Data Love

"Digital interactive space is not only a technical condition: it mobilizes larger ecologies of meaning which cannot be captured by an exclusive focus on those technical features. Roberto Simanowski gives us a brilliant exploration of one such ecology, an ironic and critical take on contemporary society's ambivalent relationship with data. -- Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions

"With the advent of the web, digital technologies seem to contain alternatives to the consumerist models implemented by the culture industry as described by Adorno and Hockheimer. Roberto Simanowski shows how data economy turns this dream into a nightmare of hyperconsumtion founded on hypercontrol. -- Bernard Stiegler, author of States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century

"With this book Roberto Simanowski joins Evgeny Morozov as an indispensable critic of our obsession with big data. What sets Data Love apart from other accounts is its determined shift of attention away from the sinister machinations of government agencies to the impact of seemingly harmless commercial data service providers, as well as its informed historical focus that ties modern data mining to the venerable project of enlightenment. The ability to process big data by using links and search engines -- and the concomitant ability to trace, predict and capture all us who do so -- has accelerated the once measured advance of enlightenment into an algorithmically powered amok run. Seek and you will find, a famous text promised two millennia ago. Search engines like Google have renewed the pledge, but Simanowski leaves no doubt that the digital platform supporting this promise is turning it into a threat: Seek and you will be found. -- Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, author of Kittler and the Mediabr>
"Simanowski proffers a much more profound history and theoretical basis to the debate which heretofore is unparalleled in its findings and conclusions which are neither too radical nor too conservative. Without question Data Love is the most comprehensive and philosophically rich contribution on this subject that I have read. -- Creston Davis, The Global Center for Advanced Studies