navigate both digital and nondigital sources of oppression—and even, at times, to flourish. Nemer uses a decolonial and intersectional framework called Mundane Technology as an analytical tool to understand how digital technologies can simultaneously be sites of oppression and tools in the fight for freedom. Building on the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, he shows how the favela residents appropriate everyday technologies—technological artifacts (cell phones, Facebook), operations (repair), and spaces (Telecenters and Lan Houses)—and use them to alleviate the oppression in their everyday lives. He also addresses the relationship of misinformation to radicalization and the rise of the new far right. Contrary to the simplistic techno-optimistic belief that technology will save the poor, even with access to technology these marginalized people face numerous sources of oppression, including technological biases, racism, classism, sexism, and censorship. Yet the spirit, love, community, resilience, and resistance of favela residents make possible their pursuit of freedom.

David Nemer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and in the Latin American Studies program at the University of Virginia. He is also a Faculty Associate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center and Princeton University's Brazil Lab. His research and teaching interests cover the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Anthropology of Technology, ICT for Development (ICT4D), and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Nemer is an ethnographer whose fieldworks include the Slums of Vitória, Brazil; Havana, Cuba; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia. Nemer is the author of Technology of the Oppressed (MIT Press, 2022) and Favela Digital: The other side of technology (Editora GSA, 2013).

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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In Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), Dr. Susanne A. Wengle shows how agrotechnology served—and undermined—Soviet and Russian political projects. “The book emphasises a tight connection between political change, technological change in food systems, and the transformation of everyday lives - a connection that we can grasp and understand through the lens of technopolitics.”

Like all facets of daily life, the food that Russian farms produced and citizens ate—or, in some years, didn’t eat—underwent radical shifts in the century between the Bolshevik Revolution and Vladimir Putin’s presidency. The modernization of agriculture during this time is usually understood in terms of advances in farming methods. Dr. Susanne A. Wengle’s important interdisciplinary history of Russia’s agriculture and food systems, however, documents a far more complex story of the interactions between political policies, daily cultural practices, and technological improvements.

“A central augment of this book is that politics and technologies together drive a change in food systems and that we should think of food systems as technopolitical regimes. Technopolitics refers to the support of and reliance on agricultural technologies - from tractors to CRISPR techniques - in policy regimes that seek to realise particular political goals and utopias. A technopolitical regime is forged by privileged agents of change and the technologies they employ to grow crops and raise animals.”

Examining governance, production, consumption, nature, and the ensuing vulnerabilities of the agrifood system, Dr. Wengle reveals the intended and unintended consequences of Russian agricultural policies since 1917. Ultimately, Black Earth, White Bread calls attention to Russian technopolitics and how macro systems of government impact life on a daily, quotidian level. “Food systems can be a lens to track interactions between domains of life that are too often seen as discrete and disconnected, such as rural production and urban consumption. They can also tell us about the interactions between human realms and the nonhuman realms of crops, livestock, climate and soil conditions.”

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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In Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), Dr. Susanne A. Wengle shows how agrotechnology served—and undermined—Soviet and Russian political projects. “The book emphasises a tight connection between political change, technological change in food systems, and the transformation of everyday lives - a connection that we can grasp and understand through the lens of technopolitics.”

Like all facets of daily life, the food that Russian farms produced and citizens ate—or, in some years, didn’t eat—underwent radical shifts in the century between the Bolshevik Revolution and Vladimir Putin’s presidency. The modernization of agriculture during this time is usually understood in terms of advances in farming methods. Dr. Susanne A. Wengle’s important interdisciplinary history of Russia’s agriculture and food systems, however, documents a far more complex story of the interactions between political policies, daily cultural practices, and technological improvements.

“A central augment of this book is that politics and technologies together drive a change in food systems and that we should think of food systems as technopolitical regimes. Technopolitics refers to the support of and reliance on agricultural technologies - from tractors to CRISPR techniques - in policy regimes that seek to realise particular political goals and utopias. A technopolitical regime is forged by privileged agents of change and the technologies they employ to grow crops and raise animals.”

Examining governance, production, consumption, nature, and the ensuing vulnerabilities of the agrifood system, Dr. Wengle reveals the intended and unintended consequences of Russian agricultural policies since 1917. Ultimately, Black Earth, White Bread calls attention to Russian technopolitics and how macro systems of government impact life on a daily, quotidian level. “Food systems can be a lens to track interactions between domains of life that are too often seen as discrete and disconnected, such as rural production and urban consumption. They can also tell us about the interactions between human realms and the nonhuman realms of crops, livestock, climate and soil conditions.”

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Internet-enabled mobilization begins long before there is a call for protest. In the book Internet Use and Protest in Malaysia and other Authoritarian Regimes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Kris Ruijgrok examines the case of Bersih – an anti-corruption movement in Malaysia – to track the sequence of events that lead citizens to take part in protest action. Contrary to the impression that social media platforms like Twitter spontaneously spark protests around the world, the book takes a longer and wider view of how the internet challenges information scarcity in authoritarian regimes, which, consequently, creates conditions for citizens to carefully consider their sympathies for a protest movement and defy their fears about state control.

In this podcast, Kris discusses the reasons why the Malaysian government is unable to successfully control the digital public sphere in the same way it controlled the information environment of traditional media. He makes a case for going beyond what he considers to be technologically deterministic debate between cyber-pessimists and cyber-optimists. Instead, Kris foregrounds the importance of context – how different social conditions result to different outcomes.

Kris Ruijgrok is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Amsterdam.

Like this interview? You may also be interested in:

• Aim Sinpeng, Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: The Yellow Shirts in Thailand (U Michigan Press, 2021)



Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel.

This episode was produced in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University.

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In The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (Duke UP, 2021) Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression-language, image, music, communication-into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies.

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Robert Jacob’s book Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (Yale UP, 2022) re‑envisions the history of the Cold War as a slow nuclear war, fought on remote battlegrounds against populations powerless to prevent the contamination of their lands and bodies. Jacobs’s book put these “nuclear bodies” and the legacy of our eighty years history of nuclear weapon and power use at the center of his inquiry. The contaminated bodies of the hibakusha and the contaminated grounds on which they live (or in many cases lived. As many lost their homes), Jacobs argues, are largely invisible because of the colonial and post -colonial power relations that made these communities a target to begin with. Nuclear weapon tests and power stations usually were set at remote places, and the harm was done to people with no political power. Furthermore, it is not just contemporary communities that were harmed, but also future generations. “Plutonium will remain dangerous for over two hundred thousand years, and uranium particles for more than one million years”. Eighty years of tests and nuclear power have saddled our future descendants with radiative waste, most of which is still not safely stored, “a global legacy currently sitting in spent fuel pools and dry storage casks, waiting.” The invisibility of the problem and people affected by it, Jacobs argues, is manufactured in science and politics. Furthermore, the way we study the problem historically further obscured its scope. Different sites have been studied through different national historical “silos,” Jacobs, however, takes a global approach, and look at sites from Nevada to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kazakhstan to Xinjian, and the various Pacific sites that were sites of nuclear tests and accidents since 1945 to make the invisible global hibakusha visible.

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Although there is often opposition to individual wars, most people continue to believe that the arms industry is necessary in some form: to safeguard our security, provide jobs and stimulate the economy. Not only conservatives, but many progressives and liberals, support it for these reasons. Indefensible puts forward a devastating challenge to this conventional wisdom, which has normalized the existence of the most savage weapons of mass destruction ever known.

Indefensible: Seven Myths that Sustain the Global Arms Trade (Zed Books, 2017) is the essential handbook for those who want to debunk the arguments of the industry and its supporters: deploying case studies, statistics and irrefutable evidence to demonstrate they are fundamentally flawed, both factually and logically. Far from protecting us, the book shows how the arms trade undermines our security by fanning the flames of war, terrorism and global instability. In countering these myths, the book points to ways in which we can combat the arms trade's malignant influence, reclaim our democracies and reshape our economies.

The book can be read here for free.

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Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been called “the most innovative square mile on the planet.” It's a life science hub, hosting Biogen, Moderna, Pfizer, Takeda, and others. It's a major tech center, with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple all occupying big chunks of pricey office space. Kendall Square also boasts a dense concentration of startups, with leading venture capital firms conveniently located nearby. And of course, MIT is just down the block. In Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub (MIT Press, 2022), Robert Buderi offers the first detailed account of the unique ecosystem that is Kendall Square, chronicling the endless cycles of change and reinvention that have driven its evolution.

Buderi, who himself has worked in Kendall Square for the past twenty years, tells fascinating stories of great innovators and their innovations that stretch back two centuries. Before biotech and artificial intelligence, there was railroad car innovation, the first long-distance telephone call, the Polaroid camera, MIT's once secret, now famous Radiation Laboratory, and much more. Buderi takes readers on a walking tour of the square and talks to dozens of innovators, entrepreneurs, urban planners, historians, and others. He considers Kendall Square's limitations—it's “gentrification gone rogue,” by one description, with little affordable housing, no pharmacy, and a scarce middle class—and its strengths: the “human collisions” that spur innovation.

What's next for Kendall Square? Buderi speculates about the next big innovative enterprises and outlines lessons for aspiring innovation districts. More important, he asks how Kendall Square can be both an innovation hub and a diversity, equity, and inclusion hub. There's a lot of work still to do.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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